Faculty Development Program

You have important knowledge to impart. Let’s make sure it sticks! And that your peers can apply what they learned at the annual meeting into their practices when they return home. Studies show that we go about educating and learning in the wrong ways. There is a large growing body of evidence-proven strategies to replace accepted practices that are rooted in intuition, tradition and myth. The most effective learning strategies and education programming are counter-intuitive. We need to build new bridges between our talks and speeches and the learning research in order to increase our participants’ ROI.

After attending this session, participants will be able to:

• Identify several evidence-proven learning strategies that all education sessions should incorporate for greater attendee ROI and how to apply those strategies to the different types of conference sessions.
• Discover, define and assess why and how individual elaboration is critical to making new learning stronger and more memorable.
• Develop teaching strategies that reinforce learning retention.

Research shows that the traditional lecture is the equivalent of distributing a report. Metaphorically speaking, it doesn’t mean your audience will read it (hear and learn it), retain it or even apply it. If you want your audience to learn it and remember it so they can apply it, you’ll have to change what you’ve usually done. Increasing your audience’s engagement through peer-to-peer discussions, activities and reflection exercises will increase their learning and retention and ultimately their ability to apply it. And yes, this can be achieved even in short presentations in large session rooms.

After attending this session, the presenter will be able to:

• Compare expert-centered and participant-centered education.
• Define engagement and why it’s necessary to increase your listeners’ learning.
• Identify the steps to transition your traditional lecture to an interactive peer-to-peer presentation.

Traditionally, medical conferences have been based on lectures because that’s how physicians were taught in medical school. But that is changing. And it’s changing because there is scientific research that clearly indicates that passive listening is not an effective method of teaching.

Science, especially cognitive psychology, neuro-biology, neuroimaging, and neuroscience have given us real-time data and visual images of how the brain learns. We now can watch how the brain accumulates, connects, makes sense of, stores and retrieves learned information. We also know which learning strategies most successfully lead to long-term memory, retention, remembering and application.

Science says that active learning, highly interactive methods and peer-to-peer-to-peer participation, work the best, especially for the STEM fields. We can actually see what happens to brain activity and structure when the speaker facilitates, and participants learn.

This session will help you discover how to ignite your participant learning using research-based strategies for technical presentations.

After attending this presentation, the participant will be able to:

• Explore how to identify content that meets the business case for your presentation and aligns with your learning outcomes.
• Compare and contrast active and passive learning strategies and elaborate on which strategy you’re willing to tackle for your next presentation.
• Identify three categories of active learning exercises and assess which ones are best for your technical presentation.

We often have more content than time when giving a presentation. But including everything and not allowing the audience time to reflect can actually be a barrier to learning.

This session will help you reframe your mindset about offering brain-friendly presentations regardless the size and demographics of the audience. Through practice and application, you’ll discover six learning principles based on the science of learning that you can use in any situation. You’ll uncover the steps needed to invent, innovate, create, explore and design learning opportunities that are conceived with the brain in mind. When you apply these principles, you lead your audience to change their attitudes, behaviors and skills which is when real learning occurs.

After attending this session, the participant will be able to:

• Identify six brain-based learning principles that speakers should embrace to encourage learning.
• Compare and contrast various types of educational programming that results in the mental engagement science says is needed for learning to occur.
• Discuss the illusion of knowing and why we have to help our participants recognize authentic learning vs. copying and mimicry.
• Evaluate the role of technology in our learning opportunities.

The Science of Learning by Deans for Impact

Facilitating Learning with the Adult Brain in Mind by Kathleen Taylor and Catherine Marienau

A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science by Barbara Oakley

What’s the Use of Lectures? by Donald Bligh

What Is the Point in Discussion? by Donald Bligh and Harold Thomas

Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter Brown, Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel

Brain Rules by John Medina

How We Learn by Benedict Carey

Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning by James Lang