Guest Speaker: Michelle Miller, “Remembering Names: Techniques Anyone Can Learn”

Learning students’ names in a timely fashion and with correct pronunciation is a key technique for setting a welcoming, personalized, and engaging classroom atmosphere. However, most people struggle with learning names, due to the characteristics of human cognitive and memory systems. Led by guest presenter Michelle Miller, This workshop leads participants through effective strategies for name learning, drawing on the presenter’s background in cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics and her recent book A Teacher’s Guide to Learning Student Names: Why You Should, Why It’s Hard, How You Can (University of Oklahoma Press). Read more about her work in this Chronicle of Higher Education interview: How Can Professors Learn Students’ Names? A Scholar of Memory Shares Her Process. Dr. Michelle Miller is a cognitive psychologist, researcher, and speaker focused on supporting higher education faculty in creating effective and engaging learning experiences for students, author of Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World (West Virginia University Press, 2022) and a Professor of Psychological Sciences and President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University.