AI-Aware Math Teaching A few years ago, it was pretty easy for math educators to ignore generative AI. The chatbots of 2022 and 2023 were notoriously bad at math. But that’s no longer true! Today’s frontier AI models are very good at math—to the point of proving mathematical conjectures that have been open for decades. This week on the podcast, I have a roundtable discussion with some of my favorite math educators about the ways they're responding to AI's impact on the teaching of...
8 days ago • 4 min read
It's Webinar Season With The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching coming out this summer, I've started lining up a few webinar appearances to help get the word out about the book. Here are three coming up in the next two months, all of which are free to attend. Cutting through the AI Noise: Claims about Learning, Cognition, and Critical ThinkingApril 22, 2026, 11am Central, hosted by Alchemy Conversations about AI in education often swing between extremes, from claims that it is “rotting brains”...
15 days ago • 3 min read
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...
22 days ago • 3 min read
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...
29 days ago • 2 min read
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...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Learning How to Learn (with AI, Actually) I wrote the first draft of the “Using AI as a Tutor” chapter in the forthcoming Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching, co-authored with Annette Vee and Marc Watkins. I pitched this chapter for the book because I was brought into the author team as the “STEM guy,” that is, a co-author who could bring some STEM education perspectives to the work, and because the number one use case of generative AI in STEM education that I hear about is students turning to...
about 1 month ago • 6 min read
Reimagining Grading with Sharona Krinsky and Robert Bosley This past December, I had the honor of being a guest on the Grading Podcast ("reimagining grading as a tool for student success") hosted by Sharona Krinsky and Robert Bosley. We had such a great conversation that I thought I would return the favor and invite Sharona and Boz on my podcast. Sharona Krinsky is the executive director of the Center for Grading Reform, a non-profit that hosts an annual conference on grading, among other...
2 months ago • 1 min read
Student-Designed AI Chatbots I've heard a lot of different objections from students to bringing generative AI into the classroom, but there was one I hadn't heard until I talked to my friend Windy Frank, who teaches in the College of Bible at Lipscomb University here in Nashville. She asked her students to design custom AI chatbots based on figures in the Old Testament such as Jonah (with the whale) and Daniel (with the lions). Her goal was to motivate students to study relevant primary and...
3 months ago • 3 min read
Hi friends, Many of you know I'm based in Nashville, and we had an epic ice storm last weekend. My power went out Sunday morning and didn't come back on until Thursday afternoon. And I'm one of the lucky ones! There are still 80,000 households in Nashville without power. And other parts of the Southeast were hit at least as hard... I know my friends in Oxford, Mississippi, are struggling. Please send your warm thoughts our way! All that to say, there was no podcast episode this week, and I'm...
3 months ago • 5 min read