I've had the good fortune to be a part of a lot of conversations on teaching and learning in the last week. Instead of a longer essay in this week's newsletter, here are some highlights from some of those conversations. Hopefully, you'll find at least one that connects with your teaching context!

Also below you'll find a few photos from my outing to the Circle B Bar Reserve near Orlando, Florida, last week. The birdwatching at this nature preserve was top notch.

Course Contributors

At the Top Hat Engage conference last week, I met Whitney Silvis-Sawyer, who teaches education courses at Louisiana Tech University. She regularly invites her students to provide feedback on her courses, and when she makes a change to a course in response to student feedback, she acknowledges that student by name (and with permission) in a "course contributors" section of her syllabus. Some of her course syllabi now have dozens of students listed who have helped shape her courses. I love this as a way to help students see that you take their feedback seriously and as a way to acknowledge sources of inspiration for one's teaching.

Non-Zero-Sum Games

I've been reading Liz Norell's new book, The Present Professor: Authenticity and Transformational Teaching. In Chapter 3, Liz talks about some of the minefields in academic culture, that is, aspects of the culture that make it a lot harder to be ourselves (present) when teaching. One of those challenges is what Kevin Gannon calls "performative hardassery," which is an evocative turn of phrase. Liz writes that performative hardassery "defines the field of learning as a combative one from which shall emerge winners (few) and losers (many)."

There's an assumption I sometimes hear that college education is a zero-sum game, that there can be only so many students who are successful in a course or a program. I hear this assumption from faculty who approach their teaching as a form of gatekeeping (this happens a lot in intro courses), and I hear this assumption from individuals who think that "DEI" is some way of allocating success by identity instead of "merit." To those people, I would say that having all the students in a course get an A because they know their stuff is actually a good thing and something for which we should strive.

Belonging Stories

Circling back to the Top Hat Engage conference, I attended a breakout session led by Gina Londino-Smolar, who teaches forensic science at Indiana University Indianapolis. She shared a story about how she found belonging in higher education in spite of personal obstacles that might have communicated to her the idea that she didn't belong. She asked us to consider what belonging stories we might share with our students, to help them see that they, too, belong in our courses and programs.

I reflected on the fact that I regularly share some personal stories on the first day of my courses as a way to build rapport with students, but rarely do those stories focus on overcoming obstacles to belonging. Next time, I'll have to share about the time in graduate school that I kicked my real analysis textbook across my apartment out of frustration, and how that textbook and its cracked spine sit on my bookcase as a reminder to me that learning is hard.

In-Class Escape Rooms

Over on Bluesky, I was delighted to see that Lisa Fazio, who teaches psychology at Vanderbilt University, shared images of the escape room activity she designed as a review for her social cognition course. Her students worked in teams of four to complete a series of puzzles and open a number of combination locks, all of which required them to apply social cognition concepts they had been studying. Lisa writes, "Watching them race through the puzzles today brought me joy!" See Lisa's thread for all the details.

At the end of the thread Lisa gave some props to Jennie Miller, who apparently shared a similar class activity at a recent conference, and to me "for planting the idea in my head many years ago." I don't know exactly when I shared my escape room activities with Lisa back when I was at Vanderbilt, but I loved talking about them! See this post by student Faith Rovenolt (that I just rescued from the now-defunct Vanderbilt Center for Teaching blog) for details and photos from my escape room activity.

Digital Reading

Earlier this week I led a virtual lunch and learn for the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Virginia on the topic of teaching digital reading. We watched a couple of videos from the OneHE mini-course "Teaching Digital Reading" by Jenae Cohn, then discussed our own experiences with both digital and analog reading. I really benefitted from both Jenae's resources and the UVA faculty discussion, and I wanted to share a few takeaways from the event.

• We come to reading with different purposes, and those different purposes can benefit from different reading strategies.
• If the purpose of reading is short-term memory, research indicates that reading on paper is more effective than reading digitally.
• The ability to read is not innate like the ability to speak. As a result, our ability to read is affected by our reading experiences.
• Digital reading is often framed as inevitable, but it need not be so. We (instructors and students) can make intentional choices in how we read.
• There are ways to help students learn to read digitally, like Cohn's "highlight and link" technique or social annotation more generally.
• Teaching students to read well (individually and collaboratively) will take time and attention on our part.

Coincidentally, I was reading John Warner's new book More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI, and he covers similar ground in his chapter on reading and AI. That's chapter nine and I think it's the first chapter in which he identifies some application of generative AI that he sees as potentially useful. I have lots of thoughts on John's book, but those will wait for a future newsletter after I've finished reading it!

Thanks for reading!

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