Teaching in Higher Ed

Remi Kalir shares the Fair Feedback Project for addressing bias in student evaluations on episode 628 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

If you actually have students write about affirming values as a kind of open free write before they complete an evaluation of teaching, it actually has been shown to mitigate bias.

There are many people who are experiencing the effects of these structural patterns of bias who don’t look like me. So what can I do? How can I show up as an individual in this?

I did not want people coming to the Fair Feedback project and then having long-winded, tangential, potentially problematic conversations with Claude as a chatbot.

You can call it my complicity, you can call it my complexity, whatever you might call it, but I am very much entangled in this AI moment, trying to understand how I am navigating all of this.

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Janice McCabe shares her research on campus loneliness and college friendship networks on episode 627 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

The previous surgeon general, among others, have declared a loneliness crisis facing the United States, and, in fact, the highest rates are among young adults.

Many people that I interviewed told me how they felt like everyone else either had more friends than them, had better friends than them, was having more fun than them, along those lines.

Something I hear from students a lot is just this appreciation for taking friendship seriously in students’ lives. And so that’s something that professors, teachers, college administrators can do.

Students often say they don’t really like group projects, but then, that was a place that many of the friendships that formed in classes that I saw formed.

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Jeanie Tietjen unpacks trauma-informed practices in higher ed and why naming itself is a form of teaching on episode 626 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Naming goes so far back in, even just in literary terms, the importance of naming.

There is still a very nascent and as yet relatively unarticulated understanding of how profoundly trauma, adversity, and violence adversely affect teaching and learning.

Many students have experienced traumas that are situated in educational settings, bullying experiences that are identity-based, that profoundly shape how they feel about the educational setting as a place.

Learning is very vulnerable. It involves being wrong, failing, failing in front of other people.

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Malini Johar Schueller unpacks critical race reading and the role of discomfort in the classroom on episode 625 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Racism is a permanent structural feature of American society, and law alone, as now we have it, cannot deal with racism because racism is also part of law.

Critical race reading takes off from that, and it asks, is there a way of reading… that can awaken us to questions of racial privilege and hierarchy, but without us imagining that we have taken over somebody’s place?

Critical empathy, where you feel for others and you feel the injustice of others, but you also feel differently, you know, differently.

Some level of discomfort is fine for learning, because if learning doesn’t produce any kind of discomfort, you haven’t moved outside your zone of what you already know.

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Denise Maduli-Williams shares how to engage learners in online courses on episode 624 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

The very first thing I saw was the online instructor posting this video where she was roller skating in this roller Derby rink and welcoming us online, and that just changed everything for me.

When we design with accessibility in mind, we support everyone, all students.

Students who are quieter, whether it’s synchronous on Zoom or synchronous in person, they have the opportunity to participate when they’re ready and to prepare.

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Rebecca Fordon unpacks vibe coding and the eight AI teaching tools she built in a single semester on episode 623 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Vibe coding, I think of being able to describe the kind of application or website that you want in just words, a narrative, rather than having to code it, knowing coding language.

I think the easiest place to start is in ChatGPT, or Gemini, or Claude Code.

Many of my students have not used it for anything related to law school. Until they get into my class, and then they see there actually are some good, legitimate uses.

If you want to mess with things on your own, you can really just ask AI: How do I do that? Where should I look?

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Jennifer Wallace shares about her book, Mattering: The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose on episode 622 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Mattering says you belong at the table, but it goes even further, and it says you would be missed if you weren’t here. You are adding value, and we would notice if you weren’t here.

We have so much input and so much output being demanded of us today that often we go through life on autopilot.

Mattering is not another thing to add to your to-do list. Mattering is a way of looking at your to-do list.

When you look at the data on what drives performance, it is engagement. And what drives engagement is mattering.

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David Perry shares about his new book, The Public Scholar, on episode 621 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

If we are really practiced at teaching, and as we develop our skills as teachers, those are the skills that can also take us into other spaces outside of the classroom.

Academia is structured around all kinds of failure. Once you recognize that, and then bring yourself into another context where you’re going to experience rejection, you already have the skills to cope with it.

I think all writers, and certainly in academia, worry a lot about our worst faith readers. How do we not get ripped apart? You have to write for your best faith reader. You have to really shift your focus.

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Flower Darby shares about being a joyful online teacher on episode 620 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Higher education doesn’t do a great job of preparing faculty to teach, generally speaking, that’s not new, but especially online teaching.

If you’re not a meme person, don’t do that. Something that isn’t authentic to your personality is not going to be effective.

Sometimes you don’t need all the latest bells and whistles; you don’t need the latest iPhone. We can be effective with simpler tools.

We can’t be joyful if we’re always working.

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Lew Ludwig + Todd Zakrajsek uncover themes from The Science of Learning Meets AI on episode 619 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

We could actually create an educational system. Not so that it deals with the problems we have with AI, but so that those problems are no longer relevant.

If you don’t have students attention, they can’t learn because if you don’t attend to something, you can’t learn it.

Keep in mind that you’re the expert. This is your assignment. You know what you’re doing, you know the content, so then you can judge what AI gives you, what works, and what still may need some work.

What this gets down to is backward design; we start with the learning goals. We should figure out how to assess them, and then decide if AI fits in that or not.

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