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| One of the themes emerging in my conversations with departments and programs across campus this semester (17 so far!) is our commitment, as teachers and scholars, to helping our students embrace the challenge, satisfaction, and necessity of thinking—deeply, creatively, productively.
Faculty across campus articulate this goal in a variety of ways: Teaching students to value slow thinking in untangling math and programming problems, rather than speed in getting to an answer. Building the attention span and intellectual curiosity to commit to sustained, reflective reading. Creating a semester-long sense of community that opens space for exploring many perspectives, thinking empathetically, and revisiting personal experience with new questions. Taking concepts and questions from class out into daily life and bringing new observations about the world around us back into the classroom as fodder for discussion and learning. Across disciplines and programs, our most satisfying moments of teaching are often when we get to witness students’ excitement when they realize the power of their own thinking after wrestling with new or hard things. Taking the time to think through hard things is a life skill—a job skill, a relationship skill, an adulting skill—not just a classroom skill. And the emergence and pressures of AI make it more, not less, urgent to develop our students’ ability to think through ideas and problems for themselves. We can help them build these skills by being intentional, transparent, and encouraging—and maybe even joyful—about the process of thinking and learning. Michele Poulos writes about one of the many ways to do this in her short essay on using concept maps in her courses. We’ll continue exploring the topic of slowing down and doing hard things in the age of AI in our CfLT programming through the rest of this academic year, so please stay tuned. Karen |