Welcome to the Intentional Teaching newsletter! I'm Derek Bruff, educator and author. I've spent the last two decades helping college and university instructors develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas in teaching and learning. I've been blogging about this work for ages, but I thought it was time to start a newsletter and connect with colleagues in education in a new way.

The name of the newsletter, Intentional Teaching, is a spin on my 2019 book, Intentional Tech: Principles to Guide the Use of Educational Technology in College Teaching. I'm using it to indicate that we should be intentional in how we teach, but also how we develop as teachers over time. I hope this newsletter will be a valuable part of your professional development as an educator.

Engaging Students with Purpose

This fall, as I've been asked to speak to faculty at various institutions about teaching and learning, there's been a recurring theme in the needs identified by my hosts: engaging students in their coursework, whether that's in-person or online, synchronous or not. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the rhythms of teaching and learning, to put it mildly. Faculty and other instructors with years of teaching experience pre-COVID have bounced back in various ways, either leaning on old habits or adapting their teaching to leverage what they learned during pandemic teaching. But students? Some of our students only know higher education in a pandemic context, and the rest aren't always sure how to re-enter today's physical and virtual classrooms.

How do we counter this wave of student disengagement that appears to be breaking over higher education? There's no silver bullet here, of course. Some of the disengagement is caused by systemic problems, from financial insecurity to health concerns to political turmoil, and those problems need systemic solutions. But as the designers of our students' learning experiences, at least in the contexts in which we teach our students, we have some tools at our disposal to engage our students in our courses, in our disciplines, and in the act of learning itself. I'll be exploring these tools this fall here in the newsletter, and I want to start with a key concept: purpose.

Engaging in learning, especially deep learning is hard work, and that kind of hard work takes motivation. Extrinsic motivation (grades, class ranks, and such) can do the trick for some, but intrinsic motivation tends to be more powerful. What leads to intrinsic motivation? Self-determination theory tells us there are three main catalysts: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. We humans are more motivated when we can make meaningful choices in our work, when we are doing tasks that aren't too hard nor too easy, and when we have a sense of community with others. Some researchers (Martela and Riekki, 2018) add beneficence to this list, that is, prosocial behavior that benefits others. I'm not entirely sure what blend of these catalysts leads to purpose, but they're all important and they are catalysts we can cultivate in our courses.

Here's an example I like to share in my workshops. Elizabeth Meadows, principal senior lecturer in English at Vanderbilt University, sometimes teaches a course on dystopian fiction. She often invites her students to produce a creative project in lieu of a traditional argumentative paper. One of her students, Allyson Nesmith, decided to create a parody of a clothing company website, replacing the rather romantic copy traditionally used by the website with descriptions of the labor conditions under which clothing sold in the United States is sometimes made. Nesmith drew a connection between the ways labor is often hidden in the clothing business and the ways labor in the Hunger Games novels is hidden from the wealthy capitol elites.

Here's Nesmith, talking about her project at the 2019 Celebration of Learning hosted at Vanderbilt:

What I love about Nesmith's project is how she connected her interests in clothing to the questions about labor and class that her instructor was posing through the course readings. In his classic book What the Best College Teachers Do, Ken Bain argues that our courses need motivating questions, whether they are questions we instructors bring to the course or questions the students bring to the course. Meadows designed an assignment that allowed students to see the value of the questions she was posing about dystopias and to connect them to their personal and professional interests. That is, she designed an assignment that helped students find purpose in the work.

This kind of open-ended, creative assignment isn't a good fit for all courses, of courses, but helping our students find purpose in their learning experiences is something that we can all work toward. I would love to hear your ideas for going about this, the more practical the better. Just reply to this email, reach out through my website contact form, or mention @derekbruff on Twitter. I'll be happy to share your strategies in a future newsletter.

Around the Web

I probably spend too much time on Twitter, but my colleagues there share such interesting things! Here's my link round-up for this first newsletter.

• ​Coffitivity. Do you love the ambient sounds of a coffee shop but can't get to one right now? I believe it was Nancy Chick who shared Coffitivity with me in 2020 when we were all working from home. It's the sounds of a coffee shop, right in your browser!
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• ​Picture a Professor. This is a brand new book in the Teaching and Learning in Higher Education series from West Virginia University Press. It's edited by Jessamyn (Geeky Pedagogy) Neuhaus and features practical advice for teaching from a variety of instructors who don't fit the traditional stereotype of a college professor.
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• ​Dead Ideas in Teaching S5E1 with John Warner. This podcast from the Center for Teaching and Learning at Columbia University explores myths about teaching and learning that don't really have merit. The latest episode with John Warner is fantastic, tackling the notion that in-person teaching is the gold standard.
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• ​Lessons Learned from Six Years of Podcasting. This one is by me, a blog post from last week in which I reflected on what I learned from hosting and co-producing the Leading Lines educational technology podcast for six years. Podcast was such great professional development for me. Don't be surprised if I start a new one!

Thanks for reading!

If you found this newsletter useful, please forward it to a colleague! I'll be back next week with more words on teaching and learning.

Intentional Tech provides teaching principles and practical advice for educators interested in making use of educational technology to meet their teaching and learning goals. "Derek Bruff is an engaging—and often charming—guide throughout this concise book. The stories he tells keep things moving at a crisp pace and offer pedagogical inspiration." - Peter Felten, Elon University

Note: Some of the links in this newsletter are affiliate links, which means I get a small finder's fee if you use those links to purchase products. These links help offset the costs of the newsletter.