In order to make the information presented in the Speaker Series useful for graduate students and faculty members engaged in college teaching, we have developed a series of web pages that integrate each of the talks in the series with a variety of resources. Each of the pages takes one or two of the speaker presentations as its starting point and then provides a research background for instructors who are not familiar with the speaker’s field, principles for teaching practice, and suggestions for further reading.

Links to the pages:

A Neuroscientific View
Two Views from Anthropology
Views from Cognitive and Social Psychology
Views from Social Psychology and Education
Two Educational Views

Each of the pages listed includes:

Speaker Presentations
In this section, we provide brief abstracts of the speaker presentations, along with links to a more complete summary and a video recording of the full talk. Readers can choose whether to read only the abstract, to read further detail in the summary, or to watch the entire presentation just as it was delivered to the working group.

Research Background
In this section, we list the fundamental principles underlying the speaker presentations, clarifying the disciplinary perspective for graduate students or faculty members who are not content experts in the speaker’s area. We also list one recent key text, suggested by the speaker, that provides an overview of the discipline’s contribution to the science of learning.

Teaching Practice
In this section, we list the key learning principles that can be abstracted from the speaker’s presentation. While the “research fundamentals” in the previous section are intended to clarify disciplinary background, these “key learning principles” are meant to be practical teaching tips based on the research. We envision that some newer graduate student instructors, looking simply for practical strategies, may choose to skip directly to this section. In this section, we also provide examples of classroom activities inspired by this talk, which were developed by members of the 2011 How Students Learn working group; users can click on the activity titles to read descriptions, as written by the faculty members and/or graduate students who designed them. In case the activities developed by working group members are too specific to be of use, we also provide a series of links to “activities and approaches to try” that relate to the learning principles at hand.

Further Reading
In this section, we provide links to three or four recent, readable, scholarly articles, available online, that provide additional research support and teaching tips on the topic at hand.

Links to the pages:

A Neuroscientific View
Two Views from Anthropology
Views from Cognitive and Social Psychology
Views from Social Psychology and Education
Two Educational Views