Featured Speakers
Gerald Nosich
Gerald Nosich, Ph.D., is a professor at Buffalo State College and Professor Emeritus at the University of New Orleans. He has been working with critical thinking concepts since 1977. Since the mid-1980s he has become committed to teaching for critical thinking across the curriculum. He is convinced that the only way for students to learn a subject matter is to think their way through it. He is the author of Reasons and Arguments (Wadsworth, 1982). His second book, Learning to Think Things Through: A Guide to Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum, has recently been released in its fourth edition (Prentice Hall, 2011) and has been translated into Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic.
He has given more than 200 workshops on all aspects of teaching for critical thinking. These have been given for instructors at all levels of education in the U.S., Canada, Thailand, Lithuania, Austria, Germany and England. He has worked with the U.S. Department of Education on a project for a National Assessment of Higher Order Thinking Skills; given teleconferences sponsored by PBS and Starlink on teaching for critical thinking within subject-matter courses; served as assistant director of the Center for Critical Thinking and as a consultant for ACT in Critical Thinking and Language Arts assessment; been a consultant and evaluator for SACS; and been featured as a noted scholar at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of numerous articles, audio- and videotapes on critical thinking and is an associate of the Foundation for Critical Thinking.
Scott Simkins
Scott P. Simkins, Ph.D. is the director of the Academy for Teaching and Learning (ATL) and associate professor of Economics at North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro, NC.
As ATL director he has led or co-led a number of institutional initiatives focused on improving teaching and learning, assessment of student learning outcomes, and curricular reform, including North Carolina A&T’s participation in the Carnegie CASTL Institutional Leadership Program, AAC&U’s General Education Institute, and two four-year national longitudinal studies (the Collegiate Learning Assessment and the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education). The latter led Simkins and a colleague to develop the Wabash-Provost Scholars program, a nationally-recognized program that trains undergraduates to conduct student focus groups on issues of institutional importance, analyze the resulting data, and present written and oral presentations of their findings to the campus community. In spring 2012 Simkins was selected to participate in a national technical advisory group for the Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA), whose recommendations led to the inclusion of AAC&U VALUE rubrics as an accepted VSA assessment tool.
His pedagogic research has appeared in a variety of book chapters and academic journals, including the Journal of Economic Education, and focuses on pedagogical innovation and cross-disciplinary educational research. He is co-editor (with Mark Maier) of Just-in-Time Teaching: Across the Disciplines, Across the Academy (Stylus Publishing, 2009), and currently serves as an Executive Editor of College Teaching. Simkins is a frequent presenter on scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) topics at workshops and conferences regionally, nationally, and internationally, focusing on evidence-based pedagogical innovation, the integration of students in institutional SoTL research, and factors affecting faculty adoption of new teaching practices.
He has co-led multiple National Science Foundation-supported projects exploring the adaptability of STEM discipline teaching innovations in economics, including the implementation of Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT) techniques. Most recently, Simkins (with Mark Maier, KimMarie McGoldrick, and Cathy Manduca) was awarded a $500,000 NSF grant to develop a national economics pedagogic portal, Starting Point: Teaching and Learning Economics, introducing economists to a variety of evidence-based teaching practices and providing resources to implement those practices in their courses.