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.
Take It or Leave It with Stacey Johnson, Liz Norell, and Viji Sathy We're back with another "Take It or Leave It" panel on the podcast this week. I know it's only been a couple of episodes since the last one, but there's a lot happening in U.S. higher ed right now, and I find these panels helpful for making sense of it all. Once again I’ve invited three smart colleagues on the show to discuss recent op-eds that address the challenges that colleges and universities and their teaching missions...
Teaching with AI Agents: A Conversation about Cogniti I think the first custom AI chatbot I tried was one called “Are You a Witch?” designed by past podcast guest Marc Watkins. This chatbot would answer your questions like ChatGPT, but unlike ChatGPT it would only do so after accusing you of witchcraft (in the most caricatured way possible) and making you solve a riddle. That chatbot was kind of silly, but I soon heard about faculty and other instructors building chatbots to do all kinds of...
New from the UVA Teaching Hub One of my roles at the University of Virginia Center for Teaching Excellence is supporting the growth of the CTE's Teaching Hub. The Teaching Hub features collections of resources on a variety of teaching and learning topics, with each collection curated by someone with expertise in that topic. The goal isn't to build all the great resources, but to point to the really good ones that are already out there, with recommendations like the staff picks at a good...