Teaching: What Students are Saying

I heard this last week from a senior who has just returned from an outstanding semester abroad experience but couldn’t stop smiling about being back in our liberal arts setting and digging into her Denison classes.

We were meeting because she’s an education major who wanted to hear about my career path to becoming a teacher and now a director of a center for teaching. But, as often happens in our conversations with students, I learned at least as much from her that day as she learned from me.

As we hit mid-September and everyone’s teaching workloads begin to fully kick in, I wanted to share two takeaways from our conversation:

1. Our students want to be “using their brain muscles.”  Sometimes they are tired.  Sometimes we are tired. Some days this feels harder than other days. But they are here for it, even if some of them still need encouragement. A great place to start with this is “The Case for ‘Slow Teaching'” by Pamela Scully (a former member of the Denison faculty, now at Emory).

2. “My professors aren’t afraid of AI anymore.” The campus vibe around AI feels much different to her than even a year ago. She didn’t mean that she’s now expected to use AI in every class but that making intentional choices about AI use has become a topic of conversation in all of her classes. This reflected my own sense of what I’ve been hearing from colleagues and makes me hopeful that many of you will join us at the CfLT for some thoughtful conversations about AI and faculty work on September 17, 18, and 19 (see the announcement below). In the meantime, this essay by Demian Hommel offers useful suggestions for talking and thinking through the complexities of AI with our students.

As the semester continues, I want to remind us all of the serendipitous moments of joy and energy that can come from listening to our students’ perspectives on our teaching and their own learning.  

If you have a particular student moment that energizes you this week, please feel free to stop me on campus and share your story with me!

Karen