20-Minute Mentor Sessions
20-Minute Mentor sessions take place Saturday afternoon and feature fast-paced, 20-minute presentations organized into focused mini-tracks. These concise sessions deliver quick, practical ideas you can immediately apply to your teaching.
Many college, graduate, and professional students struggle with imposter syndrome and often question their ability to succeed in their chosen fields. This session introduces a teaching practice that helps students view themselves as future professionals by using their intended titles in classroom interactions. Participants will explore how identity-affirming language reduces imposter feelings, practice ways to apply this approach across learning environments, and experience a brief reflection activity that helps students see themselves as emerging professionals. Attendees will leave with an easy-to-implement strategy that strengthens engagement, supports belonging, and fosters a more motivating, inclusive classroom climate.
Avery Dingle & Traci Dingle
University of South Carolina
How can content analysis inform teaching practices that advance sustainability literacy in the college classroom? This session introduces content analysis as a practical method for curriculum innovation and improvement. Attendees will profile research applying content analysis to examine key textbooks in a discipline, uncovering common knowledge, themes, variations, and gaps. Finally, we’ll discuss how these findings can guide revisions to course content and assessments to embed sustainability principles across disciplines.
Allison Fetter-Harrott
Butler University
Computer science students often build impressive projects but struggle to communicate their work clearly and confidently to employers — a gap that directly affects internship and job outcomes. Supported by a career-integrated mini-grant, an upper-level Mobile App Development course was redesigned to explore structured ways to help students articulate technical work more effectively. This session introduces the LOVE framework, Learn, Observe, Verbalize, Exhibit, a simple, adaptable model that can be integrated into any project-based course to strengthen students’ professional communication skills.
Sirong Lin
University of Massachusetts Lowell
Formative assessment is one of the most effective ways to improve student learning, yet many instructors feel uncertain about how to use it consistently or efficiently. This session introduces simple, research-supported formative assessment techniques that can be implemented in any discipline without adding extra grading or preparation burden. Participants will learn how to gather real-time feedback on student understanding, make quick instructional adjustments, and create a classroom environment where students are more engaged and aware of their own learning progress. The strategies shared are low-tech, adaptable, and designed to provide immediate benefits for both instructors and learners.
Jason Van Acker
Wisconsin Lutheran College
Project Management Agile frameworks use a “Definition of Done” (DoD) to clarify when work meets expectations. In this session, we’ll adapt that concept to academic settings, showing how instructors can co-create a clear, student-friendly “definition of done” for assignments and tie it directly to grading rubrics. This approach increases transparency, reduces rework, and promotes accountability and self-direction. Participants will see examples from project-based courses and leave with a template to try in their own classrooms.
Anna Radziwillowicz
University of Connecticut
Recent research suggests that the introduction of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools, such as ChatGPT, could benefit students and instructors in data analysis and data science courses. Students can use AI to analyze datasets and assist with problem-solving. In addition, AI can be used by data analytics instructors to develop course material and guide student interactions with tools such as ChatGPT. This discussion introduces tools and techniques to maximize the benefits of AI for data analysis that benefit both students and instructors. At the end of this session, participants will have example exercises and AI prompts that can be used to analyze data sets and for course preparations when teaching data analysis.
Katrice Branner
University of South Carolina
In many classrooms, generative AI is often viewed only as a threat to academic integrity. Drawing on examples from undergraduate linguistics courses, this session presents low-prep activities in which students critique, fact-check, and revise AI-generated content, then compare it to their own work. Participants will learn how to design AI-supported activities that promote deeper disciplinary thinking, create clear prompts that emphasize transparency and ethical use, and adapt these strategies across class sizes, formats, and subject areas.
Safieh Moghaddam
University of Toronto
This session explores how retrieval practice can meaningfully increase both student engagement and academic performance. According to Nichols and Dawson (2022), retrieval practice, in the form of low-stakes testing, is a way of encouraging students to interact with educational materials beyond simply reading a chapter or taking notes during a lecture. Studies have also found that retrieval practice improves performance on high-stakes assessments while boosting engagement, particularly for students prone to boredom or multitasking. By reinforcing attention and participation, retrieval practice offers a practical, evidence-based strategy for helping students stay connected to course content and improve learning outcomes.
Melissa Hawthorne
Louisiana State University-Shreveport
The syllabus lists the chapters, but the blank stares in the classroom tell a different story. “The Great Unread” is a pervasive challenge in higher education, leading to stagnant discussions, shallow learning, and frustrated faculty. But is the problem truly student laziness, or is it a design flaw in how we assign and utilize texts? This session moves beyond the typical complaints about unprepared students to explore actionable solutions. Attendees will dissect the root causes of reading resistance from cognitive overload to a lack of perceived value and introduce a toolkit of strategies to combat them. Attendees will learn to address the reading gap by implementing transparent, high-leverage strategies including Social Annotation (Perusall), Collaborative Note-taking, Jigsaws, and Exit Tickets.
Patricia Turley
Indiana University
In many student success courses, time management is presented as a list of tips, yet students rarely change their habits based on advice alone. This session explores how peer dialogue can make time management more meaningful and effective. Participants will learn how to use activities such as identity webs, partner self-assessments, procrastination interviews, advice letters, case studies, and gallery walks to help students reflect on their habits, compare experiences, and choose strategies that fit their real lives. Attendees will leave with a clear understanding of why peer interaction increases reflection and motivation, along with adaptable activities that can be implemented in any course where students need to plan, prioritize, and manage their academic work.
Anna Gavrilova
University of Minnesota Duluth
Universities face growing pressure to keep graduate students meaningfully engaged while navigating heavy cognitive loads, uneven preparation, and increasingly digital learning environments. This session translates peer-reviewed research into practical teaching strategies that enhance engagement, not just satisfaction. Participants will explore how case-based virtual simulation (VS) can be intentionally designed to strengthen behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement. Drawing on findings from a 2025 Nurse Education in Practice study of 1,331 students, this session highlights participation as a key driver of perceived learning. Attendees will experience VS-inspired strategies and leave with practical approaches they can adapt across disciplines and course formats.
Christi Doherty
Kaplan North America
Online clinical training for healthcare students often relies on static text vignettes, which can leave learners detached from the intended clinical experience. This session introduces a creative approach that replaces written cases with video-based scenarios featuring campus members, designed to humanize and personalize learning. These videos are embedded within a scenario training exercise (STX) framework, adapted from military training models, to create an immersive and iterative learning environment. Students engage in reasoning, differential diagnosis, and care planning in ways that mirror authentic clinical complexity. Participants will explore the STX design process, implementation strategies, and assessment methods used to integrate storytelling into an asynchronous course.
Rebecca Boles & Keely English
Sherman College of Chiropractic
This session outlines a series of mid-semester support lunches designed for faculty teaching students on the autism spectrum. Grounded in scholarship that reframes autism from deficit to identity, this specific program invited faculty to adopt an explicit asset mindset while troubleshooting real cases. Together, program participants named recurrent issues, generated UDL-informed interventions, and learned when and how to partner efficiently with accessibility and care offices. Attendees will leave with a replicable, low-lift model for faculty mentoring that centers faculty community and well-being while simultaneously fostering more inclusive, affirming learning environments for autistic students.
Lucy Littler
Rollins College
Graduate faculty continually seek ways to support students as they transition into advanced study and navigate the complexities of conducting and writing research. The Cognitive Coaching (CC) Planning Conversation offers a powerful, equity-minded approach that can be applied across course contexts. By centering guided questioning, intentional listening, and the mediative stance of a coach, this strategy creates conditions for students to surface their thinking, more accurately assess their needs, and build metacognitive skills essential for self-directed learning.
Chasity Bailey-Fakhoury
Grand Valley State University
This session presents an evidence-based, collaborative, exam-review model in which students first complete an individual exam and subsequently retake it with a group of peers. This approach strengthens confidence, retention, and awareness of test-taking strategy without adding faculty grading time. Assessment data and student feedback demonstrate meaningful gains in learning and reduced exam anxiety. Attendees will explore implementation options adaptable across disciplines and class sizes, and leave with ready-to-use templates for integrating collaborative retakes into their own courses.
Kyra Noerr
Franklin College
Advisory Board Session
Online students face many of the same challenges as other learners but often lack the in-person support systems available to on-campus peers. Connecting students through virtual communities offers a valuable way to provide social support. This session presents results from a needs assessment with online graduate students, shares lessons learned from a pilot virtual-community initiative within a Master of Public Health program and offers a practical playbook for creating virtual communities.
Sarah Wackerbarth
Augusta University