Schedule Updates

As you read this, I will have started a very busy couple of weeks in my personal and professional life!

I'll be at the POD Network conference in Pittsburgh from today through Sunday, November 19th. I haven't attended an in-person POD conference since 2019, so I'm very excited to reconnect that way with colleagues. I'll have a stack of Intentional Teaching stickers with me, so if you're going to POD, come find me and ask for a sticker! I'll also be scouting potential podcast guests while I'm attending sessions at the conference.

Following POD, I'll be taking some time off to do Thanksgiving and Christmas with my family. My wife's brother and his family live in Texas, and they're coming east just once this holiday season, so we're going to pack in a Christmas celebration the weekend after Thanksgiving! Expect to see some activity on my board​game​socials during that time as I hang with the nieces and nephews.

All this means that the Intentional Teaching schedule will be erratic over the next little while. I aim to post a new podcast episode every two weeks and send out the newsletter weekly, but November and December won't hit those marks. There will be no podcast or newsletter next week (for Thanksgiving), then a new podcast episode on November 28th continuing my short series on innovations in career-oriented undergraduate education. The pod will return two weeks later on December 12th, then take the rest of the year off. After next week's Thanksgiving break, the newsletter should be weekly through December 21st, then off for the rest of the year.

Desirable Difficulties

One thing that's hard to admit about working in teaching and learning is that I haven't read all the things. It would be great if could read every book and journal article and white paper about teaching and learning that gets published, but no one I know has that kind of time. This means that someone can mention some bit of research, even some pretty classic research, and I just nod and smile like of course I've read that.

This happened earlier this year when Rob Eaton and Bonnie Moon were on the podcast talking about their book Improving Learning and Mental Health in the College Classroom. Rob referenced Robert Bjork's concept of "desirable difficulties," noting that not every difficulty students face in the college classroom is desirable. A lot of the advice he and his co-authors provide in their book is about designing out undesirable difficulties so that students can focus their time and attention and efforts on learning.

I know I had heard of "desirable difficulties" before interviewing Rob and Bonnie, but I didn't know anything concrete about it. I also thought I knew who Robert Bjork was, but I was thinking of Robert Boice, who did some foundational work on the experiences of junior faculty. I really like Rob Eaton's use of this concept to talk about equity in higher education, and I wanted to use it in a recent presentation on inclusive course design. I figured it was time to do a little homework on Robert Bjork!

It turns out, Robert Bjork is a psychologist with an incredible amount of scholarly work. I probably would have read some of his work in grad school, but it didn't come up in my mathematics program. He uses the term desirable difficulties to describe a set of learning strategies that you're probably familiar with, including spacing, interleaving, and retrieval practice. He calls these desirable because they enhance long-term learning and difficulties because they pose challenges and slow down learning. See this short interview with Bjork for an overview.

For instance, consider a study by Roediger and Karpicke (2006) that I read about in Dynamic Lecturing, the excellent book by Christine Harrington and Todd Zakrajsek. The researchers had a bunch of students read a passage, then study the passage, then take a quiz over the material. The first quiz was five minutes later, the second quiz was a week later. For that "study" phase after reading the passage, some students were given 15 minutes to reread the passage and some students were asked to spend 15 minutes trying to recall information from the passage and write down what they remembered. The students who spent the time rereading the passage did the best at the five-minutes-later quiz, but the students who did the recall, that is, the ones who engaged in retrieval practice, did the best on the week-later quiz.

The upshot from that study is that the rereading strategy was helpful in the short run but less helpful than the retrieval practice in the long run. That's typical of this notion of desirable difficulties; what helps us do well on the quiz this week might not help us learn the material long-term. This is important to convey to students when we try to engage them in deep, authentic learning. If they really want to learn new knowledge and skills useful for their professional or personal goals, that might entail some desirable difficulties.

Reader and Listener Feedback

Thanks to everyone who responded to my reader / listener survey in the last two weeks! If you haven't responded, it's not too late. And it's a very short survey. I shared one response to the survey in last week's newsletter, and I thought I would share some more this week.

One of the questions on the survey asks, "What topics or themes or questions or people would you like to hear about or from in future newsletters or podcast episodes?" There have been a lot of responses to this question, and I think those responses give a sense of the current conversations around teaching and learning in higher ed. Here are some of the topics and themes suggested so far:

• Teaching politically challenging material
• Experiential or service learning
• First day and final day teaching strategies
• Contract grading
• Documenting effective teaching
• Common courses for first-year students
• Translating teaching practices across disciplines
• Instructors as the "front line" for students in distress
• Course-based undergrad research experiences (CUREs)

These are all great topics, and I'll be looking for resources and podcast guests who might speak to these topics!
Some survey respondents had more to say than just a topic, like these two who both weighed in on AI:

• "I believe the variety of topics is what will continue to draw me back - please don't get caught in the AI pit. I understand it is very important - but there are SO many other important topics to be discussed and I feel that everyone is stuck on AI currently."
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• "I don't think enough can be said about GenAI and how it is impacting teaching. What is the future of writing assignments? How do we express to students our expectations for their work in a compelling and clear manner in an age of Gen AI? What should that work look like in an age of GenAI?"

I will continue trying to square that circle by covering AI and teaching but also covering other topics and themes!
There was also this suggestion, which reflects the survey results indicating that a lot of you out there are teaching center staff or other administrators:

• "I'd love to hear you explore how teaching center staff and administration can position themselves within universities. When can we push back against policies or approaches we find misguided? How do we demonstrate our importance? What should we advocate for to help our centers function effectively?"

I have lots of thoughts about this, and I'll plan on putting some of them in writing in the near future!
Finally, here's one suggestion that I don't fully understand:

• "A way to leverage your platform for those new to the field of professional development would be beautiful."

I think that means sharing the work of folks relatively new to the field of teaching and learning, and, if so, I am game for that. Back on the old Leading Lines podcast, we would often interview junior faculty and graduate students about their educational technology use because they were often doing the most innovative work! I'd love to have some more junior educational developers share their work here in the newsletter and on the podcast. Another something to look for while I'm at POD this week!

Around the Web - AI Edition

This is the part of the newsletter where I link to things about generative AI that I find interesting in the hopes that you do, too.

• ​Call for Papers: Teaching AI Ethics - My University of Mississippi colleague Deborah Mower is co-editing a special issue of the journal Teaching Ethics on the topic of teaching AI ethics, and the journal has issues a call for papers. "The special issue seeks to compile a robust multidisciplinary collection of papers—drawing from philosophy, the humanities, social sciences, computer science, and other STEM fields—that explore novel pedagogical methodology and practice that use this moment of AI attention to promote the ethical development of students, broadly understood." If you're teaching AI ethics or using AI to teach ethics, please consider submitting an abstract by February 1, 2024.
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• ​Are You a Witch? - You may have seen the news that OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has released new tools called "GPTs." These are, in a nutshell, a way for regular folks to customize ChatGPT to behave in certain ways or draw on certain data or texts in its answers. You could, I think, give it a bunch of your old writing and have the GPT chat in your voice. Or upload an entire knowledge base for some technology and have the GPT answer tech support questions using that knowledge base. Or, as my UM colleague Marc Watkins did, you could design a GPT that accuses you of witchcraft and won't answer your questions until you answer its riddles. If you're not a ChatGPT user, you can see a sample interchange with Marc's bot here. Expect to see a lot more domain-specific AI chatbots in the next 12 months!
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• ​Beyond ChatGPT: New Tools to Augment Your Research - Speaking of Marc Watkins, he led a virtual session for the University of Mississippi last week that included some updates on new generative AI technologies and a really case study of using AI in teaching. The case study was shared by Kellye Makamson, who has started using Perplexity, an AI chatbot, in her first-year composition courses to teach students to think more critically about the claims they encounter. I really liked Kellye's use of AI because it made clear that what you get from an AI depends on what you ask, so asking good questions is still important for students to learn. I recapped the whole session on the UM CETL blog.

Thanks for reading!

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.

Or consider supporting Intentional Teaching through Patreon. For just $3 US per month, you get access to bonus podcast content, Patreon-only teaching resources (like a guide to using audio assignments in your courses), an archive of past newsletters, and a community of intentional educators. Patreon supporters also get 20% off my book, Intentional Tech: Principles to Guide the Use of Educational Technology in College Teaching, when they order from West Virginia University Press.
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