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.
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Seriously, the New York Times has created an EXCELLENT resource that will bring you up to speed on ChatGPT, large language models, and all those other A.I. terms you’ve heard about. The five-part series, On Tech: Become an expert on ChatGPT and other cutting-edge chatbots in just five days, is written at an understandable level and only takes about 10 minutes to read.
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When I started teaching last century, I was hyper-sensitive about avoiding mistakes. Or at least that was my intent. However, welcoming mistakes and ambiguity in the classroom can spark your students’ curiosity. In their Chronicle article, How to Embrace Uncertainty in Your Teaching, Murphy and Levison give five simple ways to spark curiosity, including pursuing the unanticipated in class discussions and modeling not knowing (something I’ve grown more honest about).
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Over the past several decades, considerable scholarship has focused on conditions that promote students’ learning, retention, and transfer of academic knowledge. The term ‘science of learning’ is often used to describe this field of specialization. My center colleague, Dr. Chris Hakal, recently shared the free e-book In their own words: What scholars and teachers want you to know about why and how to apply the science of learning in your academic setting, which explores the history, principles, application, and practice of the ‘science of learning.
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In the last TTT, I shared that I lecture. In this round of resources, we see a slight variation that I strive for called dynamic lecturing. The goal of dynamic lecturing is to get the learners more involved.
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I always prided myself on returning feedback to students right away – usually by our next meeting. This required some forethought from me – collect on Friday to return on a Monday – but I thought it was pedagogically significant to get things back into their hands ASAP. Some recent studies show this might not be the case: Delayed and Immediate Feedback in the Classroom: The Results Aren’t What Students Think! |
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At this time last year, professors reported widespread anxiety, depression, and a lack of motivation in their classrooms. Hopefully, this year is faring better, but we can use our recent break to reset the tone in our classes if things have drifted. This Chronicle article, How to Solve the Student-Disengagement Crisis, provides tips from six experts on how to keep students engaged. |
Let me be honest – I lecture. While I intersperse active learning activities throughout, a large portion of my course content is presented through lectures. But how do I know if my students understand? Are they picking up what I am putting down?
If you want to try incorporating testlets into your own courses, you can do that right in Canavs by using the quizzes feature. Check out this Canvas Basics Guide on Quizzes to learn more about them. There’s also this video on how to get started with quizzes in Canvas.
As Process Advisor for Academic Integrity, I often see the aftermath of an integrity violation. But what if we, as faculty members, could craft our courses and assignments to reduce students’ temptation to cheat? In his short article “10 Ways to Prevent Cheating: Ten simple strategies to reduce academic dishonesty that don’t rely on students’ ethics,” Steven Mintz argues, “In the end, cheating is as much an engineering problem as a moral problem.
In her piece, So Over COVID!, Prof. Lisa Lawmaster Hess shares her frustration with student attendance and participation. But she explains how an in-clas discussion with her first-year students revealed much she hadn’t consider. She writes, “During their sophomore year (of high school), everything had shut down. During their junior year, classes were hybrid. And senior year?
