Keynote Address

Maryellen Weimer Professor Emeritus of Teaching and Learning The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA grg@psu.edu   Growth and Development for College Teachers   Good teaching constantly makes demands of teachers: emotional energy, the will to keep caring, intellectual stamina, creative approaches, vigilance, faith in the power of feedback to prompt learning and perseverance to find the way back from failure. During this presentation we will explore all that it takes to sustain teaching excellence across a career, not in the how-to-do excellent teaching sense but how growth and change can be approached so that they make improvement a positive and productive process. Ways of thinking about instructional growth and ways of implementing change that can increase both the motivation to teach and effectiveness in the classroom will be proposed. More >>>

The thirty-eighth annual conference of the International Society for Exploring Teaching and Learning (ISETL) will be in Las Vegas, Nevada, from October 23-25, 2008. ISETL encourages college and university faculty and practitioners from all disciplines to develop, study, and apply learner-centered principles of teaching, learning, and assessment in innovative, yet effective and practical ways. The program committee invites proposals for a 50 minute presentations - Interactive Teaching Sessions or Academic Research Sessions - or for a poster session presentation that reflects these goals. We are especially interested in presentations that demonstrate practical and creative teaching and learning techniques based on personal experiences and/or research that will appeal to colleagues in several disciplines. We will also consider presentations on other topics relevant to the mission of ISETL. Preference will be given to presentations that promise to model alternative teaching methods and engage their audiences in activity and dialogue. All conference information is available on the Conference Information sheet.

ISETL is a supportive and inclusive organization of professionals dedicated to the practice and scholarship of teaching in higher education. The rich representation of disciplines from traditional liberal arts and sciences, engineering and the applied sciences, and a diverse set of professional schools gives us all new insights to achieving common goals of improving teaching and learning. ISETL conferences provide a professional forum for those who have something to share, and the informal and interactive nature of the presentations makes learners and teachers of us all. ISETL's listserv provides an online forum for exchanging ideas and innovations in pedagogy, and ISETL's publication, the International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, a peer-reviewed journal, provides faculty with an outlet for sharing their academic endeavors.