Conceptual Understanding, Technical Skills, and Generative AI Literacy One of the perks of working at the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Virginia this year is getting to meet UVA faculty who are doing really interesting work in their teaching. Back in August, I had the chance to spend a couple of days on Grounds, as they say there, working with UVA’s Faculty AI Guides. These are faculty fellows who are experimenting with the use of generative AI in their own teaching and...
20 days ago • 4 min read
An Oral History of the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching When I left Vanderbilt University in September 2022, I wanted to find a way to honor the good work that the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching had done over the years. The CFT was founded in 1986, which made it 37 years old in 2023 when the current Vanderbilt provost folded the center into another unit. I worked at the CFT for 19 of those 37 years, including two years as a graduate assistant, six years as an assistant director, and eleven...
27 days ago • 3 min read
Captain, It's Wednesday I saw this meme going around the socials on Wednesday of this week: Captain Paddock sits there looking shocked and exhausted and he says, "What a week, huh?" Tintin sits next to him trying to be helpful and he says, "Captain, it's Wednesday." (Thanks to 30 Rock and the internet for this meme.) That pretty much sums up how I felt the day after Election Day. I was surprised that the outcome of the U.S. presidential election was known so quickly. I figured it would take...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Talking to Colleagues about Generative AI I'm facilitating or participating in five faculty learning communities this fall that focus on teaching and generative AI. Most of the participants in these learning communities are keen to explore possible uses of generative AI in their teaching or in their students learning. Many of the participants, however, are working in departments or programs with colleagues who are skeptical of generative AI and its role in teaching and learning. The...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
Active Learning in Large Humanities Courses There has been much research on the value of active learning instruction in the STEM fields. It's clear that such instruction results in more student learning and greater student success, particularly for marginalized students, when compared with continuous exposition by the teacher and when students are fully able to participate in active learning. The 2014 Scott Freeman et al. study is now a classic work on this subject since it offers a...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Generative AI and the Struggle Last week I posted the following on LinkedIn, and it kind of took off: Talked to a guy last night who's in tech by day and music by night (this is Nashville). He talked about struggling to write a bridge for a song. He was tempted to get ideas from ChatGPT, knowing that would speed the process. But he decided the struggle was the valuable part of the process. That seemed analogous to the use of AI in writing. If the goal is writing-as-thinking, then the struggle...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Teaching Habits of Mind with Becky Marchiel Last year while working at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Mississippi, my colleague Emily Donahoe and I organized a panel of faculty on the topic of alternatives to the traditional essay. One of the panelists that Emily recruited was Becky Marchiel, associate professor of history, who asks students in her United States history survey course to conduct oral histories with people born before 1970. Students can...
2 months ago • 4 min read
Around the Web I'm busy leading lots and lots of faculty learning communities, so I'll keep this week's newsletter short and sweet. Here are a few items of interest around the web that I think readers might find interesting. Behind the Curtain of Higher Education: Faculty Aren't Trained - This Forbes essay by San Francisco Bay University president Nick Ladany has been lighting up my little section of LinkedIn. Ladany points out something that many of us in higher ed know well, that training...
2 months ago • 2 min read
Teaching in an Election Year with Bethany Morrison It is a presidential election year here in the United States, and that can make for some high-stakes discussions in our classes. I had been wanting to share some strategies for navigating those conversations, when earlier this month I saw a new blog post titled "Preparing to Teach During the 2024 Election" from Bethany Morrison, political scientist and assistant director at the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT) at the...
3 months ago • 3 min read