Engaging students is half the battle, says psychology professor

Replete with blaring music, excerpts from animated TV series, and other pop culture references, David B. Miller’s lectures are multimedia events that have earned him awards and accolades as a highly engaging faculty member.

During a recent class, Miller, a professor of psychology, selected snake photos from a science journal to highlight a presentation about mimicry and evolution. The photos showed a non-poisonous snake with similar coloring to a poisonous snake, that give it “an adaptive advantage by not being preyed upon.”

“What I try to do is really engage the student,” Miller says. “That’s half the battle. Once you’ve got their attention, then you hit them with the important stuff.”

Miller’s enthusiasm for his subject and his students have earned the respect of his colleagues and have been recognized over the years with nearly every UConn teaching award, including his most recent honor last month, when he was presented with the 2005 UConn Alumni Association award for Faculty Excellence in Teaching at the Undergraduate Level.

“David Miller is widely recognized by his colleagues as an outstanding researcher and as a truly outstanding leader in our mission of teaching excellence,” says Charles Lowe, chair of the psychology department in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Miller joined the UConn faculty in 1980, primarily to conduct bird research.

A decade later, a grant from UConn’s Institute for Teaching and Learning provided some computer equipment and the impetus to change his approach to the classroom.

“It started with simple scanning of slides for an animal behavior course ... and sort of snowballed,” Miller says, adding that he routinely upgrades the multimedia elements for all his courses.