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Intentional Teaching with Derek Bruff

Welcome to the Intentional Teaching newsletter! I'm Derek Bruff, educator and author. The name of this newsletter is a reminder that we should be intentional in how we teach, but also in how we develop as teachers over time. I hope this newsletter will be a valuable part of your professional development as an educator.

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Featured Post

MIT's report on AI and learning, plus other new teaching resources

MIT's Report on AI in Teaching and Learning The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (better known as MIT) released a report last month sharing the findings and recommendations of their Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research. I've read a lot of university reports on AI over the last few years, and most of them are forgettable. This one, however, is fantastic. It's very MIT, in that it's grounded in the MIT context, which is not a typical college or university context,...

8 days ago • 5 min read

Intentional Teaching's 100th Episode Episode 100 of the Intentional Teaching podcast is coming up, and I would love your help making it a special one. There are interviews I've aired on the podcast that I find myself referencing all the time in my work with faculty. All my guests are fantastic, of course, but some managed to share some piece of insight that has stuck with me, changing how I think about teaching and learning. And I bet, if you're a listener, you have similar insights from past...

15 days ago • 4 min read

One of the things I appreciate about designing and facilitating workshops for faculty is that doing so gives me the opportunity to take a few ideas and examples that have been bouncing around my head and turn them into a new argument of some kind. Having led eight workshops for various audiences in the last ten days, I've had no lack of opportunities to do that synthesis work! What follows is one of the new arguments I made during my workshops recently. Back in May, I wrote that it's time to...

22 days ago • 7 min read

You may have noticed this edition of the newsletter is coming out on a Monday instead of its usual Thursday or Friday. That's because, well, it's August! August is the busiest month of the year for those of us in educational development as we work to help our colleagues get ready for upcoming semester. I was running point on seven instructor-facing workshops last week, including a webinar for my publisher, W.W. Norton, on AI syllabus statements as invitations for conversations with students....

26 days ago • 3 min read

AI-Aware Teaching in Political Science The ebook version of my new book, The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching, co-authored with Annette Vee and Marc Watkins, is out! To celebrate its release I’ve interviewed a few of the faculty whose AI-aware teaching we highlight in the book, and I’m excited to share another one of those conversations on the Intentional Teaching podcast this week. Eric Loepp teaches political science at UW Whitewater, where he helps students understand the complexities and...

about 1 month ago • 4 min read

What AI Journals Reveal about Student Learning To celebrate the release of The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching, I've interviewed a few of the faculty whose AI-aware teaching practices we highlight in the book, and I'm excited to share those interviews on the Intentional Teaching podcast this summer. First up is Susan Ray, associate professor of English at Delaware County Community College (that's near Philadelphia, not in Delaware). Susan teaches a mix of on-site and online composition...

about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Abstract illustration of cats occupying every corner of a sprawling, interconnected network suspended through a large academic building. The image serves as a visual metaphor for the difficulty of aligning many independent perspectives during curriculum r

A Coherent Program-Level Response to AI Two weeks ago in the newsletter, I shared some data from this summer's Inside Higher Ed student survey on the ways students find generative AI helpful in their learning. Today, I want to point to more data from that survey, this time about institutional responses to AI. When asked how well their colleges and universities are responding to AI and helping students navigate what AI means for their futures, just 37% of students said that their institutions...

2 months ago • 5 min read

I'm happy to share that the ebook version of The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching is now available! Visit your favorite online retailer to purchase a copy, and if you don't have a favorite, see Norton's listing for the book for options. The paperback version is still on track for a late September release, but you can dive into the digital version of the book right now. It is packed with ideas and inspiration for teaching with, without, and about generative AI, and my co-authors Annette Vee...

2 months ago • 1 min read
Graphic for the launch party repeating information found in the text of the newsletter above.

The Future of AI-Aware Teaching My Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching co-authors Annette Vee and Marc Watkins and I had the good fortune to be guests on Bryan Alexander's Future Trends Forum the other week. If you missed the live show, the recording is now available on Bryan's YouTube channel. That recording doesn't include the text chat--which was a firehose!--but you'll get to hear us weigh in on What we mean by "AI-aware" teaching, AI as an arrival technology (that is, it just showed up...

3 months ago • 4 min read

My wife and I took a proper vacation last week--kid-free, for the first time in three years! Between that and the Juneteenth holiday, this newsletter didn't go out last week. But I did drop a new podcast episode last Tuesday, so here's a special Monday edition of the newsletter to get the word out about that new episode. Study Hall Is Back! Last year I tried a new podcast episode format in which I invite three guests on the show to discuss recent studies on teaching and learning in higher ed....

3 months ago • 2 min read