Plenary Sessions

Teaching Professor
Online Conference

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Live Access: October 22–24, 2024
On-Demand Access: October 25, 2024–January 31, 2025

PLENARY

Prioritize, Optimize, and Sustain Your Well-Being

October 22 〡11:45 AM to 12:45 PM

In this age of burnout, business leaders face unprecedented challenges that require effective strategies for maintaining their well-being and enhancing their leadership capacity. It’s crucial to find tangible ways to prioritize, optimize, and sustain personal and professional health amidst the complexities of today’s business environments. Join award-winning educator, Kristen Lee as she delves into the latest research and evidence-based approaches that can help leaders build resilience. By focusing on practical habits, positive mindsets, and sustainable practices, Kris will offer invaluable insights designed to protect against the pervasive risk of burnout and promote long-term well-being.

Kristen Lee, a professor of behavioral science, brings her extensive experience and expertise to the forefront in this session. Drawing on cutting-edge research in neuroscience and psychology, Kris will share actionable strategies that can be seamlessly integrated into daily routines. Her insights are grounded in scientific evidence, providing leaders with the tools needed to navigate their professional landscapes with greater ease. By building a resilient mindset, leaders can enhance their personal well-being and improve organizational effectiveness. 

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Kristen Lee

Northeastern University

Kristen Lee, EdD, LICSW is an internationally recognized, award-winning behavioral science author, clinician, researcher, educator, speaker, comedian, and from Boston, Massachusetts. As Behavioral Science faculty at Northeastern University, Kris’s research and teaching interests include individual and organizational well-being and resilience, particularly for marginalized and underserved populations. She is the author of RESET: Make the Most of Your Stress, Mentalligence: A New Psychology of Thinking-Learn What it Takes to be More Agile, Mindful and Connected in Today’s World, and Worth the Risk: How to Microdose Bravery to Grow Resilience, Connect More, and Offer Yourself to the World. She is a contributor for Psychology Today and Thrive Global. Kris’s work has been featured on NPR, Ted, Forbes Fast Company, and CBS radio.

PLENARY

Teaching to Include and Empower Students

October 23 〡10:00 to 11:00 AM

In this plenary presentation, Marybeth Gasman will share strategies for faculty to teach in ways that speak to the experiences of all students, and share methods for empowering all students to learn by building on their unique identities and contributions to the classroom. Participants will learn how to craft culturally relevant pedagogy, how to design course that center students, how to incorporate student identities, and how to build on community needs and challenges in course assignments. Gasman will challenge participants to rethink the way they “learned” how to teach and the way they engage students in learning, encouraging them to use more innovative approaches and to engage students in peer-to-peer learning. Her approach will pay special attention to students of color, and teaching to empower them to do their best.

Marybeth Gasman

Rutgers University

Marybeth Gasman is a distinguished professor, and the associate dean for Research in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University. She also serves as the executive director of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Institute for Leadership, Equity & Justice and the executive director of the Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions. She is the author or editor of 33 books, including Educating a Diverse Nation (Harvard University Press, 2015 with Clif Conrad), Envisioning Black Colleges (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), Making Black Scientists (Harvard University Press, 2019 with Thai-Huy Nguyen), Doing the Right Thing: How to End Systemic Racism in Faculty Hiring (Princeton University, 2022), and her newest book HBCU: The Power of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024). 

PLENARY

Against Ease: Teaching Critical Thinking in the
Age of AI

October 24 〡11:00 AM to 12:00 PM

Where does critical thinking fit into The Age of AI? How can we encourage our students to slow down and reflect, when they are surrounded by a world that increasingly demands speed and efficiency? These questions will be front and center in this session. We’ll begin by covering what critical thinking is. In The Age of AI, critical thinking feels almost counter-cultural. In involves dedicating our time to slowing down, to think about how something works. It means resisting the temptation to move on and to, instead, linger and think about a topic from multiple sides.

For the rest of the session, we will focus on specific, concrete ways that we can use AI to encourage critical thinking. We can use Generative AI to boost what has been called “desirable difficulty,” creating scenarios and learning experiences where students work through a difficult, but important and relevant, idea. The goal is to move us towards a model of AI that recognizes the ongoing importance of desirable difficulty and tension in the modern learning experience. In the process, we will think about the value proposition of Higher Education in this new era.

Jason Gulya

Berkeley College

Jason Gulya is a professor of English at Berkeley College, where he teaches courses ranging from writing and lterature to AI-powered communication and social media. He also works as an AI consultant and strategist for colleges, and has worked with more than a dozen colleges and thousands of faculty and administrators. His goal is to help colleges use AI responsibly and ethically, while improving students’ learning experiences. For his work in AI and education, he has been featured in Insider and Forbes (three times). He is currently researching the future of close reading in The Age of AI.