The always-popular Professional Development Seminar during the 2012 TCCTA convention will be held on Friday, March 2, 2012, at 1:00 p.m. Speaking will be Patrick Allitt, Cahoon Family Professor of American History at Emory University, addressing “Teaching for Student Success.” Dr. Allitt will also deliver the keynote address during the General Session Thursday evening during the convention. A forthcoming post will describe this presentation.
Dr. Allitt was born and raised in England and graduated in 1977 from Oxford University. An Americanist specializing in religious, intellectual, and environmental history, the professor earned his Ph.D. in American history in 1986 from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Divinity School and has been at Emory since 1988. His current research and writing project is a history of the intellectual and political opponents of environmentalism, from the 1960s to the early twenty-first century.
Professor Allitt says, “All teachers have to decide for themselves how to approach the practical challenges of their work. Should they be distant or friendly, rigid in upholding the rules, or flexible? How much should they permit students to discuss personal issues in their classrooms and offices? There is no simple right answer to any of these questions and different teachers will adopt different policies. Whatever subject they are teaching, however, teachers always have to create a teaching persona. It’s never just you in the classroom. It’s you in the role of teacher. Just as we act differently with our children than with our friends, so we have to act in a distinctive way with our students. The theme of this seminar is creating and sustaining your own teaching persona, and using it as well as you possibly can to promote students’ effective learning.”
The speaker is affiliated with The Great Courses (www.greatcourses.com), which brings engaging professors into your home or car on DVD, audio CD, and other formats. Since 1990, great teachers from the Ivy League, Stanford, Georgetown, and other leading colleges and universities have crafted over 350 courses.
One component, “The Art of Teaching: Best Practices from a Master Educator” helps educators develop and enhance their own teaching style, provides them with invaluable methods, tools, and advice for handling all manner of teaching scenarios, and increases awareness on how other teachers, and their students, think about and approach this life-changing profession.
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