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.
Hot takes on class participation, the joy of learning, genAI, and much more
Take It or Leave It with Liz Norell, Betsy Barre, and Bryan DewsburyThis week on the podcast I once again borrow a format from one of my favorite podcasts and host a Take It or Leave It panel. I invited three colleagues whose work and thinking I admire very much to come on the show and weigh in on several "hot take" essays on teaching and learning in higher ed. For each essay, each panelist had to Take It (that is, agree with the central thesis of the essay) or Leave It (that is, disagree). Our judgments might have been binary, but our debates on each of the essays were full of deep and useful discussion on teaching and learning. The panelists for this edition of Take It or Leave It were Liz Norell, associate director of instructional support at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Mississippi; Betsy Barre, assistant provost and executive director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching at Wake Forest University; and Bryan Dewsbury, associate professor of biology and associate director of the STEM Transformation Institute at Florida International University. We talk about class participation, the joy of learning, generative AI, and much more. Liz, Betsy, and Bryan shared so many good ideas and such rich insight. I hope you'll take a little time to listen to the panel or read the transcript. You can find the Take It or Leave It episode here, or search for "Intentional Teaching" in your podcast app. 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 can help defray production costs for the podcast and newsletter and you get access to Patreon-only interviews and bonus clips. |
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...