Shannon Halkyard's Introduction

I am Shannon Halkyard and I teach chemistry and statistics (and sometimes anatomy and physiology) at Stuart Hall High School in San Francisco. This is my fourth year in the doctoral program at USF and my fifth year teaching at Stuart Hall.

Professional Life
I teach tenth grade chemistry. I also teach upper level AP chemistry and/or AP statistics when we have sufficient enrollment. Stuart Hall is a small school, so we sometimes have to rotate AP classes to provide a variety of classes for the small number of students. This is a little bit like the rotation of classes at USF for the L&I students. I push the envelope technologically speaking at my school, and while my students don't do chemistry blogs, they do make good use of computer-assisted instruction, multimedia, and other tech-based learning tools. I am presenting soon at the SF archdiocesan conference on multimedia chemistry textbooks.

Why a Doctorate
I want to develop new and better materials for teaching chemistry. I also want to be taken seriously. I want a doctorate to help me learn how to create these materials and to provide me with a serious credential so that publishers and distributers take me seriously.

Potential Project Topics
I am interested in three areas and how they may interact (and plan to do a dissertation on these possible interactions):

Area one is Learning Styles. (This is Bob Burns' fault.) I want to get a better idea of what they are in terms of human abilities and what they mean for instruction and learning--and curricular design. Something beyond the really shallow stuff that they pass around at teacher development sessions.

Area two is human abilities--especially the areas commonly associated with learning styles and with working memory channels, namely auditory processing and video/visual processing.

Area three is is working memory and the auditory and visual processing channels and how to best utilize human learning potential via multimedia presentation of information, especially if that presentation can be tailored to individual strengths in ability and/or learning styles.