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.
AI-enhanced learning on a bonus podcast episode, plus birdwatching!
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Surprise! I have another podcast episode for you this week. Usually I release episodes every other Tuesday, but I've been talking to too many interesting people lately! I'm taking the Intentional Teaching podcast weekly for the month of April to catch up on my backlog of interviews. AI-Enhanced Learning with Pary FassihiThis week I have another fantastic interview about teaching with AI. Pary Fassihi is a senior lecturer in the College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program at Boston University. She's been at the leading edge of teaching with technology since I met way back in 2007 or so. In fact, she's one of the instructors I profiled in my first book, Teaching with Classroom Response Systems, about her use of "clickers" in language instruction. Pary is part of a program at Boston University piloting AI-intensive writing, research, and inquiry courses. Pary and the other participating faculty have been paired with AI affiliates, undergraduate students with expertise in generative AI, who help them develop and implement new AI-enhanced activities and assignments. Also, Boston has picked up the tab for ChatGPT Plus subscriptions for all the students in these courses. The goal of the program is help instructors find ways to "incorporate AI into their teaching ethically, responsibly, and effectively," and then have those instructors share what they've learned with Boston and beyond. After reading some of Pary's posts on LinkedIn about the AI-enhanced activities and assignments in her courses this spring, I reached out to her to see if she would share her explorations on the podcast. In the interview, she talks about having students make art with AI (and reflect on the experience), using ChatGPT as a robot peer reviewer for student work, getting AI to help students with course readings, and more. I was impressed with the thoughtfulness and creativity Pary has brought to her AI-enhanced courses this spring, and I think you will be, too. She also has a charming story about the first time she realized she wanted to be an educator. You can listen to my conversation with Pary Fassihi here, or search for "Intentional Teaching" in your favorite podcast app. Thanks for reading!That's it for this week's newsletter. Between travel and illness, it's been quite a week in the Bruff household. But I'll leave you with a couple of migrating warblers I saw in Radnor Lake here in Nashville yesterday. If you found this newsletter useful, please forward it to a colleague who might like it! That's one of the best ways you can support the work I'm doing here at Intentional Teaching. |
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.
Around the Web This is the part of the newsletter where I link to things that I find interesting in the hopes that you do, too. This week, this is the entire newsletter! Education as the Lighting of a Fire: Personal Connection Strikes the Match - This is a preprint of a study by Steven Most and Nathan Clout of the University of New South Wales Sydney. Two groups of participants heard the same recorded lecture. One group was given a "relatable" backstory about the lecturer, the other was told...
How well do you know the law as it applies to teaching? This week on the podcast, I talk with Kent Kauffman, author of Navigating Choppy Waters: Key Legal Issues College Faculty Need to Know. I invited him on the show because of all the stories we've seen in the last year about college and university faculty being accused by students of teaching something the student didn't the instructor should be teaching. These incidents have a lot of instructors worried about teaching controversial...
Learning How to Learn (with AI, Actually) I wrote the first draft of the “Using AI as a Tutor” chapter in the forthcoming Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching, co-authored with Annette Vee and Marc Watkins. I pitched this chapter for the book because I was brought into the author team as the “STEM guy,” that is, a co-author who could bring some STEM education perspectives to the work, and because the number one use case of generative AI in STEM education that I hear about is students turning to...