Initiatives
Dr. Linda Slakey
STEM Speaker, November 4, 2014: Making Student-Centered Teaching the New Normal: Are We at a Tipping Point?
Senior Advisor for AAU STEM Education
Take-Home Lessons
• There is abundant evidence that learning is better served by teaching methods that
engage students actively than by dependence on lecture, but knowing this has not led
to active pedagogies becoming the new normal.
• Summaries of the evidence, guides for beginning to change, new metrics for both
faculty practice and student learning, and the development of frameworks for institutional
change all put us in a better position to bring about change than was the case a decade
ago.
• Institutional change work requires attention to what is known about adult learning,
models for cultural change, the incentives that are in place for change or for the
status quo, and the economics of change.