A master class is an unique educational experience where participants have the opportunity to learn with and from an expert in a specific field or discipline. Master classes typically focus on refining a basic skill or developing new skills with direct feedback from the featured expert. Dr. Schell is an authority on innovative pedagogy and conducts master classes on a variety of topics including: Design Thinking, Collaborative Learning, Peer Instruction, Flipped Learning, Project-Based Learning, and incorporating cognitive science into classroom teaching. In her master classes, Dr. Schell leads participants through hands-on simulations of the techniques and strategies she first learned at Harvard University and now uses in her own classroom at The University of Texas at Austin.
Julie is an expert Design Thinking facilitator. She specializes in the design of learning experiences that create Design Thinking Readiness so that participants can implement Design Thinking immediately and with efficacy. Her recent talk,"Design Thinking has a Pedagogy Problem" was selected by SXSWedu 2018 as a Future 20 Session and is available as a Keynote presentation. She offers an emerging idea that Design Thinking has a wicked pedagogy problem. The talk is a call to action in response to a recent article in FastCoDesign, authored by Meg Miller, that suggests we "forget Design Thinking" to fight wicked problems like inequality. Based on her teaching and experience, Schell argues that, instead, we must rethink how we teach and learn Design Thinking -- to be more inclusive and extend well beyond the classroom and ever popular "bootcamp" models. She recommends we move from rapid exposure to deep learning.
Want your students to learn effectively, retain their learning, and be able to apply their knowledge skills outside of the classroom? No matter the grade level, most students do not incorporate strategies based on the science of learning into their approach to studying or academic work. Worse, throughout their lives, most learners never receive direct instruction on how to learn more effectively. So, they repeat the same learning cycles over and over un-interpreted. Once students get to college, they have developed strong attachments to what are largely ineffective learning strategies unsupported the science of learning. In this workshop, Julie uses Design Thinking to lead participants through Design Your Learning, a curriculum she created as part of her Design Your Learning Project to address what she believes is an epidemic of ineffective learning strategies among students of all ages. Design Your Learning is appropriate for student, college and university faculty, and K-12 teacher and administrator, or lifelong learning audiences.
In this popular video, Julie explains the Flipped Classroom in 60 seconds.
Instructors all over the globe are turning their students' worlds around by flipping their classrooms. In a flipped class, teachers move information coverage out of the lecture hall so that they can better leverage in-class time to address student difficulties and misconceptions. She will use responses from her work with teachers all over the globe in the workshop and discuss the why, what, and how of flipped classrooms by confronting and resolving a series common myths about flipped teaching. Note, this is not a session on how to create lecture videos.
Contrary to popular belief, flipped learning is much more than watching videos and doing "homework" in class. In this hands-on session, Dr. Julie Schell will introduce two research-based flipped methods called Just-in-Time Teaching and Peer Instruction and demonstrate how to flip your classroom in ways that will engage students throughout the learning cycle. A primary goal of Peer Instruction is to prepare students before class for radically transformed in-class experiences.
How can I help my students learn in ways that pique their interest and enrich their subject matter understanding? We will explore this perennial question by considering an innovative, research-based teaching method called Peer Instruction (PI). Developed by Dr. Eric Mazur to address major gaps in students' conceptual knowledge of physics at Harvard University, this interactive pedagogical method is now widely used by thousands of instructors across the world. PI leverages the power of social learning and the latest advances in instructional technology to confront students' misconceptions and activate their minds while providing instant feedback to faculty. Most of all teaching with Peer Instruction is fun for teachers and students alike. Attendees will participate in live demonstrations of Peer Instruction and test out classroom response systems.
How can I help my students learn in ways that pique their interest and enrich their subject matter understanding? We will explore this perennial question by considering an innovative, research-based teaching method called Peer Instruction (PI). Developed by Dr. Eric Mazur to address major gaps in students' conceptual knowledge of physics at Harvard University, this interactive pedagogical method is now widely used by thousands of instructors across the world. PI leverages the power of social learning and the latest advances in instructional technology to confront students' misconceptions and activate their minds while providing instant feedback to faculty. Most of all teaching with Peer Instruction is fun for teachers and students alike. Attendees will participate in live demonstrations of Peer Instruction.
Technology in its various forms has been a part of classroom pedagogy for centuries. The origins of the chalkboard, a classroom innovation that changed how information was delivered en masse, are unclear. It may have been based on smaller slates that individual students used during classroom learning . But without a sound approach, even the simplest classroom technologies such as chalk and chalkboard can be and often are misused, failing to catalyze student learning. They very same holds true for the most popular and promising educational technologies, classroom response systems. In this workshop, we will work with low-, medium-, and high-tech versions of classroom response systems such as flashcards, clickers, and Learning Catalytics. We will collaborate to determine protocols for ensuring that technology enhances rather than dampens teaching and learning.
Learning Catalytics is a new, cloud-based response system that facilitates student learning through a large variety of engaging question types. The software, developed in the Mazur Group at Harvard University has a number of sophisticated but easy to use features to help instructors drive learning in the moment and outside of class. In this highly interactive workshop, Dr. Julie Schell will lead live demonstrations of Learning Catalytics. Participants must bring a wifi enabled device (smartphone, tablet, laptop) to participate.
Why don’t students remember what they learn, even when they study hard? How can we help students boost their learning strategies to increase their success in and outside of the classroom? In this session, we will review the current science on memory and learning. We will discuss easy to implement, research-based strategies for helping people remember what they learn in educational settings and transfer their learning to new contexts. After this session, participants will be able design experiences so that the most important things for students to learn stick.
In this workshop, participants will practice designing research-based learning experiences for their students that incorporates the cutting-edge science of retrieval-based learning.
The ability to take what is learned in classrooms and apply it within new contexts is the most important skill for 21st century learners. Transfer of learning is the heart of innovation and the core purpose of any educational system. No matter if you are a teacher, an administrator, or policymaker, no matter where in the world you reside and no matter what you teach, this mission of education does not drift. Unfortunately, by the time students arrive at university, after more than 11,000 hours of compulsory schooling, they still have difficulty transferring knowledge across contexts. This is a sign that their learning is situated, rather than flexible. Transfer of learning is also a difficult skill to teach. In this talk, Dr. Julie Schell will provide an overview of different types of transfer of learning and present several practical strategies for teaching for transfer.
Advances in cognitive science have changed what we know about how people learn, but pedagogical approaches have not adapted to use this knowledge to help our students learn better. In this workshop, Dr. Julie Schell will draw on cognitive science principles to demonstrate three simple tips educators can use to catalyze learning in any educational context.
Questions are the heart of engaging students in or outside of class. In this workshop, we will discuss the anatomy of a question and use contrasting cases to identify the elements of an effective question. We will practice answering different question types as a large group and work individually and in pairs on a case study to set the stage for developing effective questions. At the end of the workshop, we will also apply our learning by trying to write a few new questions or improve on ones we typically ask in our classrooms or on tests.
Open the doors to any classroom across the globe and you will observe an almost universal model for the assessment of student learning. Instructors stand at the front of a lecture hall, teach content, students (at least we hope) attempt to learn that content, and then instructors assess that content learning periodically through high-stakes multiple-choice exams, quizzes, or research papers. Most of these conventional approaches to student learning assessment are too infrequent, too high stakes, too procedural to drive student learning or to inform teaching. Indeed, for most faculty, assessment is considered separate from teaching, rather than a teaching strategy. In this workshop, participants will learn a framework for innovative approaches to assessment that are proven to drive, rather than limit, student learning.
Teachers use tests and quizzes frequently in an effort to measure what students learn. Despite their ubiquity, measuring learning is not where the power of testing lies. Testing involves an activity called retrieval or “the act of calling information to mind rather than rereading it or hearing it” (Roediger and Butler, 2011). When students engage in retrieval practice as a learning approach, versus rehearsing materials, they can more than double their performance on exams or assessments that test the same and even related content. However, most students do not use retrieval practice and are unaware of it’s benefits. The same holds true for most teachers. In this workshop, we will review the science of retrieval practice and and describe how to use testing to it’s full potential in education.
When I ask teachers from all corners of the world about what worries them most about their teaching issues of deep learning are by far the most popular response. Teachers wonder: “Am I making any difference in my students’ learning lives? Have my students gotten anything out of my course that will help them succeed in their subsequent classes and eventual careers? Are they learning anything at all?” These are certainly the questions that weigh heavily on my mind at the end of a semester of teaching. In this workshop based on a blog post on the same topic, we will consider five of my favorite strategies for assessing deep learning among students. I use these strategies in my own classrooms to help me write questions or assessments that provide evidence of deep learning (learning that is permanent, strong, and enduring) versus surface learning (learning that is temporary, weak, and short-lived).
Rubrics have their origin in religion, first used as a guide for how church services should be conducted. In the past, “rubrics” could be found in prayer books, most often written in red ink. Today, rubrics are used in similar ways, in the first place to guide how assessment should be conducted and in more innovative uses, to clarify and make explicit expectations for students. In this workshop, we will practice using a simple rubric designed by Dr. Julie Schell around a familiar topic. We will then work individually and in pairs to develop more sophisticated rubrics for assessing one performance task important to participants’ individual classrooms.
This is a hands-on, introductory session on project-based learning. Participants will learn what project-based learning is, delve into easy to understand examples of project-based learning, learn how to get quickly started using the method, and come away with a protocol for how to design a project-based experience for students that is aligned with best practices in the field.
In this presentation, Dr. Schell will present a case study of her project-based course Technology and Innovation in Higher Education. She will outline the design that helped her achieve a 5.0/5.0 on her teaching evaluations despite requiring students to work exceptionally hard. Participants will gain insight into her failures and successes, view example projects, and hear from students about the most important things they gained from the project-based experience.
In this workshop, Dr. Schell offers a quick start guide for incorporating game-based learning into your curriculum. Participants will understand that at the center of every game is an inherent, content- and skill- rich learning experience to be had. They will also come to believe that anyone can build a game. Finally, participants will apply the fundamentals of game design by creating a game prototype for teaching a difficult topic in their own classroom.