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| This update of David Clark and Robert Talbert’s 2021 essay on what “rigor” means (and doesn’t mean) in our grading practices provides a useful summary of the principles underlying the discussion at last Thursday’s Teaching Matters discussion on “How are We Grading Now?”
Clark and Talbert say: “Here is, ultimately, the problem: Rigor is a wildly overloaded word. |
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.
How Are We Grading Now?
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| Last Thursday, Hoda Yousef rounded out 3 years of rich Teaching Matters programming with her final topic: “How Are We Grading Now?” The discussion provided a bounty of thoughtful ideas about alternative grading approaches that work for our Denison students. Emily Nemeth (EDUC/QS/BS) started us off with a reminder of the Four Pillars: clearly defined standards, helpful feedback, marks that indicate progress (vs “absolute” grades) and reattempts without penalty. |
Talking with Students about AI
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| At “Talking with Our Students about AI,” our three presenters shared their different approaches to incorporating AI into their teaching and students’ learning.
Rhodora Vennarucci (AGRS) explained that her thinking is grounded in the issue of the “digital divide” within her own fields of archaeology and her concern to provide all of our students with the tools they will need to navigate professional lives after Denison. |
Teaching Students When to Struggle
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| This essay from The Conversation, “A writing professor’s new task in the age of AI: Teaching students when to struggle,” reflects many of the conversations happening across our campus about the need for our students to develop their own thinking and knowledge before they can evaluate AI output effectively. It’s especially worth reading for the connection it makes between the focus on grades and outcomes that our students learned in high school and the reasons they might choose to rely on AI: “[M]any college students I meet arrive already anxious, already performing, already optimizing for the grade rather than the learning. |
Making Reading Matter
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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. |
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. |