Three weekly tidbits from the Center for Teaching & Learning plus upcoming events.
The Inclusive Pedagogy (IP) Toolkit from Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning & Scholarship (CNDLS) offers faculty a concise, practical collection of strategies for creating learning environments where all students can participate and succeed. It outlines core principles of inclusive teaching—such as transparency, flexibility, and fostering belonging—and turns them into easy-to-apply practices for course design, classroom interactions, and assessment.
Is it more effective to take a 10-minute break halfway through a 90-minute lecture or a 90-second break every 10 minutes? Researchers investigated the effect of the timing of these breaks on learners in an undergraduate psychology course and have some interesting findings:
While there are mixed feelings about generative AI among faculty and students, it’s undeniable that AI is not going away and will continue to become embedded in all aspects of life. Even if students choose not to use it, they still need to understand how it works and ethical implications of its use. Who is going to teach them this?
I’m working on an interactive tool to help faculty visualize their workload and think through which instructional tasks they might cut back on. Faculty are so overextended, and I’ve found they’re extremely grateful when I acknowledge:
Researchers in India conducted a randomized-control trial study with close to 17,000 at 10 colleges to test the impact of mandatory in-class phone collection versus unrestricted phone use. What do you think they found?
You may or may not be ready to use generative AI for teaching and learning, but there are so many other uses. These large language models are really good with language, so if you need something well-written in a short amount of itme, try out one of the AI tools we have access to, like Gemini, Copilot, or Perplexity.
This article in Change: The Magazine of Higher Education does an excellent job of outlining the effect that political pressures have had on faculty across the country and how some faculty in Florida have responded.
Spoiler alert: you can’t tell how well the students actually learned in your course. While feedback on your course evaluations will be helpful to understand the student experience, a recently published meta-analysis found no correlation between student evaluations of teaching (SETs) and later performance, and actually a negative correlation after grade controls. When schools connected contract renewal to SETs, there was evidence of grade inflation by those instructors.
One of the challenges of teaching is reaching every student. This can be especially difficult in distance courses where you don’t have a chance to grab a student after class to check in on them.
Are you curious about what it’s like for someone with a vision impairment to navigate a website? Gareth Fuller attended this training at the Association on Higher Education and Disability (AHEAD) conference last week and returned with the session materials. This website explains how screen readers work and what the experience is like for someone to use it. It also provides guidance on downloading and using software to try it yourself.