Todd Zakrajsek

Center for Faculty Excellence
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Saturday September 24:“How Students Learn: Strategies for Teaching from Cognitive, Social, and Physiological Psychology”

As educators, our task is to bring about as much growth as possible within our students. Growth consisting of new foundational knowledge, more sophisticated ways of looking at and understanding one another, the ability to solve problems that do not yet exist, a better understanding of what it means to be educated, and a deeper recognition of how to learn independently. This session will draw on the areas of cognitive psychology pertaining to information processing as it relates to human learning and memory, physiological psychology to investigate how external influences such as exercise and nutrition impact the brain, and social psychology to better understand how knowledge of ourselves and our interaction with others mitigates all learning. As this session will be conducted relatively late in the day, interactive learning will be implemented to draw on the energy of social interaction, engaged learning will be used to keep your cognitive processes involved, and movement will be used to demonstrate the impact of physiology on the learning process.

Biography

Todd Zakrajsek serves as the Executive Director of the Center for Faculty Excellence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He previously was the Inaugural Director of the Faculty Center for Innovative Teaching at Central Michigan University and the founding Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Southern Oregon University, where he also taught in the psychology department as a tenured associate professor. Todd directs the Lilly Conferences on Teaching and Learning in Traverse City, Michigan, and Bethesda, Maryland. He received his Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from Ohio University. In the past several years, Todd has published and presented widely on the topic of student learning, including workshops and conference keynote addresses in over 35 states and 5 countries.