Preconference seminars are a great way to start your week at NISOD’s International Conference on Teaching and Leadership Excellence. These special learning experiences provide intensive, collaborative, hands-on opportunities for exploring leading-edge teaching and learning skills and strategies. Each seminar, facilitated by experts in the field, offers in-depth study and insights into a particular topic that has been specifically developed for the NISOD audience. Participants leave with skills, knowledge, and materials they can immediately use in their own teaching and learning practice.

Emotional Intelligence, Efficacy, and Success

Have you ever wished you could change your students’ or colleagues’ attitudes to one of more positive engagement in their work? Well, you can! The secret is appreciating that all of us, as leaders within our classrooms and professional areas, have a profound impact upon the emotional state of the people we engage with each day. Whether interacting with individuals or groups, the neuroscience is clear—the affective domain powerfully impacts cognition, persistence, motivation, and performance. In this multidimensional, highly interactive, experiential, and fun workshop, participants explore ways they can increase their chances of experiencing positive, motivated, and engaged collaboration!

David Katz, Executive Director, Organizational Development, Mohawk Valley Community College

Is Your Institution Ready for PLA? A Prior Learning Assessment and Competency-Based Education Clinic

During this workshop, participants learn about the components that make up successful prior learning assessment (PLA) and competency-based education (CBE) programs. Also examined are the benefits of PLA and CBE for students, colleges, and communities. Participants determine their institution’s readiness for PLA and CBE and receive information about best practices in PLA implementation, infrastructure and staff investment, course development, faculty and staff training and support, marketing, assessment and reporting, and policy and administrative issues.

Christine Hubbard, President, North Texas Community College Consortium

Teach Students How to Learn: Metacognition Is the Key!

Many students enter college unprepared for the demands of college courses. Workshop participants learn simple but effective learning strategies based on cognitive science principles they can easily teach students. Through interactive think-pair-share and group reflection exercises, participants explore the reasons why students have not developed these skills before college and examine evidence demonstrating that teaching students how to learn can immediately and dramatically increase student learning and retention rates.

Saundra McGuire, Director Emerita and Retired Professor, Louisiana State University