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| Three faculty members–Heather Rhodes (HESS), Andrew McWard (Politics & Public Affairs), and Matthew Smalley (English)–shared some of their goals and practices around assigning reading at a recent Teaching Matters session. Their comments naturally coalesced around the pedagogical purposes of assigning reading: as a way to encourage depth, challenge students to think in different ways about the material at hand, and inculcate reflective habits of thinking. |
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.
Revision History
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We have a new tool to see students’ writing processes called Revision History. This Chrome browser extension integrates with Google Docs and Slides to provide visibility into writing and revision patterns. Features include:
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Getting to the Far Side
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| Last Wednesday, with the launch of Artemis II, four astronauts headed to the moon–the first human-crewed mission to the moon’s orbit since 1972. In the deluge of our post-spring break weeks, I didn’t even realize it was happening until I saw FB posts about where people were last Wednesday when they were watching it.
As a result of my ROMO (realization of missing out—is that a thing?) |
Slowing Down for Thinking
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| Thinking takes time. In our culture of speed and instant gratification, our students don’t necessarily come into our classrooms recognizing or valuing the time required to think deeply about things, so it’s important to create space in our classrooms to help them slow down, even–or especially–at this frantic time of year.
In this short essay, “I Made My Students Write by Hand. |
Relationships Matter
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| Why is building social and professional networks on campus important to us, what strategies work, and what would help us to build more connections? It is important to network beyond our departments as we develop our own perspective on professional challenges. Connecting with colleagues outside our disciplines benefits not only our teaching and scholarship but our students’ understanding of their liberal arts education. |
Constructing Your Personal Advising Philosophy
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| It is important to think through our own goals as advisers as a part of setting expectations for ourselves and our students. The “Situational Model of Academic Advising Styles” has four quadrants (Guardian, Accountant, Endorser, Mentor) and recognizes that we shift among versions of these different approaches depending on the needs of particular students at different stages of their Denison careers. |
Teaching “Efficiently”
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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. |
Gauging Student Learning in the Age of AI
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| This edition’s read of the week is a pairing for your reading pleasure: 2 essays that work together well to underline the importance of rethinking our learning goals and what exactly we are assessing in our students work in our AI era–their ability to produce an output, their ability to think through, understand, and explain what they have produced, or a bit of both. |
Feature Options in Canvas
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| Did you know you can control some features in Canvas to customize your experience and tune it to your preferences? You can click on Account > Settings, then scroll to the bottom of the page for “Feature Options”. There you can change options like turning on or off the course tutorial, disable keyboard shortcuts, enable Microsoft immersive reader, use a dyslexia friendly font, or choose a high contrast UI (User Interface) among others. |
Spring Cleaning
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| As I was preparing to head back to class this week, I was thinking about Marie Kondo. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve never read a single one of her books about “tidying up”–as anyone who lives in my house can attest. But I do know that her name is now synonymous with decluttering, with an emphasis on letting go of anything that no longer serves a clear purpose for you or “sparks joy.” |