CfLT Newsletter

The posts below are from the CfLT newsletter which includes curated, research-based digital resources to support ongoing faculty development and pedagogical engagement. As of August 2025, CfLT Director Karen Spierling oversees the content. Posts from July 2020-May 2025 were compiled by previous Director Lew Ludwig.

Helping Our Students Connect with Each Other

Posted on by dalkej

It’s easy to assume that on a small campus like Denison, our students are already well-socialized and highly connected with one another before they ever get to our classrooms. But in the wake of Covid-19 and other dynamics of the 2020s, even Denison students often need some coaching to connect with each other.  “Why One Professor Fosters Friendship in her Courses” offers some specific reasons and strategies for encouraging student connections, and if you take a minute to ask around, your Denison colleagues probably have even more!

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AI Feedback on Writing: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Posted on by dalkej

Students frequently ask AI for feedback on their writing, so we need to teach them how to interpret that feedback. This week I am sharing some materials I developed to do that. In my W101, when students peer review rough drafts, I am now integrating lessons on AI feedback. I teach an 80-minute class, and during the first half, students work in pairs on a traditional peer review exercise.

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From ETS: A smorgasbord of Canvas tools

Posted on by dalkej

A smorgasbord of Canvas tools

Although not as enticing as the image above, Canvas has numerous apps, plug-ins, or LTIs (Learning Tools Interoperability) that can be integrated into courses. Some tools are already configured; you only need to enable visibility on your courses’ left navigation menu: Settings > Navigation > Enable > Save. Examples of tools added this way include:

The window for requesting new LTIs/apps/plug-ins for spring semester closes in a week and a half on October 15th.

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Helping Our Students Make Connections

Posted on by dalkej

In the lively Teaching Matters conversation last week about “Why We Teach,” a colleague raised this question: How do we help our anxiety-laden students make connections between our classroom learning goals and the other things they are trying to accomplish in college?

One of those student goals is building a career path, but as academic faculty, we don’t always feel prepared to talk to students about how the thinking they do in our courses might connect to possible professions beyond academia. We

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Teaching: 5 ways students can think about learning so that they can learn more- and how their teachers can help

Posted on by dalkej
By week 5 of the semester, the rubber has hit the road, and our students can be feeling (and acting) overwhelmed. Providing consistent messaging about the challenges and value of the learning process is one of the many things that we can offer that can help them to build their own life coping strategies in the long run.

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Teaching: Supporting Our Students as Readers

Posted on by dalkej
As we navigate the fourth week of classes, you may be experiencing that moment when your summer vision of the semester, so carefully laid out in your syllabus, starts to bump up against your students’ busy schedules and reading habits. Although a quiet day in class may sometimes mean that students didn’t do the reading, John Orlando observes that other times it means that “many students simply didn’t get the needed information out of the assigned texts.”

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Tech: Commitment Planning Tool for Time Management

Posted on by dalkej
Time management is an important skill for academic success. If your students are struggling to plan ahead or are interested in leveling up their time management skills, consider sharing the Commitment Planning Tool with them.

This Google Sheets-based visualization tool has three key advantages:

  1. Provides a clear visual (Gantt Chart) of student commitments (curricular/extra/co-curricular) to identify “hot spots” and to plan ahead in order to meet multiple commitments
  2. Provides entry skills and insight into project management, a common skill requested by employers
  3. Requires students to determine assignment sub-tasks and to estimate time they must allot to assignment completion

If your students use this tool, please encourage them to complete the pre-use survey before they start using it and the post-use survey at the end of the semester.

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Teaching: A Fall Equinox Strategy- Accentuate the Positive

Posted on by dalkej
I know that I’m taking a risk here with this week’s title, throwing it out blithely to an audience professionally trained to be skeptical of the positive and always to look carefully and deeply for the potential negatives of any situation. But please (please!) bear with me.

As we officially head into autumn, with its dwindling daylight hours, intensifying grading loads, fluctuating student (and faculty) energy, and seemingly perpetual chaos in our information streams, it can be easy to focus on frustrations and challenges in the classroom. One

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Voice and Independent Thinking

Posted on by dalkej
This fall I have redesigned my W101 to experiment with new methods of assessment given that many students will use AI to write their essays. Because the quality of a written artifact is no longer necessarily a sign of student learning or a reflection of their ideas, I have shifted some of my assessment criteria to focus on evidence of student learning.

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