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| Last, but not least, we finish our summer book group takeaways with two interesting reads.
Pedagogy of Kindness by Catherine Denial
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Teaching Tips
Articles and resources to empower your teaching experience.
Why and How to Teach Teamwork
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| Check out this 2021 essay from the Chronicle on setting up your students to navigate the challenge of team communication. Our favorite tip:
Have students practice how not to cooperate in a group. …Internal conflict derails many a group project and students don’t always know how to manage a troublemaker. So give them practice. Have groups meet in class to do a short task related to their project. |
Teaching Hacks That Save Time
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From Gatekeeper to Waymaker: Reframing Rigor Through Empathy
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| As we wade into midterm season, it can be helpful to remind ourselves of the importance of structuring our classes and assignments in ways that clearly communicate our expectations rather than creating obstacles to students’ full engagement with the intellectual work we want them to be doing.
Crystal Donlan writes: “Rigor is about cognitive demand, not obscurity. |
The Science of Learning Meets AI
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| The group who met to discuss The Science of Learning Meets AI by Todd Zakrajsek and our own Lew Ludwig (MATH) reported that they took away a lot of practical suggestions and strategies. One participant wrote that “the book was very helpful in creating various on-ramps so that novices and experts (or skeptics and enthusiasts) all found useful ideas.” |
Teaching Controversial Topics when Information is Incomplete
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| The speed at which information comes at us in 2026 primes us–and our students–to react rather than reflect. Ahlam Lee’s essay is a helpful reminder that “Because digital platforms reward speed and reaction, classrooms should model slower inquiry.” The author lays out simple strategies for teaching our students (and reminding ourselves) to pause and think through context and complexity instead of focusing on emotional hot-takes. |
Cultivating Engagement, Curiosity, & Joy in the Classroom
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Last Thursday at the first Teaching Matters lunch of the year, we explored different strategies for fostering student engagement in ways that add joy to learning and teaching for our students and ourselves. Andy McCall (BIOL) talked about having students observe and then draw a plant specimen and how he emphasizes the value–and pleasure–of trying things (like drawing), even if we’ve been told long ago that we weren’t good at them. |
The Return of the Oral Exam
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| This Chronicle article on “The Return of the Oral Exam” highlights the fact that the current interest in oral exams (something happening at Denison, too) is not simply a reaction against AI-related issues but part of ongoing efforts across the country to implement the most effective pedagogical approaches for any given generation of students. At UCSD, for example, engineering professors found that some of their best students “could solve problems but had trouble explaining their thought process. |
Making Space for Choosing
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| Last week in a post-assignment debrief, my students expressed surprise that such a short paper had been so hard to write. The challenge was that the broad prompt had required them to make a lot of their own choices about how to focus their reflection and what evidence to select to support their assertions. This process was hard and time-consuming. |
The Courage to Teach & On Writing
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