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| When you have 90 seconds between advising sessions, please take a look at our Read of the Week: Alan Levinovitz’s brief Chronicle essay, “Efficiency Isn’t Everything,”
This may seem like a strange topic for April and advising season, when time is of the essence. But I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the tension between arguments for the inevitability and value of embracing the “efficiency” of AI in the workplace and insufficiently explored questions about the place of “efficiency” in our classrooms and our students’ learning processes. Levinovitz argues for a definition of efficiency that highlights the importance of relationship- and trust-building in our work as teachers. He writes, “Efficient teaching isn’t economical teaching, but rather teaching that accomplishes its intended purpose. In my case, the intended purpose of teaching is the creation and maintenance of a community dedicated to learning, for whom the course content is meaningful. That’s why grading notecards by hand is more efficient, in the broader sense, than outsourcing labor to iClicker.” As we continue to examine the roles and limits of AI in our teaching work and our students’ Denison education, it is more important than ever to start by interrogating how we each define “efficiency” and its connection to our “intended purposes” in our classrooms. |