Spotlight
Teaching Success
| USF News
From top: Autar Kaw, Lois Roma-Deeley Christy Price, Todd Pagano
The country’s top undergraduate instructors shared their insights on teaching and student success during a panel discussion at the third annual Student Success Conference in April.
Selected by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, the 2012 Professor of the Year honorees — USF’s Autar Kaw; Lois Roma-Deeley of Paradise Valley Community College in Phoenix, Ariz.; Christy Price of Dalton State College in Dalton, Ga.; and Todd Pagano of the Rochester Institute of Technology’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf in Rochester, N.Y. — agreed that connecting to students and having a true passion for learning are the hallmarks of a great teacher.
“Students want to be challenged. They want to learn, and I believe that you must have that real high expectation in a real positive way,” Roma-Deeley said. “I assume my students want to learn even if they don’t know it.”
Kaw said students today want access to their teachers 24/7. He’s responded by adjusting his schedule and providing social media sites to keep up with the instant communication students expect. Kaw is an enthusiastic supporter of MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses, and reaches students with a YouTube channel, a blog, and a Twitter feed.
“It’s a great and effective use of technology for instructional purposes and a wise use at that,” said USF Vice Provost for Student Success Paul Dosal. “I’m afraid too often we become in some ways captives to the technology, and we rarely adapt it as well as Dr. Kaw has done.”