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Teaching, Tech, and Tidbits Digest
The posts below are from a bi-weekly digest that encapsulates a range of evidence-based best practices and cutting-edge insights on innovative teaching strategies, effective use of technology, student engagement techniques, and effective assessment, to name a few. The content, diligently curated or crafted by the director Dr. Lew Ludwig, is grounded in robust research and drawn from a wide array of innovative articles, books, and online resources. The goal is to support timely, ongoing faculty development with the most current and impactful knowledge in the field.
Teaching: Validity Matters More than Cheating
In a CfLT-sponsored webinar on assessment and gen-AI on March 3, Leon Furze (longtime educator, education administrator, and now Ph.D. candidate working on a dissertation on AI in writing instruction) shared an academic article, “Validity Matters More than Cheating,” which argues that academic integrity needs to focus on “assessment validity” rather than “cheating.” Cheating is a question of moral integrity, whereas validity is a process by which educators ensure that students have met learning outcomes.
Tidbit: Revitalizing Your Course at the Halfway Mark
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| We’re at that critical midpoint, and it’s all too easy to coast (or crash) until finals. But midterm is our golden chance to step back and see if we’re still on the path we laid out at the start. A few small tweaks now can save us—and our students—a heap of stress when crunch time rolls around. |
Teaching: Kids These Days Can’t Read
I’ve been in education long enough to recognize this as a familiar faculty lament. Over the years, I’ve heard numerous concerns:
- Kids these days can’t compute a square root.
- Kids these days can’t graph (or factor) a third-degree polynomial.
- Kids these days can’t use an abacus.
You see the pattern. It seems that the longer we teach, the more likely we are to encounter this sentiment.
Teaching: Responsive Teaching in Action
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Teaching: Magic School AI
Despite Sydney Green’s proficiency with AI prompting, she often finds extracting specific tasks from advanced models like ChatGPT or Gemini to be time-consuming and sometimes unproductive. To address this, she turned to Magic School AI, a platform offering over 80 AI-powered tools designed to assist educators with lesson planning, assignment creation, and material generation. It’s user-friendly, click-based interface allows users to interact without the need for specialized prompts.
Teaching: Teach Students How to Make Informed AI Decisions
My approach to AI in my writing courses is primarily to teach students how to make informed decisions about when it is appropriate and inappropriate to use AI. Part of this involves helping them understand what they do and don’t learn when they use AI. To that end, I include an AI policy statement on every assignment as well as a table that identifies what students learn if they use AI for some tasks vs.
Tidbit: Adopt or Resist? Beyond the AI Culture Wars
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| I was talking with Matt Kretchmar after our recent session with Leon Furze on “Understanding GenAI in Education: AI and Assessment.” He was very excited about Leon’s approach to move beyond merely moralizing about students cheating and focusing on how to productively live with this new reality. In particular, Leon emphasized a shift in perspective:
In Validity matters more than cheating the authors argue convincingly that the concept of cheating is an unproductive frame for academic integrity, and we should instead re-centre the concept of “validity” in assessment. |
Tech: Important deadline approaching- about 30 minutes from now
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| Spring break is around the corner, and we all have many tasks to wrap up before it hits. One mission critical assignment that we all need to be mindful of is to…… look outside for a few minutes. I’ll wait.
– — — Excessive screen time can affect mental and social health, eye strain, neck, shoulder, and back pain. |
Teaching: Why Students Won’t Read- and What to Do about it
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| While reading is a mainstay in most college classes, it has gotten increasingly challenging to engage students with their assigned reading. In the insightful piece “Why Students Won’t Read—and What to Do about It,” our friend Chirs Hakala offers practical advice on how to foster deeper engagement with reading materials.
Although this piece first appeared in the summer of 2022, pre-ChatGPT, it still has legs. |