Teaching in Higher Ed

Norma Montague shares of her experiences going from awareness to action, interrupting bias in the classroom on episode 618 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

One thing that my work on inclusive teaching focuses on, is really being able to understand your learner’s motivations.

One of the ideas that I learned from a colleague who had recommended a book was the idea of rebranding office hours as student hours.

I think it’s important to help students understand what those student hours are for and how they can get the most out of them.

When students feel safe in the classroom, then they’re going to contribute, invest. That’s when I find that I can really increase their rigor and challenge them more.

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For resources, recommendations and more information about this episode’s host and guest(s), visit the episode 617 page on the Teaching in Higher Ed website.

Nancy Chick, Peter Felten, and Katarina Mårtensson share about The SoTL Guide: (Re)Orienting the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning on episode 616 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

We see SOTL as simply inquiry into teaching and learning for the purposes of improving teaching and learning in context and then contributing to what we know about teaching and learning in support of the broader aims of higher education.

What I usually say when I speak to colleagues and academics who are sort of starting a SOTL journey is to start small, small steps, and whatever is a low threshold.

I can’t go through this book and say who wrote this sentence or this section or whose idea this part was, because it really is a product of the three of us.

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Matthew Mahavongtrakul and Bonni Stachowiak have a conversation about being kind to our future selves on episode 615 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Not everything that comes your way is an emergency. Not everything that comes your way has to demand your immediate attention.

Once you are comfortable with your system and you’re iterating, it actually starts to become second nature, not only to professional life, but to personal life as well.

An exercise that I did with my supervisor once was to actually go through each of these tasks and to see what I thought was high priority, was it actually high priority for the job that I was in?

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Bonni Stachowiak shares how to keep your Personal Knowledge Mastery (PKM) real simple with RSS on episode 614 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Rather than get that overwhelmed feeling of how hard it’s going to be to keep up, I don’t have to, and neither do you. Enter RSS, Real Simple Syndication.

It’s pretty spectacular how, if somebody knows about RSS, and they’ve subscribed to a blog or a website, how you can find people that you have a lot in common with, and get going with your curiosity.

It’s amazing what happens when, before we start trying to lecture or share information,  we ask people to predict something. Even if they end up predicting incorrectly, there still is that connection where we’ve piqued their curiosity.

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Marc Watkins shares about cultivating skepticism and curiosity in an age of AI on Episode 613 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

I do think online education is going to be the focal point for this next year, and how it can survive with an agentic AI. My feeling is, we need to be offering students more embodied experiences and disembodied spaces.

Every technology has its affordances and the things that are negative about it too; your cell phone, the computer, the fact we’re talking about this right now on the systems that we are using, cloud computing, that all has a cost.

For an incoming freshman student in college to take 4 or 5 classes and have 4 or 5 very different AI policies, 4 or 5 very different understandings of what AI is, it is incredibly confusing.

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Lynn Meade uncovers how to make learning visible with portfolios on episode 612 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast

An ePortfolio is basically a curated collection of student work. It includes reflection, and it’s usually across the college experience.

Anytime I teach portfolios, it’s really big that we talk about audience and purpose. Who is your audience and what is your purpose?

There’s something particularly lovely about seeing student or faculty members’ written comments about my work. Both the critiques and those comments that build me up, and how very powerful they are, and how much they mean to me.

It’s not about the tech. The most important thing is, am I writing? Am I able to think about myself? Am I able to reflect about myself?

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Danny Mann shares about fostering peace, joy, and community in teaching and leading on episode 611 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Great teaching, and I think great life, is this adaptive, responsive thing, pulling out the bugs or getting things back in balance.

Peace and joy are really interrelated, and I gravitated a lot towards these, as I spent time studying and practicing mindfulness practices.

If you discover your why, you could basically feel much more energized and joyful about what you do, if you align your life with that.

Giving students space to speak and share ups and downs. So the ironic leading by listening.

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Mike Cross shares about his experiments (big and small) in teaching and learning on episode 610 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

The reason I did it is because I just wanted to better understand what my students were going through.

I love that, that idea of tiny experiments. I think that that is absolutely critical because we’re all so busy.

Anytime you can put yourself in someone else’s shoes, it makes you a better person, right? Whether that’s a better teacher, a better spouse, a better friend, a better citizen, anything.

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Theresa Duong on episode 609 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

“All we’re really trying to do is create these conditions that can help our students flourish and thrive within our classrooms while maintaining the rigor of our work.”

“I felt like I could thrive in my PhD program because I had these people who kept pushing me to go and kept pushing me to take care of myself.”

“Pedagogy, the formal definition in my mind, is this art and science of teaching and learning.”

“To me, wellness is really about thriving and flourishing in the work that you’re doing.”

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