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.
Teaching Civic Engagement Back in 2024, I asked political scientist and faculty developer Bethany Morrison on my podcast to share some strategies for teaching in U.S. presidential election year. She had so many resources to share that I then invited her to curate a collection of resources for the University of Virginia Teaching Hub on the topic of teaching for democratic engagement and civic learning. Once that collection was posted, a former Vanderbilt colleague and current English professor...
Around the Web This is the part of the newsletter where I link to things that I find interesting in the hopes that you do, too. This week, this is the entire newsletter! Education as the Lighting of a Fire: Personal Connection Strikes the Match - This is a preprint of a study by Steven Most and Nathan Clout of the University of New South Wales Sydney. Two groups of participants heard the same recorded lecture. One group was given a "relatable" backstory about the lecturer, the other was told...
How well do you know the law as it applies to teaching? This week on the podcast, I talk with Kent Kauffman, author of Navigating Choppy Waters: Key Legal Issues College Faculty Need to Know. I invited him on the show because of all the stories we've seen in the last year about college and university faculty being accused by students of teaching something the student didn't the instructor should be teaching. These incidents have a lot of instructors worried about teaching controversial...