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I have created this site to provide higher education faculty free teaching resources that can assist them in moving from a teacher centered practice to a learner centered one. I am a professor emeritus, retiring in 2015 after spending 38 years in higher education at Ferris State University. From 1998 to 2009 I  worked as the senior faculty developer at Ferris State. I have also given presentations at over 80 state, regional, national and international conferences in the past 10 years. In addition, I have presented workshops for 170 college and universities in the U.S., Canada, Saudi Arabia, South Korea. Pakistan and Taiwan since 2006.  In my role as a faculty developer I  have focused my work on designing effective ways to help higher education faculty become learner centered teachers by using brain science findings to guide their practice. This site includes most of my work.

You will find a significant amount of research that strongly supports the move to a learner centered teaching practice on this site. It also contains  all of my most recent presentations and more than 30 instructional resources designed to assist faculty and students in making the changes they will need to make if learner centered teaching is to be a successful learning practice for both groups.

I hope you find the site helpful and thanks for visiting.

Terry Doyle

CEO Learner Centered Teaching Consultants

Featured  Comment

November ,2016

Terry,  Thank you again for coming to Montana State University to talk at the ICLTSS conference and to our faculty.   I thoroughly enjoyed both of your presentations.   I am so fascinated at how exercise, hydration, and diet can make such a difference in student learning. I am thankful that you are current on the research on this. I am looking forward to reading your new book!   There were many positive comments from people after your presentations and they appreciated your coming. Dr Marilyn Lockhart. Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence, Montana State University.

 

 

 

Three Key Teaching Questions & Our Obligation to Follow the Research

October 19, 2015 by Leave a comment

Written by Jennifer Friberg, SoTL Scholar-Mentor at Illinois State University

Last week, I had the good fortune to attend the 45th annual conference of the International Society for Exploring Teaching and Learning (ISETL) in Savannah, GA. While the weather was delightful, the ideas discussed among attendees were even better! Now back at home and work, I’ve been busy reflecting on my experiences over the three days of the conference. While several blog posts will be posted in the coming weeks that originate in ideas generated and/or shared at ISETL, I wanted to first reflect on ideas from the keynote address delivered at the opening of the conference by Dr. Terry Doyle (titled: A New Paradigm for Student Learners). While this address focused on interesting research-based necessities to support student learning (hydration, sleep, exercise, and diet), it was the initial content of the address that provided a foundation for my thinking about teaching and learning ever since.

Doyle

Doyle asked the audience to ponder what he termed Three Key Teaching Questions:

  1. What would make us happy that our students still knew and could apply from the content and skills of our course a year later?
  2. What knowledge and skills do students need our help with and what can they do on their own?
  3. What teaching actions optimize the opportunities for students to master the learning outcomes of our courses?

He very clearly indicated that in answering these questions, we, as course instructors, are obligated to follow where research takes us (even if it’s not comfortable to do so!), which immediately resonated with my interest in the application and generation of SoTL research. As course instructors, we regularly engage in reflection of the classes we teach, asking ourselves questions such as:

  • Did my terminal project lead to transformative learning?
  • Did my students learn as much in collaborative group experiences as I hoped they might?
  • How does the content of my course compare with other, similar courses at other institutions?
  • Are my students truly engaged in learning course content?
  • Do students in my discipline learn differently than students in other disciplines?

These are all questions that we can take a scholarly approach to answering, using information in or across various disciplines to influence our pedagogical choices. We can examine published teaching and learning research for help and guidance. Or, we can create and answer our own research questions to address our wonderments about teaching and learning. Either way, we can answer Doyle’s three key teaching questions by following where the research takes us…and our students can ultimately benefit!

 

Featured Selection

Below you will find the introduction to  my latest book, coauthored with Dr. Todd Zakrajsek of the University of North Carolina College of Medicine with Forward by Neuroscientist Dr. Jeannie Loeb also of the University of North Carolina published by Stylus .

The book is written for college students and describes the most current research about how the human brain learns. The book is titled  The New Science of Learning: How to Learn in Harmony with your Brain. The book is available  from Stylus Publishers and on Amazon.com.

The New Science of Learning  has be honored as a Finalist for the USA Best Book Awards 2013 in the category of Education/Academic

book cover new science

The New Science of Learning: How to Learn in Harmony with Your Brain 

Introduction

Learning is a complicated practice.  Several thousand years ago the primary obligation of the human brain was to figure out how to find food, not get eaten by a predator (including finding a safe place to sleep), and how to find a mate.  Now, in addition to those basic human functions, our brains are inundated with things that need to be learned. Unfortunately, the evolution of a biological structure such as the brain does not allow for change as rapid as the pace at which our society is currently changing. Just imagine how much more complicated the human life has become in just 80 years, approximately three generations.  College alone is a challenge that many of our great grandfathers never faced.  The good news is that although our brains have not changed significantly in the past several hundred years, our understanding of how our brains work is light years ahead of where we were just a short time ago.

New insights into how the human brain learns make it clear that many of the learning practices faculty used in the past, and students continue to use, are highly inefficient, ineffective or just plain wrong. Better learning does not always require more effort or more time, but rather effectively aligning how the brain naturally learns with the demands of the college classroom. This book succinctly outlines several easily adapted changes that will significantly enhance your college experience by helping you to learn how to learn in harmony with your brain.

Why is it particularly important to learn how to learn as effectively and efficiently as possible?  The rate of new information, innovation and challenges facing our world are not going to slow down. College students today face a new world order where global competition for jobs is the norm rather than the exception. India and China have twice as many honor students as the United States has people. These honor students will be seeking the same professional positions that you are seeking. The U.S. Department of Labor recently reported that the average 18-year-old will have 10-14 different jobs by age of 38, with each subsequent position requiring new information and skills. As a result, as a student in college right now you are the first generation in U.S. history that must be lifelong learners in order to remain employed. It is essential that you become a highly efficient and effective learner who retains learned knowledge and skills for a lifetime, not just for a test, if you are to compete effectively on a world stage.

This brief book, based on what is currently known about how the human brain learns, will help you to change the ways in which you prepare to learn, make your learning easier and more effective, and help you to more effectively recall newly learned material whenever you need it. Taking the time to read and reflect on the material in this book will be one of the best decisions you have ever made as a learner. At this point you might be thinking, “there must be a million books out there about how to study and be successful in college.” This is not a book designed to teach you specific study skills, learning strategies or how to improve your attitude towards learning. This book explains the research about how the human brain learns in a way that is easy to understand and act upon. This book gives you a foundation to learn study skills as needed, but with a much better understanding as to why and how those skills can be best implemented. As just one example, did you know that neuroscientists have shown that understanding of new material and subsequent recall of that material is enhanced if you don’t take classes back to back? The human brain needs downtime between different learning experiences in order to process and begin to make new memories of the newly experienced material. The brain needs to work to learn new things and we need to give it time to do that work. Neuroscientist Lila Davachi of New York University said “students would be better off taking a coffee break where they just chat with friends for an hour following a college class—it would actually be better for their learning.” Strategically implemented leisure time in which the brain is not processing a lot of new material, when not overdone, is actually an effective part of the learning process.

The authors of this book have a singular goal for anyone reading or listening to this material: to better understand how you can learn how to learn in harmony with your brain! It is not difficult to make the changes suggested in this book. But it is critical. Becoming a skilled and efficient learner will be one of the most important determinants of what you can and will achieve in your life time. Our purpose in writing this book is to help you reach your full potential by providing you a simple way to understand the learning process. That simple way, will allow you to get to places in your lifetime that people have not even dreamed of yet.

A Special Note to the Reader

As authors we have purposefully written each chapter of this book to be a standalone body of information about a certain aspect of the human brain. As a result some information is repeated in multiple chapters. Also some information is also discussed in multiple chapters because it happens in the brain as a result of different activities or causes. For example making new memories is affected by sleep in chapter 2, exercise in chapter 3, attention in chapter 8 and practice and elaboration in chapter 6. We believe the repetition will serve to reinforce the important information about the human brain and learning and that the reader will find it helpful to consider the information in multiple ways.