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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. |
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.
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.” |
Teaching Toward Slow Hope
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| Looking for an inspiring read? Try this interview with Douglas Haynes about his new book, Teaching for Slow Hope: Place Based Learning in College and Beyond.
Haynes says, “So, when I discuss collaboration in this book, I’m not just talking about assigning students to do more group projects. This, too, is important work that builds students’ communication and listening skills, as well as empathy, organization and more. |
Dictation Tools To Use and Not to Use
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| Voice to text has been around for some time–before the current LLM era–and these tools can help us take meeting or interview notes, record ideas while driving or walking, and generally help us with all sorts of tasks.
However, as with any tool that interacts with our data, we need to ensure that data are protected. |
Teaching Across the Liberal Arts
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As usual for Teaching Matters sessions, the conversation last Thursday (3/5) was rich with idea-sharing. We were talking about what “moves” we make in our classroom to help our students see the connections between all of their courses and articulate how their liberal arts education has impacted them. Here’s a list of some of our ideas:
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