Articles and resources to empower your teaching experience.
At the Open Doors debrief, Dan Homan (Physics) shared a small but powerful practice he uses early in the semester to break the ice and cultivate an engaged classroom. In the first few weeks, he gives students a brief in-class writing prompt—just two minutes responding to the reading—and then asks for volunteers to read their responses aloud with dramatic flair.
Lately, I’ve been saying that keeping up with AI feels a bit like being stuck on a treadmill that only speeds up. Just when I think I’m catching my breath, something new barrels in. In the past few weeks alone, I’ve heard about “vibecoding”—the emerging ability to speak complex code into existence like some kind of techno-conjuring spell—and OpenAI’s latest image tools, which have taken deepfakes from disconcerting to downright uncanny. |
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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.
I’ve been in education long enough to recognize this as a familiar faculty lament. Over the years, I’ve heard numerous concerns:
You see the pattern. It seems that the longer we teach, the more likely we are to encounter this sentiment.
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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.
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.
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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. |
