Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. Since November 2022, higher education has been trying to wrap its collective mind around the advent of AI text generators like ChatGPT. For those of us who teach courses where we might ask students to respond to a prompt by writing a short essay, ChatGPT and similar tools certainly seem to provide students a way out of doing that writing themselves. However, our colleagues who teach computer science and computer programming often ...
Apr 18, 2023•38 min•Ep. 11
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. Picture a calculus textbook. You’re probably picturing a hardback book an inch and a half thick, full of mathematical notation. The traditional calculus textbook can be intimidating for students, like five and a half pounds of pure confusion. On today’s episode, I’m excited to share a conversation with two mathematics faculty at the College of Charleston: Amy Langville, professor of mathematics, and Kathryn Pedings-Behling, adjunc...
Apr 05, 2023•38 min•Ep. 10
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. On today’s podcast, I’m happy to share a roundtable discussion with three faculty who teach introductory biology courses using a non-traditional model. All three teach what is called studio-style biology, where the lecture and lab portions are not just coordinated, but actually integrated into the same time and space. The course might meet two hours at a shot three times a week, which each class session featuring a mix of mini-lec...
Mar 14, 2023•38 min•Ep. 9
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. Eric Detweiler is an associate professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University and the director of the public writing and rhetoric program at MTSU. When I saw that Eric had a new book out called Responsible Pedagogy: Moving Beyond Authority and Mastery in Higher Education , I knew I wanted to talk with him here on the podcast. In the interview, Eric shares the motivation for the book, the problems he sees with the notion...
Feb 28, 2023•44 min•Ep. 8
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. Thanks to another great podcast, Future U by Jeff Selingo and Michael Horn, I learned about a course at Georgetown University called Mastering the Hidden Curriculum. Part of the Georgetown Scholars Program, the course teaches students things about college that many students, especially first-generation students, don’t know, like what office are and how to interact with faculty. The course also dives into topics like imposter syndr...
Feb 07, 2023•41 min•Ep. 7
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. Regan Gurung is associate vice provost and executive director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Oregon State University, as well as a professor of psychology. Dwaine Plaza is a professor of sociology at Oregon State, and the two of them are editing a forthcoming book titled Onward to Better: How Facing a Pandemic Will Improve Higher Education in the 21st Century . Regan and Dwaine are in the interesting position of having...
Jan 24, 2023•34 min•Ep. 6
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. In this episode, I talk with Mary-Ann Winkelmes, a longtime colleague in the world of educational development. Mary-Ann has worked at teaching centers at Harvard University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, and Brandeis University. She’s also the founder and director of the TILT Higher Ed project. TILT stands for “transparency in learning and teaching,” and the project works with ...
Jan 10, 2023•45 min•Ep. 5
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. “Service courses” are courses like college algebra and calculus that are taught by math departments to students not majoring in math, who take those courses typically to satisfy a major or general ed requirement. These courses are notoriously problematic, often with high drop-fail-withdraw rates or big gaps in student performance across demographic groups. Recently, I went looking for departments who are teaching service courses w...
Dec 13, 2022•36 min•Ep. 4
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. Wouldn't it be interesting to see an analysis of how much time you spent on active learning, right after class ended? DART is a tool created by a multidisciplinary and multi-institutional team of education researchers. DART stands for Decibel Analysis for Research in Teaching. All you have to do is record your class session with your phone and upload the recording to the DART website. DART’s machine learning algorithms will then a...
Nov 30, 2022•35 min•Ep. 3
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. A few years ago you could assume that if a student submitted an essay in your class, some human wrote that essay, hopefully the student in question. That’s no longer true, however, as AI-powered writing generators get better and better at producing intelligible text. What are we to do, whether we’re teaching writing or having students use writing to represent their learning? On today’s episode of Intentional Teaching, I talk with ...
Nov 15, 2022•35 min•Ep. 2
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. On today’s episode of Intentional Teaching, I bring you a fantastic interview with educator and author Susan Hrach. Susan is the director of the Faculty Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning at Columbus State University and the author of the 2021 book Minding Bodies: How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning . I knew of Susan’s work in embodied learning, and I discovered recently that we share an in...
Nov 01, 2022•38 min•Ep. 1
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. Welcome to the Intentional Teaching, a podcast aimed at educators to help them develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas in teaching. I’m your host, Derek Bruff. I directed the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University for over a decade, and I’ve worked with faculty and other instructors at dozens of colleges and universities, helping them to become more intentional and effective teachers. I’ve written two book...
Oct 21, 2022•3 min
