Intentional Teaching, a show about teaching in higher education

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about “assignment makeovers” in this new age of AI, and a key part of rethinking assignments is exploring what we and our students can do with AI technologies in our fields. To help in those explorations, I reached out to Garret Westlake. He is the associate vice provost for innovation and executive directo...

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. On today’s episode, I talk with Eden Tanner about her experiment with mastery assessment. Eden is an assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Mississippi. Eden had been changing up her grading practices for a few semesters, and this spring she leaned into mastery assessment. The students in her 170-seat general...

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. In March 2023, educators Kelly A. Hogan and Viji Sathy wrote a piece for the Chronicle titled “How Can ‘Inclusion’ Be a Bad Word?” At the time, they both worked at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and they had been asked by North Carolina state lawmakers to provide data about DEI programming at their institution. In their op...

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. Earlier this year, I had the good fortune to speak at a teaching conference hosted by Hofstra University in Long Island, New York. My favorite presenter at that conference was a sociology professor named Rosemary McGunnigle-Gonzales. Not only did she go on a beautiful rant about the deficiencies of our traditional classroom spaces, she also...

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. In the summer of 2020, the Oregon State University Ecampus launched a research seminar that gathered educational researchers from around the world who were curious about the role of synchronous instructor presence in online courses. After all, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, most online education was asynchronous. How important were all tho...

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. If you’ve taught in higher education for any length of time, you’ve probably had one or more students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, better known as ADHD, in your courses. You might not have known it, however, since some students with ADHD haven’t been diagnosed yet and some choose not to disclose it to their instructors. Th...

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. Robert Talbert and David Clark are both mathematics faculty members at Grand Valley State University and authors of the forthcoming book Grading for Growth . They are both incredibly thoughtful and effective teachers who share their experiences, insights, and advice widely. Their new book based on dozens of case studies from instructors acr...

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. Correspondence courses. Night classes. Extension schools. Distance education. Continuing education. Professional education. There’s always been a lot happening in higher education for working adults outside the traditional residential undergraduate experience. And for the last couple of decades, those areas of higher education have increasi...

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. In her 2022 book Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology , Michelle D. Miller writes about the "moral panics" that often happen in response to new technologies. In his 2013 book Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty , James M. Lang argues that the best way to reduce cheating is through better course desig...

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. On today’s podcast, I talk with the authors of a new book that can help college teachers better understand their students as whole people, while also providing lots of advice for instructors who want to better support their students’ learning. Robert Eaton and Bonnie Moon are authors, along with Steven Hunsaker, of Improving Learning and Me...

Share your thoughts about this episode as 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 th...

Share your thoughts about this episode as 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...

Share your thoughts about this episode as 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...

Share your thoughts about this episode as 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...

Share your thoughts about this episode as 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...

Share your thoughts about this episode as 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 Highe...

Share your thoughts about this episode as 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 p...

Share your thoughts about this episode as 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 dem...

Share your thoughts about this episode as 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 p...

Share your thoughts about this episode as 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 w...

Share your thoughts about this episode as 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...

Share your thoughts about this episode as 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 univers...