Category: teaching

418. The Lift

Posted in belonging, higher education, inclusion, learning, learning spaces, professional development, reflective practice, teaching, Uncategorized
November 5, 2025

It’s easy to become discouraged and disconnected in today’s higher ed climate. In this episode, Kelvin Thompson joins us to discuss his new project designed to provide us with a lift in challenging times.

Kelvin is the Vice Provost for Online Strategy and Teaching Innovation at the University of Louisville. Kelvin developed the BlendKit Course open courseware as part of the Blended Learning Toolkit which he developed while at the University of Central Florida. He regularly serves as an invited speaker on issues related to online and blended learning. Kelvin is a co-editor of the Sage Handbook of Online Higher Education and has long served as a co-host of TOPcast: The Teaching Online Podcast.

Transcript

John: It’s easy to become discouraged and disconnected in today’s higher ed climate. In this episode, we discuss a new project designed to provide us with a lift in challenging times.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guest today is Kelvin Thompson. Kelvin is the Vice Provost for Online Strategy and Teaching Innovation at the University of Louisville. Kelvin developed the BlendKit Course open courseware as part of the Blended Learning Toolkit which he developed while at the University of Central Florida. He regularly serves as an invited speaker on issues related to online and blended learning. Kelvin is a co-editor of the Sage Handbook of Online Higher Education and has long served as a co-host of TOPcast: The Teaching Online Podcast. Welcome back, Kelvin.

Kelvin: Thanks very much. Good to be here. Thanks for having me, Rebecca and John.

John: Good to talk to you again. And today’s teas are… Kelvin, do you have tea or do you have some coffee with you? [LAUGHTER]

Kelvin: You know, I try to… when in Rome… I made tea. This is a jasmine green tea of indistinct provenance. Very nice.

Rebecca: I have English breakfast today. John… stressful morning.

John: And I have a pineapple ginger tea…

Kelvin: Ooh, that sounds good.

John: …from the Republic of tea, so a somewhat more defined provenance.

Kelvin: Yes, upscale, none of this swill like Kelvin drinks.

Rebecca: I’m lucky I have any tea today. We’ve invited you here today to discuss your transition from regular podcast to what you refer to as a not quite a newsletter on LinkedIn called The Lift insights and inspiration for academic innovation, digital learning and leading, which is accompanied by an audio version on SoundCloud. Can you talk a little bit about the origin of this not quite a newsletter?

Kelvin: Sure. Thanks for that. As our existing podcast was reaching some kind of a point where we might be winding it down, I’ve kind of enjoyed, I think you can probably appreciate this, enjoyed the sort of the process of having to think regularly about organizing your thoughts in some way toward a wider audience, outside of, like just the voices in your head. And I was thinking, Well, what might I do to have some kind of contribution to the community? And I’ve been kind of watching some of the podcast numbers, and podcasting seems to be continuing to evolve. And I thought, well, I seem to get a steady flow of newsletters personally and professionally. And I had run across the concept of LinkedIn as a newsletter platform… had sat in on a webinar about LinkedIn newsletters a while back, and I thought, well, let me explore that. I say not quite a newsletter. I don’t know what a newsletter actually is. I mean, the ones that I subscribe to, they vary, but most of them are sort of like straight prose, and I didn’t really quite want to do that. And most are, like, responding in some way to some kind of current event. I didn’t necessarily quite want to do that. So that’s some of the core ingredients.

Rebecca: Yeah, I don’t know how you knew about the voices in my head.

Kelvin: I was just talking about the ones in mine.

John: So we’ve long been fans of TOPCast, and I was really sorry to hear that it’s winding down, but it sounds like you are leaving open the possibility of continuing to some extent, but are going to be going on a hiatus with a countdown to your final official release of that. Could you talk to us a little bit more about that?

Kelvin: We had our 10-year anniversary, and we’re far less prolific with our release schedule and less ambitious than you all are. We started out as once a month, and then in 2020 we thought it was a good idea in January to start doing twice a month, little did we know, and so we’ve continued that on for the last five years. So we had our 10-year anniversary back in April/May of 2025 and it was a good time to take stock. And we noticed that the listens were significantly decreasing. We looked at wide podcast data. We looked at our specific podcast listens. We looked at kind of the state of the field in terms of online digital education, and kind of figured it must be somewhat us. And did we really want to continue to drip and drab this all the way out to the end, or go out strong and being sort of completists and round number enthusiasts, we thought, well, even though we passed the 10-year mark, which was a kind of a round number, episode, 200 was still coming up. So we would just set that as an arbitrary goal, and so we’ll be a little past the 10 and a half year mark when we hit episode 200 and thought that would be a strong thing to really sprint toward, rather than crawl to the finish line. So we do sometimes say wind down, but we’re really trying to maintain a level of enthusiasm and energy, and tried to find little ways to goose a little additional novelty and energy as we get toward that episode number 200 and then, as you say, John, my co-host Tom Cavanagh, in particular, has been a vocal advocate of, well, I mean, don’t unsubscribe, because maybe we’ll want to say something about something, and we’ll show up and just surprise you in the feed. And, I mean, we’ll see. Maybe we can’t stay away. You know, some people retire and they show up for work the next day. I don’t know if that’s going to be us, but probably not on nearly the schedule that we have been on.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about moving to LinkedIn for your not quite a newsletter? A lot of people use Medium and some other formats and deliver it to your inbox. And this is a slightly different format.

Kelvin: It is, and I gave it some thought. I mean, Substack, Medium, and I did mention that LinkedIn newsletter webinar that I really sat through a couple of years ago and made a lot of notes. I had been thinking about this for a while. Sometimes I let things simmer on the back burner for a bit, and the timing wasn’t quite right, but I was interested by LinkedIn as a newsletter platform. And I think what was most appealing was the fact that instead of like starting from scratch on a new platform, that the LinkedIn newsletter thing is basically just tapping into your existing connections and followers on LinkedIn, and especially your first issue through their newsletter tool gives like a one time invitation to all of your followers and connections to subscribe. So I thought that was sort of a running jumpstart, if you will. And then it was an opportunity to sort of unify, because of already engaging on LinkedIn, to some extent, then the newsletter is sort of complementary to that. I thought all of that had a synergy to it, maybe in a way that a Substack or a Medium might not. So I thought it was worth at least trying on LinkedIn.

John: And some advantages of LinkedIn, besides that already large base of followers, is that the listeners do not have to pay for it, as they would, perhaps with Medium. And also, there have been a number of people have been moving away from Substack recently. To be honest, I haven’t found out why, but I’ve seen a lot of people mentioning that they’re transitioning to a new format. And also, going back just to podcasting, we used to get many of our guests from things we saw posted on Twitter or on other social media sites, and that pretty much has dried up. And we get many more comments about our podcast on LinkedIn now than we ever did on any of the other platforms. So it’s become perhaps a better way of sharing information with an academic audience than the other social media sites that used to do a moderately good job of that in the past.

Kelvin: Yeah, I agree with you, and while I have tried to keep a toe in the water of Bluesky and Mastodon, I haven’t ventured out farther than that. I’m not really active on Facebook, so spin offs from that weren’t something I was really interested in, and I haven’t really mastered the kind of visual communication literacy that Instagram might necessitate. But yes, LinkedIn seems to be where I see most of the professional kinds of interaction, certainly more long form than Twitter back in the day, and I think people have less of an appetite for lots of posts,I think. So space out your posts [LAUGHTER] a little bit more and they’re a little bit longer. But that being said, yeah, it seems to be where the professional dialog is coming and the dialog is more substantive post and then comments, kind of like micro blogging, truly. I mean, we used to kind of use that phraseology around Twitter, but I think more so of like key post, and then responses, more than just the little micro post, micro post, micro post. Anyway, I’ve been fascinated, probably like you, to see how the spaces evolve, and yes, I really appreciate you bringing up. I wasn’t a real big fan of the idea of people having to… I mean, I don’t know… people only like me so much, and I’m just happy if they engage at all, and to do it for a fee hmm, that seemed egregious and unlikely to have any kind of positive outcome.

Rebecca: One of the things that I really enjoyed about your opening not newsletter, is the way that you framed The Lift. Can you talk a little bit about the framing of this particular communication strategy that you’re using?

Kelvin: [LAUGHTER] Maybe to a fault, I tried to unpack the metaphor in a multi-faceted way in that opening issue to really say something aspirational about what I was intending to undertake. So, lift, from like an emotional standpoint, to bring a little bit of mood elevation, to raise our gaze more aspirationally to the horizon. A lift in terms of like, I think I told this story in the first issue, I had a colleague who offered me a lift in his car from time to time when I was in my first few years at my former institution. And so sometimes we need to depend on other people a little bit, because maybe we’re not so up for it today. You know, today’s a rough day, and you need to lean on your colleague a little bit, and then maybe tomorrow, I’ll need to lean on you a little bit. So in all of those ways, the lift, as a construct, as a metaphor, started appealing to me. True story, a little back story. Like I said, I had this idea brewing for a while, ever since that LinkedIn newsletter webinar, and so I kept periodically coming back to it and thinking, well, what would I call it? And I told a little bit of this story in that first issue as well. I had always been very inspired by these words from Dr. Dale Whittaker that much of what we aspire to in higher education is about two things that are intertwined, lifting lives and lifting livelihoods. And since coming here to the University of Louisville, I’ve sometimes talked about the lever that is online, digital, schedule flexible kind of options. So for a while there, I thought about the lever as a title. I thought about the lever and the lift, kind of like the Globe and Mail. And then I thought, Well, gee whiz, you are full of yourself, aren’t you? That’s ponderous. That’s not going to work. And shoved it back into the recesses of my mind or down the screen in terms of the brainstorming Google Docs that I maintain. And then as we decided to really set an end date for TOPCast, I really thought, Well, okay, now is the time to do something. And then with just the… there’s a lot of heaviness in the first part of 2025 in higher education. And I thought, well, The Lift, maybe lean into all of that. Maybe it’s a coalescence of events and circumstances. So I don’t know, it worked for me. I hope it works for you.

John: I think it’s a wonderful metaphor for getting that message across at a time when I think we can all use a bit of a lift. And speaking of a lift, one of the things that continues into this, not quite a newsletter, is some reference to coffee in every issue to date, I believe. How did that become part of TOPCast, and is this going to continue through every issue of The Lift?

Kelvin: The short answer to the last question is, yes, I expect there to be some sort of a bean boost. I call it upping your coffee game a little bit in every issue, unless I kind of have this open call out the thought really is to bring about some sort of embodied mood elevation via food or beverage. And I kind of have a somewhat well-earned reputation as a coffee guy. Some people have said that I’m knowledgeable. I don’t know that that’s true. And some people throw around words like connoisseur. I know that’s not true, but I do dabble, and I have learned a few things. And I thought, well, I mean, coffee is definitely a mood elevator. And I’m amazed at the number of folks who just haven’t made fundamental steps to raise their coffee game. There are some key things that I’ve learned that, do a few little changes, and you’re going to be drinking better coffee and having a better benefit. But I have this open invitation, if maybe you’re a gourmet chef and like, here’s the one thing I’ve learned that people do poorly in cooking food on a stove, tell us. Or here’s the key thing to know about tea drinking, like don’t have an indistinct, indeterminate provenance, go to a good supplier. That’s probably a good tip. So if you, John, wanted to write a little blurb, see, I would slide it in there with attribution. That would be the first tea mood elevation in The Lift. Other than that, yeah, by default, I’ll do something about coffee. And the reason that it showed up on TOPCast… I had this local reputation as a coffee person, and when we were recording the pilot episode, or right before that, not unlike how I describe the backstory to The Lift, Tom and I had been interviewing podcasters in late 2014, early 2015 doing concept development, thinking about what we could do. And it was taking on a life of its own. It was going to be very involved. And he had enough one day, I think we might have been sitting in a cafe, and he said, you know, sort of almost metaphorically, like rip the page out of the notebook and crumple up the paper. He said, “How about we don’t do any of this. Why don’t we just get into a room, you bring, like, a thermos of coffee, and we just have a conversation.” I mean, I don’t think anybody’s gonna listen to that, but you’re the boss, and hey, we’ll give it a shot. And we got lucky, because it really sort of worked for us, and we just kind of kept going.

John: And it was a very well timed podcast as online education was spreading, and there weren’t very many other podcasts that addressed it at the time, and I don’t think there still are very many that address online specifically, but all have started to include much more of it, especially since 2020 with that whole mess.

Rebecca: One of the things that I observed in your not newsletter are like a little section of discussion prompts to have with a colleague. Can you talk a little bit about that section?

Kelvin: Sure. Another reason that this is not quite a newsletter is I’ve tried to think in terms of modularity, like little discrete pieces that maybe some of the other pieces wouldn’t work for you, but maybe this piece would be a go to, and one of those is this idea of like reflection or discussion prompts, and a key part of the not quite a newsletter, is that I’ve been… I say often, I don’t do pithy, it’s not completely true. I do. It just takes a heck of a lot of work. But I’ve been collecting little sayings, little idioms from colleagues for years, and we haven’t even gotten to the ones that I’ve derived myself from interacting with smart, wise people, and I kind of wanted to do something about that, sharing it so that didn’t just die with me someday. So the discussion or reflection questions are in relation to sharing one such little wise word saying that I have found useful. So the sharing of those wise words, by itself, is a little nugget, and I do a little brief video where I unpack if you were interested more, you could learn a little bit more. I got a face made for radio. So not a lot of people go over to the YouTube thing and listen further than the one line thing, but I’m hopeful that maybe an individual having read that little one liner of wise words, might be willing to just scroll down a little bit and ponder a little reflection based on those prompts. Or, I think we have such opportunity to dialog with colleagues. And then sometimes it seems like, I mean, we’re surrounded by such smart, capable people, but to dig a little deeper, we don’t always know where to start. So actually, just to have some prompts that you could say, “Hey, we’re going to use this as a warm up for our team meeting,” or, “Hey, can we have a cup of coffee and just kind of springboard off of these questions about that?” I just thought it would be something that might be useful for a subset of people who open the newsletter, and if not, maybe something else. Maybe the coffee bit will be something valuable. I just hope that there’s something in each issue that somebody will find useful.

John: As we talked about briefly before, you’re releasing this also in an audio version. How has that been received? What’s the sort of mix you get? And also, what is the process there? Do you start with a text version and go to audio or do you start with an audio one and then generate the text from that?

Kelvin: All good questions. I didn’t really set out to do another podcast of any sort. I kind of thought that the idea of even pursuing newsletter as a genre or a venue. The reason I did that is I kind of thought that not everybody is going to listen to a podcast. Boy, there were certainly a lot of Substacks and Mediums and so forth, as you say, and people on LinkedIn. And so I thought, well, something that’s text, text visual primarily, might have a better uptake. And then, if I can make it modular, as I discussed, maybe that’s useful. But then, after I did the first one, then I took the contrary view. See the rebuttal came from the voices in my head, Rebecca. And I thought, Well, I kind of miss speaking into a microphone. And then I thought, I’m not always up for reading one of these newsletters that comes into my inbox. I did skip the fact, by the way, that while on the LinkedIn newsletter platform, while you get, like, a posting with a link, anybody who subscribes to the newsletter, they do get the little email prompting in the same way that you might with those other platforms. I thought when those things come into my email box, sometimes I just let them sit there. I’m like, I don’t feel like reading, or I’m about to get in the car, and I love listening to podcasts or the occasional audio book while I’m doing something else, driving down the road, or walking the dog, or that kind of a thing. I thought, well, I’ve got all this stuff anyway. And John, to your point, I develop out the textual graphic thing. And then I thought, well, what would an audio edition of this thing be like? And it’s primarily an audio performance of the sort of the opening essay, and then sort of a description of some of the other elements. And I mean, it’s brief, they’re about like 15 minutes, give or take, which is half the length of the run time of TOPCast at about 30 minutes. But based on the data that I’ve got, which admittedly is not tremendous on LinkedIn… no offense to LinkedIn… the analytics are kind of rough hewn, but there’s many, many, many, many, many more people who have article accesses in that textual graphic format than the data from SoundCloud would indicate are listening to that audio edition. It’s more of a niche. Maybe it is just the odd person who I’m not going to read your thing, I can’t be bothered to scroll or I want to listen in the car. So there’s definitely people that are steadily accessing the audio edition, but there’s no comparison. And maybe that’s because it’s sort of the audio edition of this textual, graphic newsletter, rather than a true podcast. And maybe it’s because on TOPCast, it’s all very conversational, and not unlike your podcast here, it’s more of a scripted format in this 15 minute audio edition of The Lift. So will it stay around? I don’t know, and unless it becomes burdensome in some way, probably, but I don’t know if that’s gonna become the tail that wags the dog.

Rebecca: It does seem like you use the multimodal lens in thinking about online teaching and learning and the way that you designed this experience, and that there’s like text and visual in video and audio components. I mean, it feels very UDL of you.

Kelvin: Well, yes, I mean, I think that’s an occupational hazard. In fact, I reached out to, I kind of put a little advisory group together to the prototype pilot issue and asked for some feedback. And that was very scientific. I went to, like, the last 10 or 15 people that I had individual messages with on LinkedIn, and I just reached out to them and said, “Will you take a look at this and see what you think?” And one colleague pushed me a little bit on the accessibility part, even though I had done alt text and so forth, just even making more explicit, which I have mixed feelings about, but for images, in the caption for images, taking more of alt text kind of approach, even though actual alt text was already there, so that’s interesting, but it is sort of an occupational hazard in this field to think about things from a multimodal, UDL kind of a standpoint. So here’s hoping that it’s walking the talk.

John: One thing that surprised me with our podcast from the beginning is the number of people who only look at the transcripts. I never expected that. I will look at a transcript if someone referred to something that I want to look up later, or if there’s some reference that I want to go back and pay more attention to. But the advantage of podcasts for me is that you can listen while you’re doing all those things that you said, while you’re driving, while you’re doing other things where you don’t need continuous focus, but we get a lot on both. So it’s nice to have both options.

Rebecca: I though he was going to point me out as someone who likes to read transcripts.

Kelvin: I’ll tell you, I’ve been sort of a loyalist to Apple podcasts, I guess, through the years, out of habit than anything else. And when a year or two ago, Apple podcasts started just sliding in AI generated transcripts, regardless of whether the podcaster had an actual, carefully constructed transcript or not, I have found a lot of affordance in that. There’s too many times I’ve been listening to a podcast and then driving down the road, used my interface with my phone to do a voice activated voice to text text message to try to capture one little phrase at a time, like a quote from a podcast, pause the thing and then “send message to Kelvin.” “What would you like to say to Kelvin,” “from Tea for teaching podcast episode number one zillion and six quote.” The key thing to remember is comma…” You want to send it or re-record it?” “Send it.” “What did they say?” So getting to that transcript now and actually pulling it up and like, oh, that’s what they said, you know, copy, paste, put it into my notes folder. I like it.

Rebecca: Yeah, it’s handy, for sure.

John: It’s really nice to have it. At the time of this recording, the most recent issue of the lift is Issue five. We’re recording a bit further ahead than we generally have in the past, so there may be more issues by the time you listen to this.

KELVON: Here’s hoping.

John: And one of the things you mentioned in there was the starfish story that we hear at so many professional development workshops about someone seeing all these dying starfish on the beach and throwing them back in and… well, I’ll let you tell the story. And one of the things you note, though, is that story is flawed in some fundamental ways. Can you share that argument with our listeners? I thought it was an interesting argument.

Kelvin: Picking up the typical story from where you left off all the starfish dead or lying there wounded or whatever on the beach, and an individual is seen hurling individual starfish back into the ocean waves, and some sort of outsider figure comes up and says, “Well, you know, you’re not making any kind of a difference,” kind of gesturing into the field of view of these countless starfish littering the beach, and then the protagonist, stoically reaches down, picks up a starfish, throws it into the ocean, and says, “Well, made a difference to that one,” and boom, that’s the mic drop punch line. And I’ve held on to that story. I have found it compelling. I have shared that in individual one-on-one conversations, in conference presentations or keynote engagements, but I’ve adopted over time in the podcast or in writing, if I’m about to put back out some sort of commonly used quote or idiom, I’ve started trying to source check myself. I mean, fact check may not be quite the right word, because I don’t know that there ever was, like a person on the beach with the starfish. Somebody devised that. And like, before I propagate this further, is that actually good? And then I was also pondering this whole idea about making a difference. And I started going there. I was going to do something with that. I mean, call it hackneyed, if you want, with that often used story illustration. And it turns out, step one, it’s wrong, ecologically, that’s bad. Don’t do it if you find yourself on a shoreline somewhere littered with starfish, the best move you can make as a human with compassion for living creatures and for the planet and its ecosystem, sadly, best I can tell… Google it, check for yourself… the best thing you can do, walk away, let everything just be the way it is. Google it, you’ll find out. And I’m like, well, dang, that messed up a perfectly good story illustration, but then I was pondering that further. And the reason I’ve held on to that illustration, personally, in so many individual conversations, is sometimes it’s what I found it most useful for is, you’ve got this internal locus of control. You can do something. And in my old institution, a couple of presidents back there were two lines that a historic president said that got woven into the fabric at the University of Central Florida, and there’s still vestiges of these today, I think. This President said, “accent on excellence, accent on the individual.” And that individual centrality thing made a difference to that one. You can’t do everything, but you can do something. That idea, I always found very salient, very powerful, and I’m like, wow. Well, that messes up everything, if it’s not a good thing to propagate. And here’s where I got to, John and Rebecca, is I think that internal locus of control thing is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for making a difference via academic Innovation, digital learning, leading any of the various important work that we aspire to in higher education. It’s necessary. You have to take responsibility for doing something in your purview. But it’s not sufficient. You will not, personally by yourself, accomplish the kind of scale of impact that is necessary, that we are aspiring to, in the, shall we say, currently fraught sector of at least American higher education. It’s going to take partnering, and it’s going to take this emphasis on the human, this emphasis on vulnerability and compromise and working together and finding common ground, and maybe be willing to set aside my priority to connect with your priority and be in service of that, because we’re going in the same direction, and that kind of a thing, that’s what’s going to be important to make a difference, and the starfish story, by itself, won’t get you there.

John: And it’s all too common for people to be working in their own silos, ignoring the fact that everyone else is having their own struggles. And by working together, the impact can be much larger. I don’t think we’ve ever seen a time in higher education where there have been so many threats to our continued existence.

Rebecca: Yeah, and I think you can find it difficult to figure out what you can do individually sometimes too. And so I think the ecosystem that you’re suggesting within an institution and across institutions is a really powerful way to think about it, rather than kind of an individual. This ecosystem model is key. I think that’s why your reflection questions were resonating with me when I was re-reading some of your not so newsletters. And that’s because I feel like right now, people feel really drained with so much going on that the conversations that I’m often having in the hallway… they don’t have any content. [LAUGHTER] It’s like, “Hi, how are you?” “Fine?” …but not really, but we’re just going to say fine, because that’s what you do, and then you kind of move forward to kind of remind us that could have more substantive conversations on a regular basis, even though we feel really drained.

Kelvin: Yeah, I think that’s a slightly troubling but cogent observation of situations across so very many of our institutions, higher ed wise.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about some of the topics you’re hoping to… we’ve hinted at some of the ones that you’ve already talked about in your not so newsletter. But what are some of the ways that you see the not so newsletter going forward, or the kinds of things you might address?

Kelvin: Yeah, I suppose the short answer is, I really don’t know. The longer answer is I have pretty deep bench of wise word expressions, sayings, either the ones that I’ve collected or the ones that I’ve coined through my decades in K-12 education and then higher education. So I’m constantly thumbing through those. And then I guess what I look for is an intersection of wise word expression, current moment in time that we’re living through in higher ed, not so much like a discrete news item, but like dynamics, like listening to the conversations that I’m hearing at my institution, or I’m seeing on LinkedIn, or there’s several daily news feeds… higher ed related… that I scroll through, and I’m sort of like using that as a bit of a filter when it’s time to gin up the next issue. So I’m sometimes thinking like an issue or two ahead, but I try not to get too far ahead of it, and try to stay somewhat grounded in the now with an eye toward the more timeless, which I would say is the nature of those wise word expressions, but that’s a long way of saying. One, don’t know for sure, but two, everything I think so far will be in service of our collective multifaceted ability to work together in service of important, aspirational higher ed goals that serve an ever expanding, widening range of potential learners. So that’s a lot to unpack, but it’s got to line up with that, because that’s what keeps me coming back in what I hope we’re doing increasingly better job of serving those potentially wider conceptualized group of learners, not just the same students that we had last year, but how can we do better serving a wider range of students.

John: And speaking of a changing mix of students, could you talk a little bit about how your new position at Louisville differs from your prior role at UCF?

Kelvin: Yeah, happy to. I currently serve here at the University of Louisville as Vice Provost for Online Strategy and Teaching Innovation, as you said. And honestly, I was for the record, happy where I was, doing what I was doing, and who I was doing it with. And on August 30, 2022, I happened to open the email that day, but when I did, the juxtaposition of roles in that title got my attention. Not all positions that have responsibility for online learning or that have responsibility for teaching and learning centers juxtapose online strategy and teaching innovation in that way. So I was intrigued. I’ve always liked to have a kind of a foot in both of those worlds. Where I came from at UCF, there was a bit of a division, for historical reasons, between the Karen L. Smith Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning and the Center for Distributed Learning. Although those organizations have worked really well for a long time, I found myself often as the little…. whatever they call, those things on the Lego bricks that allow one brick to connect to the next, those little protrusions… I found myself to be that protrusion from the Center for Distributed Learning that was always connecting with the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning. So I was always interested in that holistic work. So this is a more overarching, holistic role. But then also, of course, my former role, I was Executive Director for the Center for Distributed Learning. I had this multifaceted, but still very online, blended digital learning focus. And in that role, I reported to Vice Provost for Digital Learning, Dr. Tom Cavanagh, who is still currently my TOPCast co-host. So here I have a Vice Provost title. The organization’s quite different, a little bit smaller, more diverse mission than my former one. The institution as a whole here is about a third the size of UCF. But interestingly, both R1s, both community engaged, both in that recent Carnegie classification new description, higher access, higher earnings. Both institutions share all of those and there’s only eight institutions nationwide that share all three of those descriptors. So the nature of the work broadly is similar, and a metropolitan research university context, that’s all similar, but then the organizational context is quite different. UCF celebrated its 60th birthday after I left, and the University of Louisville claims over 225 years of history. So as you can imagine, there’s a bit of traditionalism and friction and steadiness that has both upsides and downsides when you’re engaging in academic innovation kind of work.

John: One other difference, I would think, is that UCF has long been involved with online and blended learning, and I think that’s a relatively more recent area for Louisville. Is that correct?

Kelvin: Certainly does not go back as far at U of L as it does at UCF, but there has been activity in this space for a good 20 plus years. But it certainly is some kind of a signifier that this role that I am in currently was newly conceptualized in order to be searched for. So it reflects a little bit of a new strategic focus. What else can we do in this area more thoughtfully? So we’re working on it for sure. But yes, that is absolutely true. So the first online class was taught at UCF in the summer of 1996 so for the sake of argument, call it 66 to 96 there’s 30 years. So for if we just want to be just really rough hewn about it, for nearly half of its existence, UCF has relied heavily on online, blended, and digital education. It’s a relative drop in the pan… the University of Louisville if we say 20 years and it’s 225 plus years old. I mean, that’s what, less than 10% of its history. [LAUGHTER] So that puts things in perspective, I guess.

Rebecca: Like, it’s always helpful as we’re thinking about ways to reach across universities, as we’re thinking about this ecosystem that we’re talking about earlier, to better understand how institutions are quite different from one another. And just to get a feel for institutions that have similarities and differences from your own.

John: And I think it’s really nice to see that combination of focus on teaching and learning as well as distributed learning in one location, because when they’re done separately, you often have somewhat different directions that may not always align, or a duplication of effort that could be avoided. I think a lot of institutions have been moving in that direction.

Rebecca: We always wrap up by asking, what’s next?

Kelvin: What’s next? Well, I plan to see TOPCast through its 200th episode, and if Tom has his way, the occasional beyond, I hope to continue to release The Lift on a steady schedule. I’ve reached some sort of an intersection of priorities that has slowed down the current month’s release, but I’m committed to keeping that going for at least through a year. And I guess I would welcome, if you don’t mind, your listeners to check it out and send some feedback. What do you like? What do you not like? What would make it more useful as a personal resource? If you don’t mind a shout out using the URL shortening service dub, you can get to the lift on the LinkedIn newsletter platform by going to dub.sh/thelift, all lowercase, no spaces. I’d love to hear what listeners of t for teaching find. Just one and done. Just try it out. Just take a look. Pick one of the issues that you like, and shoot a little note over on LinkedIn, or hit me up on Gmail, drkelvinthompson@gmail.com. I would love to hear, “you know, I’m never coming back to this, and here’s why.” Or, “you know, it’d be a little better if you did this.” Or “I’m going to share this with five friends today.” I mean, I’d love to hear any of that. It’d be okay. Is that all right? You’re going to edit that part out, aren’t you?

John: No. In fact, we will include a link to those in the show notes as well. So if anyone didn’t quite write it down, you can always go back to the show notes for the episode and find those links to both The Lift itself as well as to the SoundCloud version of it.

Rebecca: Well, thanks so much for joining us. It’s always a pleasure to have the opportunity to talk to you.

Kelvin: Oh, likewise. I mean, you all are a delight. I continue to peruse the Tea for Teaching feed. I routinely share episodes from your podcast out through our faculty facing teaching related newsletter here and with colleagues via email and elsewhere. You all are doing great work, and people probably don’t tell you that nearly enough, but thank you.

John: Well, thank you. And we’ve often shared many episodes of TOPCast out to our faculty as well, so I’m hoping we’ll still see some more of those coming out. And one other thing we should mention is your last official episode is the one that’s going to be recorded at OLC, I believe.

Kelvin: Yes, in November of 2025 at OLC Accelerate Tom and I’ve been invited to do a plenary panel of sorts where we’re going to just do an episode. We’re calling it last call at the TOPCast Cafe, and we’re going to look back across the 10 and a half years a little bit for distilling some kind of insights, and look forward a little bit and try to have some kind of encouraging word for the community broadly. And then that session that we record, it might have some light editing on it, but it will then release in January of 2026 as TOPCast episode 200.

Rebecca: Mark your calendars.

John: Thanks again.

Kelvin: Pleasure being with you.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

John: Editing Assistance provided by Ryan Metzler.

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417. Life Skills in the Liberal Arts

Posted in authentic learning, engagement, first-generation students, higher education, learning, pedagogy, professional development, teaching
October 29, 2025

Students engage when they see a connection between what they are learning and their future objectives. In this episode, Angela Bauer joins us to discuss the benefits of integrating life skills into a liberal arts curriculum. Angela is a biologist and the Provost and Executive Vice President at Texas Women’s University. Prior to this, she served in several  leadership positions at High Point University. Angela is also the author of Teaching Life Skills in the Liberal Arts and Sciences: Preparing Students for Success Beyond the Classroom which has recently been released by Taylor and Francis.

Show Notes

  • Bauer, A. C. (2025). Teaching Life Skills in the Liberal Arts and Sciences: Preparing Students for Success Beyond the Classroom. Taylor & Francis.
  • NACE Competencies
  • Rebecca Winthrop and Jenny Anderson (2025). The Disengaged Teen. Tea for Teaching podcast. Episode 374. January 1.
  • Anderson, Jenny and Rebecca Winthrop (2025). The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better. Penguin Random House.
  • TILT Higher Ed
  • Angela Bauer (2018). Closing the performance gap. Tea for Teaching podcast. Episode 49. October 3.
  • Mayer, J. D., & Salovey, P. (1997). What is emotional intelligence? Emotional development and emotional intelligence: Implications for educators. New York: Basic Book. PP, 3-31.
  • Access to Innovators series – High Point University
  • Ethical Reasoning in Action. James Madison University

Transcript

John: Students engage when they see a connection between what they are learning and their future objectives. In this episode, we discuss integrating life skills into a liberal arts curriculum.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guest today is Angela Bauer. Angela is a biologist and the Provost and Executive Vice President at Texas Women’s University. Prior to this, she served in several leadership positions at High Point University. Angela is also the author of Teaching Life Skills in the Liberal Arts and Sciences: Preparing Students for Success Beyond the Classroom which has recently been released by Taylor and Francis. Welcome back, Angela.

Angela: Thank you so much, Rebecca, and good to see you and John. It’s been a while, but I’m so happy to be here.

John: We’re very glad to talk to you again. We were very glad to see you have this new book that just came out. Today’s teas are:… Angela, are you drinking tea?

Angela: I am. I have a ginger turmeric tea, which I am enjoying, and in full transparency, I do also need something a little bit more high octane in the morning, so I have a cup of very strong coffee right next to my tea. But I wanted to be a team player, so I’ve got the tea. [LAUGHTER]

John: Very good.

Rebecca: I appreciate the team play, for sure. I have Scottish breakfast this morning, John.

John: And I have black raspberry green tea today.

Angela: Oh, that sounds delicious.

John: It really is, for me, at least ,Rebecca may have a different view.

Rebecca: Yeah, I’m not a big fan of the berry teas, but we have a nice eclectic mix today, so that’s good, something for everyone. We’ve invited you here today to discuss Teaching Life Skills in Liberal Arts and Sciences. Can you tell us a little bit about the origin story of the book?

Angela: I’d be really happy to. This book has been in the making for quite some time. I would say even its origins began when I was a student. I am a product of a liberal arts education, and the impact of that was really transformative on my life in terms of how it influenced me to view the world through different lenses, depending on the situation, and to just be a lifelong learner, to be curious about things in a way that that education really instilled in me, that mindset, that it instilled in me. As I went through the ranks as a faculty member, of course, I held very much to those traditions. As a biologist, I contributed courses to the traditional [LAUGHTER] science requirement within the liberal arts core. But over time, as I rose through leadership positions in higher ed, I became more aware of sometimes the disconnect between the value of what we’re providing within the classroom in a liberal arts education and how that prepares students for their professional paths. So I want to start by saying that there are so many things that happen within the context of a liberal arts education that prepare you so well for any professional setting, in terms of your ability to look at problems from multiple perspectives, to write in a way that is clear and cogent and all the good things, and to communicate your ideas in a way that is effective and that and tailored for your audience. I mean, there are so many ways in which my liberal arts education prepared me for the world in a variety of ways, regardless of what my chosen profession would be, and I saw that happening in my students. But I also, over time, saw a disconnect sometimes between what students viewed happening within their liberal arts courseworks… they really weren’t quite getting what we were accomplishing in terms of how that related to what they would need to do in their future professions. So there was that. That doesn’t mean that we weren’t doing great things to prepare them for their professions, but they were kind of missing the connection. And by the way, we found that out in great detail when I served as Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at High Point University where we did surveys of former students, current students, when we were investigating potential revisions of our liberal arts core. We got a lot of data indicating that students thought, “Yeah, it’s great to take this sort of smorgasbord of courses, but I’m not quite getting the connection among them and how it relates to my career,” so we needed to do a better job there. Also, increasingly, over time, we were hearing from some of the business leaders, nonprofit leaders within the community, who would come to our campus to meet with us and talk with students and connect them to the community in different ways to provide internships, et cetera. We were hearing also the value of instilling in them skills that maybe weren’t necessarily intentionally addressed in their liberal arts core. And so that’s what ultimately led to all of this. There’s much more to that story, but when I did work at High Point University, even before we considered revisions of the liberal arts core, our marketing and communications team had noticed how employers, community members, prospective students, parents of prospective students, really responded to this idea of students learning life skills within their coursework. So life skills was the term that we used at High Point University for skills that prepare students for their profession and for life, regardless of what that profession is. So they’re skills that sort of transcend disciplinary boundaries and have importance in so many areas of life. That’s a very informal definition, but some refer to those types of skills in different ways. So, some would call them workforce readiness skills. Some who are very invested in the NACE competencies, they see a lot of parallels with the NACE competencies. Some call them human skills. So there are some of these skills that employers are seeking from our students that fall within the realm of, I would argue, the affective domain of learning. They’re sort of the people skills, the soft skills in terms of, how do you be a good team player? How can we prepare students to be more coachable, so that when they get into the work environment, they’re able to respond to feedback and change course or course correct, so that they’re more impactful in the work that they do? So we were having success in terms of the resonance of that messaging before it was incorporated into the core, and it kind of became what High Point University is known for. It is what High Point University is known for. They are the Life Skills University. So when it came time, as institutions do, we go back and revisit our core. Is it where we needed to be? Is it having the outcomes that we are really seeking? Is it meeting the needs of today’s students when they enter their professions? We saw the opportunity to connect to the life skills messaging, also to the liberal arts core, and so all of that work is what really got me even more invested [LAUGHTER] in the enduring value of a liberal arts education, and also some ways in which we could consider fresh approaches to it, in order to best prepare our students for lives as competent professionals and engaged citizens and all the things that we wish for them. And so kind of a long-winded answer to say, I spent a really long time thinking about what might be included in this book. Now I didn’t actually get to the purpose of the book in this conversation, and it is the following, when we had been working really hard to infuse our liberal arts core with these competencies, skills, life skills, human skills, whatever, that employers are seeking, what we found was that a lot of them fell within to a realm of teaching or pedagogy that a lot of us are not trained for within higher ed. So I’ll tick off some of the top life skills that we see cited in employer surveys. And by the way, I should mention I am now Provost at Texas Women’s University, so I’m at a different institution, and I’m meeting a lot with employers in the region to hear from them what it is that we need to be focusing on in terms of workforce readiness, to best prepare our students to enter their professions. And a lot of those skills fall within, again, the affective domain of learning, like emotional intelligence and I mentioned coachability earlier. Teamwork falls into that realm as well. You know, being a good team player, there’s a lot there that you have to be good at to be an effective team player. You have to communicate well, there are facets of emotional intelligence, obviously, that are wrapped up into being a good team player. You have to be coachable. You have to be open to respond to feedback from your teammates or maybe from your supervisor in a way that helps move the team forward to reach its collective goal. Do we do some of that in traditional liberal arts courses? Yes, we do, but do we really know how to significantly move the needle on some of those affective skills? I would argue no. And actually, a lot of the literature out there indicates that we could be doing a lot better by intentionally teaching these skills. So this book arose from what I saw is a void in our knowledge about how to best teach these skills that employers are seeking. And by the way, it doesn’t only pertain to these lesser studied skills that fall within the affective domain of learning, it also applies to skills that we in higher ed, for centuries probably, have touted as being the outcome of a liberal arts education, that being critical thinking. So when I actually dove into the literature to determine what to include in my chapter on best practices for teaching and measuring students’ development of critical thinking, I was actually kind of stunned. I mean, I knew a little bit of this before, but when I really dug in, I was kind of stunned on how we approach critical thinking in higher ed. Not everyone, I don’t mean to generalize, but often [LAUGHTER] we just think that our students pick up critical thinking as they’re writing or speaking or engaging in debate in the classroom or Socratic dialog, but actually, what we now know based on the teaching and learning literature is that the way to really move the needle on critical thinking is to be intentional in talking about it with students. Not only do you provide them with opportunities to engage in critical thinking… that does have an impact… but you can totally maximize the impact that you have if you preface all of that with a unit on talking about what is critical thinking? What does it look like? How do we take one aspect of critical thinking and apply it within different contexts? When you include a unit like that within your course and then dive into all the wonderful things in a liberal arts course that we do, challenging readings, writing papers, communicating, debating, etc, you have a much greater impact on students’ development of critical thinking than if you just assumed they were picking it up by default based on their engagement in all of those activities. Anyway, the book dives into all of that. It dives into the skills that we as academics aren’t typically trained to teach that fall within the affective domain of learning, like coachability, teamwork, etc, but it also addresses some that fall within the cognitive domain that we could probably maximize our impact if we were just a little bit more intentional about how we teach them. Critical thinking would be one of them.

John: We’ve been hearing a lot about many of the things that you found at High Point. In a past podcast interview with Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop, we talked about their book, The Disengaged Teen, and one of the things they talked about was how students in general have felt more disconnected from what they’re learning, that they don’t see the relevance of it to their lives. And that sounds very similar to the findings that you found at High Point. So this is a pretty significant shift, though, I imagine, for many faculty, how did faculty react to this shift? Was there a uniform consensus that developed very quickly, or was there a bit of resistance from people who preferred an emphasis just on the traditional liberal arts approach?

Angela: Oh, John, there was a lot of healthy debate, [LAUGHTER] but it was really, really healthy. It was so interesting to hear where everyone fell with respect to their beliefs in what a liberal arts education is all about. But meanwhile, there was this desire… we had, this branding going on of our institution at High Point University, we’re touting ourselves as a life skills university and addressing some of those skills in coursework outside of the actual core. That was really resonating with prospective students and parents and existing students, and actually on top of that, we were hearing from the employers that hired our students about how impactful those experiences were. So while there were those who are more wedded to the idea that the tradition of the liberal arts is just to instill, not just, but it is to instill lifelong learning, curiosity, the ability to view the world from different perspectives, there were definitely those who were actually very reluctant to tie it to anything related to professional outcomes. It’s not uncommon to High Point’s campus. That’s widespread. So there was that. But then there were also those who thought, “Well, why can’t we do both?” Like, “why can’t we accomplish the goals that we have for a traditional liberal arts education, while at the same time maybe structuring our classroom activities that also allow us to address some of these skills and competencies that we know are going to really help them be successful and that haven’t maybe traditionally been addressed in a liberal arts education? How can we also incorporate that? So couldn’t we do both?” And in the end, we had a lot of working groups, faculty forums, surveys, many opportunities for feedback. In the end, we actually had a faculty vote on adopting these life skills based learning outcomes. And by the way, I should mention that we had these life skills outcomes related to many that I’ve already addressed, but we maintained the traditional structure of their coursework, so they still took a course in natural sciences and quantitative reasoning and all that. But it was within those traditional liberal arts courses that we mapped these life skills based learning outcomes. So all that was said and done. But in the end, the vote was not like an on-the-fence vote. The overall faculty vote was very much in favor of adopting the life skills outcomes. So in the end, I think, generally speaking, people were really happy with it.

Rebecca: So you’ve talked a little bit about the process that was used to gain some consensus across the faculty. Can you provide some examples of what this kind of integrated learning outcome looks like that combines this traditional liberal arts approach with these life skills.

Angela: Yes, I’d be very happy to. So, when we sat down to map the life skills based learning outcomes to specific courses within the curriculum, some made a lot of sense in terms of where the best fit might be, just based on the nature of the work that happens within that discipline. So let’s use teamwork as an example. Right off the top of our heads, we thought about the courses in which students often work in teams, where there might be conflict or stress, and of course, what immediately popped to mind was natural sciences. We had a lab-based natural sciences course requirement within our liberal arts core, which I loved… what a great experience for students… but oftentimes in those courses, and especially in the way in which those courses were designed, where some of them were very much inquiry based, which is challenging for students. What a great place to teach teamwork, right? …when students are working in groups of two, three, four, to come up with a novel hypothesis to test, design an experiment, analyze data, do all the things, divvy up the responsibilities of carrying out the experiment. So what if, within that context, we are really intentional about how we structure teamwork? And talk with students about the challenges that teams experience and what makes for a functional versus a dysfunctional team, talk with them about the importance of feedback from their team members, and then taking that feedback, first of all, determining what feedback is meaningful, also, because not all feedback is meaningful, so an important part of it is figuring out, okay, what’s the most potentially impactful feedback that I’ve gotten, and then how do I course correct to make that happen? That was a natural fit to teach teamwork within the natural sciences. There are other ways… we had an ethical reasoning life skills outcome that’s, of course, very easily mapped to a philosophy or a religion course. And so that ethical reasoning outcome was mapped to those courses. I’m trying to think of some others, communication is obvious. Those [LAUGHTER] were all handled in comp courses and also a first-year seminar. So those are a few examples of how we took those life skills outcomes and embedded them in traditional courses in a way that wouldn’t take away content from those courses or the intention of those courses as a critical part of a liberal arts experience. It was just more intentionally structuring some of the activities that happened within that course in a way that made it explicit to students: Here’s one of the skills you’re gaining from this, and here’s why it’s going to be important in the workplace. Now, here’s how we can really nail this, and then laying out all the aspects of teamwork that would be important for them to know and to engage in in that course.

John: And would seem that the TILT approach that Mary-Ann Winkelmes has suggested might make this even more effective by making it explicit to students, because even though many classes were already doing those things, that information wasn’t always obvious to the students in the classes, and just making that connection explicit, I think, would be helpful.

Angela: Absolutely, and I’m going to go back to my critical thinking model, because that literature was so telling, and I ended up referencing one of the meta analyzes about critical thinking that demonstrated that in subsequent chapters, like, let’s be intentional about doing this stuff and not assume anymore that, “Well, I assigned a group project so they’re learning how to be a member of a team.” We all know that ain’t always how it works. In critical thinking, in terms of the meta analyses that have been done about different scholarship of teaching and learning studies on critical thinking, there are two different viewpoints of how to teach critical thinking: there’s the generalist view, and then the specifist view, the general views fits more within the realm of cognitive psych. The cognitive psychologists, their goal is just to talk about what it is, be very specific about what it is, give examples, practice learning it, and then transferring it into different contexts. Whereas the specifist views, which often fall within the realm of the philosophers, for example, they believe it is dependent on a deep dive into the content and context of the course in order to become a critical thinker, it’s not necessarily about intentionally teaching it. Well, we know from meta analyses of studies on critical thinking how to teach it, and how students learn in response to those different methods, we need a mix of both the generalist and the specifists views in order to move the needle the most with respect to critical thinking.

Rebecca: You talked a little bit about some of the marketing strategies upfront that maybe led to some of these conversations, or at least contributed to some of these conversations. Can you talk a bit more about how this integrated approach affected student recruitment at High Point?

Angela: When I served as Senior Vice President of Academic Affairs at High Point University, I, along with our Provost at the time, we were very engaged with recruiting events, open houses. We would do a presentation to all prospective students who might be visiting on a weekend for open house. We would do a presentation about our university mission and what life skills was all about, etc. And also talk about a liberal arts education and what that meant. By far, the predominance of questions that we would get from prospective students and their parents was, “How is this liberal arts degree going to prepare me for life beyond the classroom? …and the life skills theme really resonated with them. This is just based on my experience. And I have to say, when a lot of the institution really did experience continued success and continues to grow. And I would argue, liberal arts institutions aren’t really doing that right now. Some of them are not. Some of them are struggling with enrollment, but High Point continued to experience enrollment growth, and also continued to, during that time period, experience enhanced retention of first-year students, in particular. Like all other institutions, we were really focused on that first- to second-year transition because it’s so critical. Now, did life skills play a role in retention? So many other retention efforts happen on a campus. It’s hard to attribute it to just that, but what I can tell you is that it really helped provide shared purpose to what we were doing on our campus, kind of like a QEP. You know how accrediting bodies require campuses to engage in a quality enhancement project of some sort that everyone can get behind related to student learning? I would say it almost felt like that. We had had a prior successful QEP on our campus that focused on instilling in students a growth mindset approach to their college work, and really saw people from many different areas of university life really buying into that QEP. That’s how it worked out with the life skills initiative as well, incorporating it into the liberal arts core. It really helped create this shared purpose on our campus in terms of how everyone was contributing to those learning outcomes.

John: We should also reference our past podcast with you, which was a while ago, about how you had integrated growth mindset messaging into biology classes with some really strong results.

Angela: Yes, so when growth mindset was the QEP, Quality Enhancement proposal, at High Point University, we really worked hard to develop innovative teaching practices where students were exposed to growth mindset ideas, often in challenging courses. It was most helpful, and we actually did a whole study within our STEM courses. So there were a couple of different studies, publications that came out of that. But what we found was that when we just took time during the week, maybe 10 minutes at the start of the week and provided students with a particular growth mindset idea or strategy that they might employ and then emphasize that theme, maybe during other days of the week or at times when students experienced a really challenging exam or maybe a laboratory exercise, it improved academic outcomes. In the end, it was amazing. And yeah, so that was a wonderful QEP, and I would argue it had a really significant impact on student outcomes. You know how you have students… well, I’ll speak for myself. I’m getting old. [LAUGHTER] I’ve taught a lot of students in my day, and I love when I have students who I keep in touch with, typically through social media, but sometimes they text me or send me emails. There is one story in particular of a student. I love this story. It’s actually hard for me to talk about it without it getting emotional, because I love this student, and it is the most amazing story. She came to High Point University and really loved science, but she took her first-year introductory biology course, and man, that’s a tough one. It always is a tough one for students, and she didn’t do well, and she needed to retake it. First of all, she was just a gritty student to begin with. Some students fail, and they’ll walk away and say, “Oh, I guess I’m not a science person, and move on.” Well, she had heard some of the growth mindset messaging that I had been giving in different settings just to introduce students to the idea of what it means to have a growth mindset and how it might help them take on challenging coursework. So she’d come to my office and talk about it, and she retook the class, and actually did quite well in the class. She ended up completing a biology major. All right. Now, did she graduate with a 4.0? No, she did not. STEM courses were a challenge for her, but she had a growth mindset, and she took it on, and she continued to improve. She really wanted to get a PhD. She said that experience for her was so transformative. She loved science. She wanted to spread her passion for science. Applied to PhD programs. Didn’t get in… the GPA thing. So we talked about the importance, maybe of getting your foot in the door. Maybe get a lab tech position at an R1 institution, get to know the faculty, demonstrate your ability to engage in the scientific method. She did all that. She did, a lab tech position at one institution, went to another. Well, guess what? Oh, I love this outcome. She got into their PhD program, and I think she’s passed her qualifying exams. Occasionally, I’ll get a text with an update. “You’re not going to believe this. Look what I did,” and she’ll share where she is. But all of that started with a student who could have just walked away, and maybe would have just walked away had she not been studying growth mindset strategies and how that might impact her ability to reach this professional goal that she had set with herself. So I just think it’s so powerful, and I want to also share that growth mindset strategies are really, I would argue, a facet of a broader topic, which is emotional intelligence. So if you break down emotional intelligence into the four facets, as described by Mayer and Salovey, which I cite in my book, I structure all of the emotional intelligence teaching activities around those four facets of emotional intelligence that they have defined, that are broadly accepted within the academic community. They include emotional awareness, emotional understanding, understanding why someone might be exhibiting this particular emotion in a certain context, emotional management, that one’s obvious. But then another facet of emotional intelligence is emotional facilitation. When you have a day, we all have those days, right? [LAUGHTER]…where you’re like, “oh, I don’t want to do this,” or “this is going to be really hard,” how do you muster up the mindset and the emotions that are going to help you be successful in that day? Well, growth mindset is that right? Like, if you encounter a challenging math assignment, rather than sitting back and saying, “I’m just so not good at this, I hate this. Blah, blah, blah,” if you say, “Okay, this is going to help me grow, it’s going to be hard work. But I have to get through it,” it just totally changes one’s perspective. So anyway, we are now, at Texas Women’s University, we’re doing a study right now that broadens this approach, not just including growth mindset strategies, but also addressing these other four facets of emotional intelligence, as defined by Mayer and Salovey. And so we’re taking the same approach, little 10 minute lessons for students, and we’re doing them in STEM courses. Isn’t that great? Because STEM courses ,often, big emotions arise in STEM courses, right? They’re challenging, and there are many expectations beyond just like the didactic coursework, there’s all the lab stuff, and it is hard. So what a great ground like, what a great opportunity for us to test out some of these lessons where students are maybe struggling with some emotions in the context of the semester. So I don’t have any data to share with you [LAUGHTER] on that about its impact, because we’re still in the pilot phase of that study. But, anyway, growth mindset strategies, that was a wonderful project at High Point University, huge impact on student outcomes and just the whole mindset of the campus. And I know they have broadened their QEP now to include emotional intelligence, so that is their focus. And yeah, so stay tuned for more good data about that.

John: It sounds like that’s a very useful life skill to be including as part of that emotional intelligence component.

Angela: Absolutely

Rebecca: Sounds like a future conversation is brewing. [LAUGHTER]

Angela: I would love to, because that would mean there was a great finding to share. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: So, in your examples about emotional intelligence, as well as these bigger efforts around life skills, there’s a lot of culture shift that has to happen. We’ve talked a little bit about all the consensus building that takes a lot of conversation. But one other aspect of that is also the connections and interactions with the communities and employers of graduates from the institution, so that surrounding community. Can you talk a little bit about the approach to culture shifts between the institution and other in the surrounding community?

Angela: Yeah, that’s a great question. That is something in higher ed that some disciplines or programs are very accustomed to doing, bringing leaders from their profession into the classroom to inform about different things, and then others don’t so much. And what we found at High Point University… let me tell you how this started and then how it grew. High Point University has a series known as the Access to Innovators series. The President has been very wonderful about connecting with well-known business leaders, thought leaders, bringing them to campus so that they can mentor students, and so that all began as part of this Access to Innovators series. But what was interesting is that the more they came to speak and meet with students, they talked a lot about life skills, and it sort of brought it all together in terms of the importance of what they were learning on our campus, and then how that connected with professional life. So I love that example about the importance of intentional connection with the professional community. Things are shifting so rapidly in terms of where we are as a society, what things look like in the workplace. With AI evolving in the way that it is, there are certain professions now that have just changed so profoundly, and now, talking with employers from those professions where AI has had a profound impact, often a theme I hear is they are focusing on those human skills, soft skills, the life skills that are all about people, because AI can do so many things, [LAUGHTER] but one thing that it can’t do is lead a team, inspire a team. There’s a level of human-to-human communication that has to happen. There’s got to be emotional intelligence. The way that we need to stay on top of all of that is through connecting with our students’ future employers. One example from Texas Women’s University is the extent to which we have a lot of graduate programs in the health professions which we have a national reputation for excellence in this these areas, in nursing, physical therapy, occupational therapy. Nursing, in particular, what our Dean of Nursing is finding in meeting with clinicians, heads of hospitals, etc. is that AI is a thing in the workplace, and here are the ways in which we need your students to be prepared to be AI literate when they enter a clinical setting. And by the way, all of that changes all the time because of how technology is improving. Well, we wouldn’t know all that if we weren’t having these frequent interactions with the future employers of our students. They’re also currently providing clinical experiences for our students, so we’ve had those relationships also in the context of their educational process. But you get my point, that those connections are critical, and when you bring that into the classroom as well…. let’s say you have a business leader come to campus and meet with one of your classes about whatever life skill you choose, they can bring like, real-life tangible examples to tell you how this played out when I had an employee who wouldn’t respond to my feedback. Here’s how it impacted their work, and here’s how it impacted their career progression. And when you have like those tangible, real life in the moment examples that employers are providing to our students, there’s a level of engagement…. I don’t have any metric for measuring this, I’m just telling you what I see happen within the classroom. There’s maximal engagement. They love hearing those stories. So if we can do more to sort of reach beyond the ivory tower, and again, this is variable, many people are doing this already, but if we can sort of break down those barriers of communication between the academy and our students’ future professions, it’s better for everyone.

Rebecca: In addition to this culture shift involved with reaching out to the community and the potential employers of students or the employers that have traditionally employed people from your institution, you also mentioned that there’s a need for a bit of a culture shift in instructional approaches that are being used. Could you talk a little bit about how the shift has affected the way in which people are teaching?

Angela: Good question. That’s a good plug for my book, John, [LAUGHTER] because people often are finding that if they have a life skill mapped to their course, gosh, I don’t know how to teach emotional intelligence, so we’re having to retool some of the things that we do in order to learn this new facet of our teaching responsibilities within the classroom, and to do it in a way that we’re evidence based in how we go about it, like we’re learning from others experiences and maybe building on that and innovating on that. So, this is requiring that campuses provide more than just saying, “hey, teach this life skill in your course,” or “teach this workforce readiness in your course,” it means we have to provide professional development opportunities for our faculty, and sometimes that means also understanding that it might be a course retooling. They might need some time or resources to make that happen. It depends on how significant of a revision it is, but they need to feel supported in that effort, and not that it’s just like one more thing added to their plate. So there’s a lot of thought that has to happen on the part of academic leaders to make this possible in a way that gets people excited and passionate about a particular life skill and how that might play out for their students in a really positive way… also feeling supported in that endeavor, so they’re not just left with here’s all this extra work to do this, not really knowing how do I connect with people who know best how to teach this? We need to be bringing those experts to our campuses to meet with our faculty and coach them on this and also to provide space in people’s schedules to do the course retooling that might be necessary to make this happen.

Rebecca: You talked earlier a bit about how the life skill of teamwork might be incorporated into the life sciences. Can you provide another example of a different life skill and how that was built into the liberal arts curriculum?

Angela: So one outcome that High Point University had incorporated into its life skills learning outcomes for its liberal arts curriculum was ethical reasoning. So, you’ll look at employer surveys, often you’ll see one of the competencies they’re looking for, or one of the traits they’re looking for is someone that has the ability to reason ethically through a situation and determine its potential impact on certain individuals, the company as a whole, customers, etc. There are different views about how ethical reasoning should be taught within a liberal arts core. So some are very much wedded to the idea that it should be taught by philosophers who specifically had training in ethics and so forth, or perhaps in religion courses. And by the way, that’s what High Point University elected to do. So those ethical reasoning learning outcomes were mapped specifically to religion and philosophy courses that were a part of the liberal arts core. Now, other institutions take a different approach to embedding ethical reasoning into their courses, and I’m going to talk about a model that I cited in my book at James Madison University. You may have heard about their model of ethical reasoning that’s framed around eight key questions that you can ask yourself when you’re in a situation that gets you to consider all of the ethics-related facets of that situation. It’s a really great model. They’ve done some SoTL work to indicate that it has an impact on students’ ability to reason ethically through situations. So it is a very impressive method. What’s interesting about the eight key questions model, the 8KQ model, and by the way, it was philosophers who played a lead role in developing that model. They developed a model that could be implemented in any class, regardless of the disciplinary expertise of the professor. So I’m just throwing that out as another example where some institutions are embracing life skills that perhaps traditionally in the past have been very much isolated within a certain discipline, and moving it into a framework where it can be incorporated in other courses as well. Now James Madison, to my understanding, did not embed it into their core curriculum. It is a method that is simply being employed in courses within many disciplines. That was their QEP, by the way, ethical reasoning was their QEP a while ago, and that’s how the 8KQ framework was developed. So that’s another example of, specifically at James Madison University, how a life skills outcome, ethical reasoning, might be embedded into any course. You can imagine how useful that would be in courses like engineering or nursing. It would be useful in any discipline, but I’m just saying there are often courses, programs, disciplines, that are required to address ethical reasoning learning outcomes, even if it’s not a part of their core, they’re required by their accrediting body to have that embedded in their coursework somehow, and so that provides a really useful framework for folks in a variety of disciplines to incorporate ethical reasoning mastery into what they do in the classroom.

John: The approach you’re discussing in this book would probably work best if it was done across the board in an institution, some of us may be working in systems where the Gen Ed requirements are kind of dictated from above. I remember we spent several years coming up with our campus gen ed program, and then a year or so later, the SUNY system created a whole new overlay to that, which led to a lot of modifications. My point is that while the approach you’re suggesting would probably work best if it’s instituted across the board in an institution-wide manner, Gen Ed requirements don’t always change very easily, and while your book is a great resource for institutions that are going through a complete revision of their programs, might it also be a useful resource for individual faculty, departments, or programs that would like to integrate life skills more effectively in their individual courses and programs.

Angela: Yeah, that’s a really good point. John and I am a big fan of ensuring that every student gets exposure to these really impactful life skills outcomes by the time they graduate, which would mean, well, we’ve got to catch them in the courses that they all have to take, which is the core curriculum, the liberal arts core. But you are so right, if you are in a state system where your learning outcomes are dictated by… I’ll speak in Texas, we have a Texas Higher Ed Coordinating Board which sets out the competencies for our core curriculum, the learning outcomes for our core curriculum. And by the way, they emphasize a lot of workforce readiness skills, where there’s a lot of crossover with life skills. So I was excited to see that when I moved to Texas and took on this position, like teamwork, for example, or critical thinking, communication. But you know, even if you are in a different context, and that’s just not possible, aybe there’s not consensus among the faculty about wanting to incorporate these competencies into the core curriculum. This book, I think, is still incredibly useful, because it may be the case that you’re teaching a lot of STEM courses and you notice that your students may be struggling, maybe with imposter syndrome, like all the things that students often struggle with when they get into a STEM course in particular, but other challenging courses as well, you might want to think about doing some emotional intelligence lessons, because it can make students aware of those emotions and understanding where those emotions are coming from, and how they might manage them, and how they might facilitate emotions that would help them get beyond those feelings, to build up their self efficacy, their self confidence in their ability to be a scientist, in their ability to do science. So, even if you’re not at an institution where it’s possible to develop a liberal arts core that addresses these outcomes, yeah, this is useful to anyone, and not just 4-year institutions, 2-year institutions, I would argue, even high school teachers might find benefit from reading about some of the best practices that are outlined in these chapters for a particular life skill that they would really love to teach their students.

John: And what we haven’t emphasized is that you have a chapter on each of these life skills and effective ways of integrating that.

Angela: Yeah, and there are more life skills too, so maybe there will be a part two book. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: So many life skills. [LAUGHTER]

Angela: So funny. When I look at my original outline for the book and how many I was going to address, I think I had like 12 chapters in mind, and you’ll notice it’s significantly shorter than that, because by the time you dig into a particular topic and lay out the theory and talk about the teaching and the assessment, it takes up a lot of words.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking, what’s next? Maybe you’ve already teased a couple things.

Angela: Well, yeah, we’ll see… already in talking with folks about the topics covered in this book, those who have reviewed it and maybe provided an endorsement of the book, that there are other life skills, workforce readiness skills, NACE competencies, whatever you want to call them, that haven’t been addressed in the book. So I think there’s a lot of opportunity for a part two. So that’s something that I’ve been thinking about, as time permits.

John: Thank you for joining us. It’s great to talk to you again, and this time, let’s not wait as long before our next conversation.

Angela: I would love that. Thank you so much, John and Rebecca, it was really fun to connect with you again and talk about stuff that we’re excited and passionate about. I love the work that we do in higher ed. So, yeah, it’s fun to sit back and celebrate some of the good work that’s happening.

Rebecca: Definitely. Thanks again for joining us.

Angela: Thank you.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

John: Editing Assistance provided by Madison Lee.

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416. Teaching More Effectively with ChatGPT

Posted in active learning, artificial intelligence, assessment, edtech, educational technology, feedback, higher education, learning, pedagogy, teaching
October 22, 2025

The rapid evolution of generative AI tools has introduced an expanding set of educational applications. In this episode, Dan Levy and Angela Perez Albertos join us to discuss how these changes are affecting faculty and classrooms.

Dan is an economist and a senior lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard University where he teaches courses in quantitative methods, policy analysis, and program evaluation. Angela is a graduate of the MPA program in International Development at the Harvard Kennedy School, and is the U.S. Head of Strategy at Innovamat. Dan and Angela are the authors of the first, and now the second, editions of Teaching Effectively with ChatGPT.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: The rapid evolution of generative AI tools has introduced an expanding set of educational applications. In this episode, we discuss how these changes are affecting faculty and classrooms.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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John: Our guests today are Dan Levy and Angela Perez Albertos. Dan is an economist and a senior lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard University where he teaches courses in quantitative methods, policy analysis, and program evaluation. Angela is a graduate of the MPA program in International Development at the Harvard Kennedy School, and is the U.S. Head of Strategy at Innovamat. Dan and Angela are the authors of the first, and now the second, editions of Teaching Effectively with ChatGPT. Welcome back, Dan and Angela.

Angela: Thank you so much for having us.

Dan: Thank you very much.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:… Dan. Are you drinking tea with us today?

Dan: Yes, Moroccan tea. My family is originally from Morocco, so I tend to drink this one.

Rebecca: Always a good flavor, for sure. How about you, Angela?

Angela: Yeah, this morning I’m drinking chai tea latte. This is my usual morning drink.

Rebecca: How about you, John?

John: I have a tea which actually has a French name, which I’m not going to try to pronounce, but the English translation is chimps’ tea. It’s a black tea with fig and honey and a few other things in it, and it’s really delicious. It was sent to us a while back by one of our listeners in France, which was really nice.

Rebecca: It’s always nice to be able to try new things. I have an Assam tea this morning from Pekoe Tea in Edinburgh.

John: Impressive. She got it there herself, mine came through the mail. [LAUGHTER] We’ve invited you here today to discuss the second edition of Teaching Effectively with ChatGPT. Since some of our listeners may not have heard our earlier discussion about the first edition of this book, can you provide an overview of the purpose of the book and who is the target audience.

Angela: Thank you so much, John. The main purpose of the book is to provide a guide for educators to understand how ChatGPT and other AI tools can be useful for more effective teaching and more effective learning. Now what our main approach is to provide plenty of examples that are practical, to really demystify what AI looks like and how it can look like in and outside the classroom for learning.

Rebecca: In Chapter Two, you describe three guiding pedagogical principles that you use throughout the book, and these principles we certainly talked about on the podcast before and are great advice to anyone involved in course design, whether or not they’re using generative AI. Can you tell us a little bit about these principles and why they’re so important?

Dan: Sure. So the three key pedagogic principles were meant to give the reader of the book an overview of what are the underpinnings of the pedagogic advice of the book. For those of you who listened to this podcast, you might not be surprised in hearing the first one is to be student centered. That sounds very obvious, but yet we spend a lot more time thinking about what we do in the classroom and less time about what our students are doing in the classroom. We spend more time thinking about what we will cover in a course, rather than what our students will uncover. And so being student centered just means paying very much attention, and the focus of the teaching enterprise is stimulating the learning of our students. So that’s kind of that principle. The second principle is to plan for active learning. I think the two of you in this show have said, many times, there’s ample research suggesting that people don’t learn by just listening to someone telling them stories they learn when they actively engage. And the third one is to begin with the end in mind, and this is a little bit of a different way of saying we use backward design. So the idea we start with, what do we want the students to be able to do or master at the end of every learning experience, and then we design backwards from there. And so the book, very much, has these three principles embedded. A lot of the activities that we propose for educators to do have to do with how they can create more active learning in the classroom, and so the three principles embody a lot of what the book is about.

John: Could you each give us an example or two of ways in which Chat GPT can be used to design new classes or redesign existing courses?

Angela: Absolutely. So I can get started with a very cool use that, Dan and I actually did together when we were redesigning one of the classes on the Bayes’ rule in a statistic class, and there was a specific question or activity that was based on COVID and a positive and negative test and the possibility of a false positive and false negative, and we felt that was already an outdated activity by the time that we were working together, and so we wanted to update it to new examples that felt more appropriate for the times. And we could not pin down what could an idea of a different theme or contextualized activity could be. And we asked ChatGPT to just share what could be like 10 potential topics or things that we could explore that would help the students understand how Bayes’ rules can be valuable in a real-world context. And it gave us an infinite amount of ideas that we would have never guessed just by brainstorming him and I together, and just to give like two specific examples that we liked. One was about art forgery and being able to identify fake art pieces, and the other one that we ended up using was about being able to detect AI plagiarism in student work. And so it’s incredibly helpful for anything that has to do with brainstorming contextualized tests and activities to context that are valuable for students.

Dan: Yeah, so similar to Angela, I can think of several examples in terms of designing course, but just to give a recent one, this is more about designing an assessment, similar to what Angela just mentioned. I created a project for a course… and I’m sure we’re going to talk in a little bit about projects… the syllabus has a lot of things, and there was a question that we had created last year that we wanted to change. And so I uploaded the question to ChatGPT, and I said, “Can you tell me what you perceive to be the learning goals of this question that I just gave you?” And I think it did an amazing job, better than I could have stated them myself. This was very helpful. I think part of it is because it had access to the goals of the course, but I think it was very helpful in helping me be better at interacting with ChatGPT in the refinement of this learning activity. So that’s just like one example. I realized both examples that Angela and I gave are in the realm of assessment, but it turns out to be a very important realm in terms of designing sort of a new session or new course, the book goes over to what I think, still today, is my favorite and maybe Angela’s favorite activity. This was kind of maybe the spark of the book. We were trying to think about an activity surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis. And over two weeks, basically had a conversation with ChatGPT along the lines of, “help me design a better class session on this topic that I don’t know too much about.” After I saw that, I thought this has a potential to be an incredibly useful tool for teachers and learners, as Angela said.

Rebecca: Your first example seems like a really good reminder that we can use tools like this to help implement things like TILT (or transparency in learning and teaching), having it help us be more clear about what the course objectives or assignment objectives are, so that we can then convey that information to students.

Dan: Right. And you might have the reaction, but how can you not know? It’s not that you don’t know, it’s that maybe some of them are subconscious to you. I mean, one of the most useful things that a teacher can have is someone, or in this case, it’s not a person, but put a mirror to what you’re trying to do in the classroom. So that’s why having a colleague come and see you teach is so valuable, because you might do things and you might not realize why you’re doing them, and maybe having someone ask you or sort of give you ideas for why you’re doing them, it’s helpful. The book is based on the premise that AI can be an incredible assistant, but also an incredible thought partner. And I think both of those examples have those two roles being played quite intensively.

Rebecca: One of the other things that you certainly have examples of in the book is the way that ChatGPT can be used during class sessions. Can you give some examples of this?

Dan: Yes, we can give several examples. So, one of them, it’s an example that is described in the book. But our colleague, Mitch Weiss, who teaches at the business school, has a wonderful activity that is about discovering the capabilities of AI, and students use that in the classroom in a case called Storrowed. And so probably not the best use of time here to describe the full activity, but suffice it to say that students are put into two groups, and they’re kind of competing to be able to see who comes up with the best ideas, but they’re able to use AI for proposing some of their ideas. So that seemed like a very interesting one. The book also highlights two examples of using AI to summarize student input in the classroom, and I think that’s an incredibly powerful tool. I think a lot of educators have heard about the one minute paper, the way that it typically worked, at least until not too long ago, was you ask people to give you what was the main idea that they learned, or maybe the muddiest point, or whatever it is, at the end of class. This is incredibly valuable, but normally you would just get out of the classroom and then have to read and sort of think about how it works. And now you can do it in the classroom, live and understand what are the main themes that people are picking up. You can also do it with questions. And then a very exciting use that I experimented with a month ago is with group work. I don’t know how much you have been in situations where you assign students to work in groups, and then 10 minutes later, you’re trying to debrief. But debriefing is a little bit hard because you don’t really know what happened in the groups. You might circulate, but if you circulate, typically, the moment you approach a student group, the conversation changes, so you’re not really listening to what they’re describing. And so what I did is to build a simple custom GPT that did the following. So the students were put into groups, and they were asked to input their answers to the activity in a Google slide. So this was typical use, especially during COVID. You did breakout rooms, everyone fills in a slide. As soon as they’re done doing that, what custom GPT does is it produces four slides for the instructor. So this is in a matter of a minute. And so the first slide has the main themes. So of all the groups you had in the classroom here, the main themes that were emerging. The second slide has particularly novel or interesting ideas that emerge. But not only they tell you the idea, but it also tells you it was group three that came up with this idea. So you can use that in the debrief, “Hey, group three, I noticed you came up with this idea. Can you expand on this?” The third slide tells you about points of contrast or tension between what the groups did, and then the fourth slide gives you some ideas for how you could debrief. And so the fact that all of this is available within one minute of students finishing the group work, I found it to be incredibly empowering to lead a much better debrief discussion. So those are the kinds of uses that I think advance learning in the classroom in a way that it would be very hard to do without a technology like this.

John: You have a chapter discussing how ChatGPT can be used to either design or grade assessments, and there’s been a lot of discussion on this in various social media forums and also in some editorials and articles and so forth, in terms of whether generative AI should be used to create assessments and to grade student work, with some students being concerned that they’re not getting the direct feedback from their professors. Could you talk a little bit about what ways might be appropriate and how this may be helpful.

Dan: So, I would like to separate the question into two parts. One is about designing assessment, and the other one is about giving feedback in terms of assessment. I am convinced that for designing assessment, AI can be incredibly helpful without sacrificing the voice of the instructor or the learning objectives. And the two examples that we gave at the beginning, I think, are suggestive of how can they be used. It can convert you in a much more creative teacher, because you have a thought partner with which to bounce ideas. It can give you feedback on the assessment that you’re doing. My colleague from the business school, Mitch Weiss, again, he has this custom GPT that is like eliminate ambiguity in my exam questions. And so he gives the exam question to the AI tool and essentially “write it in this way so that there’s less ambiguity for students.” So you could imagine ways in which the design of assessments can be improved with the help of AI. I’m not saying we should farm out the design. It’s like, “okay, I’m teaching this class, and now you go, AI, create the assessment, and that’s it.” But I do think, in my mind, whatever drawbacks there are, weighing everything, I think the impact is positive. For providing feedback on assessment, I think you have decided this is a big topic, a lot of controversy about student expectations on assessment and so on. I am not going to tell you that I’m convinced about what the right answer is, but I would say, as we describe in the book, there’’re both benefits and risks associated with doing this. But what I would like to suggest is that what we know from the science of learning is that students benefit from both practice and timely feedback on that practice. So that we know. And so the question to me is, are our students getting enough opportunities to practice and timely feedback? And my sense is the majority of us educators feel that the answer to that question is, no matter how hard we work, it’s very hard to provide timely feedback to students of the sort and in the quantity that they need to really, really make a difference in terms of their skill development. And so what we end up is with assessment strategies that are the most feasible given all the constraints that we face. But I think we’re leaving some value on the table in terms of our students being able to practice. So I’m not suggesting that AI should do all the assessment work for us, but if it could work as a complement to the work that we already do, I think this could potentially be a useful thing. Just to be super concrete, maybe if you had five ways of assessing students in the semester, but you’re only able to grade two because of time constraints or whatever it is, maybe you can use, in a very transparent way, here’s AI to help you provide feedback on the assessment. Now, of course, this has to be done with a lot of care and thought, but we can’t do it by hiding from the students that we’re doing it. And also, I think we need to explain to the students why we’re doing it, and if we’re just saying to ChatGPT, “just give them feedback without our input,” then our students, very justifiably will say, “Well, what are you doing? So I can do that.” So I think there is thought that needs to go into how AI is used to be able to do it. Just to close, we have here the Kennedy School, a course taught by Shard Goel, Teddy Svoronos, and myself, and we have our Teaching Fellow, Calvin Isley. He basically helped us design a system by which the assignments would have a preliminary assessment done by AI, and then our teaching team would take into account that and use it as input for grading the assignments. Students were able to opt in to this pilot. And what I think happened is the students who opted in got more detailed feedback than they would have gotten in a system where we’re just counting on human labor. So, in sum, I’m not saying AI should do everything in providing feedback, but I do think there’s a role.

John: And humans get tired. And if we’re providing feedback on many students, the quality of that feedback may very much vary over time in a way that it wouldn’t if you’re working with an AI tool for assistance and at least providing a starting point.

Dan: For sure. I mean, one of the things we say in the book is that AI has like, two very important virtues: it’s available 24/7, and it has infinite patience, and I don’t know many human beings for whom we can say that.

Rebecca: One of the things that you just highlighted was student practice. And you have a number of chapters in your book about how ChatGPT can help students learn. Can you give us some examples in which ChatGPT can support student learning?

Angela: Absolutely, these were one of the chapters that I was more excited about writing, because when we find many of the books that are there is that they focus a lot on the teaching side of things. But there’s so much that as educators, we can do to just teach students to use ChatGPT in a way that is beneficial for learning. And just to give a couple of examples, the first one I’ll give is in continuation with this idea of practice, we have an example in the book of one student that was studying medicine, and she was learning and preparing for an exam, and as she was finalizing her preparation, she wanted more activities to practice, because she had already completed all of the activities that her teacher provided. And so she just asked ChatGPT, “Can you create more questions? These are some of the questions that I received. Can you generate more questions and then don’t give me the answer? I will give you the answer, and then you will let me know if it’s correct or not.” So it’s just an extension of this practice that, again, it’s one of the things that for educators, it’s hard to provide enough practice opportunities for students because it means generating more questions and more questions that cannot be used for formal assessments. So that’s one possible example. The other possible example, it’s the personalization of learning, and this, again, it’s one of the big moments that for Dan and I, it just sparked our interest even more for what AI could do for learning. And the specific moment was related to time when in one of Dan’s classes, he encouraged his students to learn about risk management strategies before the class itself, and then he asked. The students to share what the conversation with ChatGPT had been like. In addition to that, he nudges students to ask ChatGPT about risk management in a certain way. So for example, sharing what context they had about risk management strategies, etc. And we basically saw very different conversations depending on the student. You had, students that were much more familiar with risk management strategies and the kind of explanations that they received were much more technical, much more detailed, less intuitive for somebody that would be just exposed to this concept. Well, for some students, it was the complete opposite. It was a much more intuitive, just like high level conceptual explanation with lots of examples that could be relatable. And this is something that would be very hard for an educator to replicate, a specific one-on-one explanation that would fit the needs of every single student. So many multiple uses for students that can really help improve learning.

John: In the spring of 2025 we had a reading group on campus that read your book. And just as a little bit of an aside, one of the things that happened is, right at the very beginning, people suggested that people would experiment with something, try it, and then bring it back and report at the next reading group meeting. And that worked really well. It’s a great book for a reading group. But one of the things that surprised people a little bit who had experimented with ChatGPT was the ability to customize it to meet your individual needs. Now some people weren’t able to do that very well if they were using it in a wide variety of applications, but now, with the new edition, you’re able to talk about projects in ChatGPT. Could you talk a little bit about how you can customize ChatGPT in general, and also how you can use projects for a similar sort of purpose?

Angela: Absolutely. So to put it simple, because sometimes I feel it can be hard to get lost in all of these, like features and new releases of ChatGPT. The idea here is that you can customize ChatGPT so that it’s more responsive to your needs or your specific context. And to put this into an example, my specific context, for example, may be I teach an economics course to first grade university students. But the reality is that I don’t use ChatGPT only for my classes. I may use ChatGPT also for other uses. And so what openAI has rolled out in this past year is the possibility to customize the responses of ChatGPT at different levels. The first level is to have instructions that apply to any chat that you open in ChatGPT, and that’s what system instructions do in chat GPT. For example, you can keep this to a very general level, like, “I’m a woman, I’m 30 years old. I do this as a profession. I’m from this country, etc, etc” things that may be relevant. For cases where you may use ChatGPT frequently, but it doesn’t apply to any use of ChatGPT that you do, you may want to choose projects instead, where you may have a project for a specific course that you teach. You may have a project for something that you do frequently with ChatGPT. Perhaps you were talking about travel planning before, like, perhaps you travel plan a lot, and you want to have a project specifically where you can provide instructions around the kind of travel that you like to do and the kind of places that you want to go to and the kind of things that you want to do when you go on traveling, and so that’s what projects allows you to do. It allows you to have instructions that you don’t need to be repeating every time you open up a new chat, but then don’t apply to all of your chats within ChatGPT.

Dan: The only thing I would add to what Angela just said is that not only can you add instructions which are very helpful in customizing, but you can add files, and those files can be incredibly helpful. So, for example, for each of my courses right now, I have not only instructions about teaching philosophy, goals of the course and so on, but also the syllabus and relevant material that I think has helped, as Angela said, the advice that you get from ChatGPT be much more customizable. Back in the old days, and old days here means 2023, when you were writing one chat and then you would begin another chat, it was like two completely independent conversations, and now I think AI is much better at understanding through not just the customizations that we just talked about now, but through the use of memory and so on, it’s much better understanding who you are as a user. I think one aspect of the progress in LLMs, ChatGPT in particular, but I think it’s true for all of them that we have picked up in the second edition of the book, is increased personalization and customization that is now available to a user to be able to get more customized and specific advice from their LLM. And the last thing I want to say is that everything that Angela said is very, very, very, very easy to do. You don’t need to code. You don’t need anything. If you know how to prompt ChatGPT, you can create a project, and it’s as simple as you put in instructions, you put in files, and then you create the chats within that project, that’s all you need to do.

Rebecca: You’ve hinted at some ways of taking advantage of projects. Can you give one or two specific examples of where this could benefit student learning?

Dan: So I think the easiest way Angela mentioned is you can create a project for each of your courses. Once you do that, then a lot of the help that you asked ChatGPT would be useful for creating activities for students, helping you design assessments and so on. So that’s one use of projects. If you want to create something that students consume directly, then you would move from projects to custom GPTs. Custom GPTs can be shared with students and they can interact with it. In the first iteration of custom GPTs that were most popular were the tutor bots, so where you might ask students to interact with a tutor bot, for example, to learn some skills in whatever subject that it is that you teach, but where the instructor was playing kind of a design role, was adding materials and so on. I think those tutor bots continue to be helpful. One of the things I think, I suspect many of us have discovered is that if the tutor bot is not part of the natural workflow of students, then it becomes a little bit harder for them to benefit from it. So if students are using ChatGPT as their AI tool or any other AI tool, it’s going to be hard to move them to the custom GPT or to the tutor bot, unless you sort of have very directed task at them doing that. But there are many, many other ways in which you can use custom GPTs with students. And before we were talking about giving students an opportunity to practice, but imagine you were teaching negotiation, for example, you could imagine, and there are some available out there, bots that allow students to practice negotiations or public presentations or so many other skills. So if you teach any skill that you think benefits from repeated practice and feedback on that practice, I think the potential of AI to help you and your students in that task is immense, and custom GPTs are a way to make this happen. And again, the book is called Teaching Effectively with ChatGPT, so we put our stake in the ground with selecting one LLM, partly because it was most popular sort of tool. But if you’re using some other LLM, like Claude or Gemini, the equivalence of everything we have talked about exists. So Claude has projects. You can build custom GPTs in Gemini, through what they’re calling GEMs and so on. So I think a lot of these companies are all building and competing with each other in this space.

John: And in addition to providing those tutor bots, you can also design them to help you with course design, things that will generate things in the TILT framework, for example, or make suggestions for adding more active learning activities. Pretty much any of the things that you talk about in your book, if it’s going to be done repeatedly, could be turned into a custom GPT. And your book was really good at providing them, that was a really popular chapter with the reading group.

Dan: Thank you. I just want to say one thing. So since the first edition of the book, projects became a thing, and I would say, I think building custom GPTs is relatively easy, but if you’re only going to use that tool for yourself, then building projects is an even easier way to accomplish the goal. Obviously, custom GPTs have the advantage that they’re shareable, so you can share not just with students, but with colleagues and so on. But if you’re getting started and are feeling somewhat intimidated with how do I do all this stuff, projects is a very, very natural step up from your ad hoc use of ChatGPT.

Rebecca: There’s still a lot of faculty who maybe would prefer to ban student use of AI or focus their efforts on trying to detect student AI use. Are there any ways of reliably detecting AI use?

Dan: So I’m not a computer scientist, but the ones I speak with give me pause that we will ever be able to really do this at a level of reliability that suggests that we can take action on this. My general sense is that this is a lost battle in the battle of an instructor against students. I think students always win, is my sense. If this is the battle that we’re fielding, we’re not going to win. I think we have to do differently. But just to give you a sense of for why I think it’s so hard, is that now AI is so embedded in everything that we do, that I think it’s going to be very hard. Back in the old days, again, 2023, you could ask students, okay, go to ChatGPT and then have a conversation and then give me the transcript. But now it’s embedded in the things that we do. It’s auto complete things in Word and so on. And more importantly is that you could, as a student or as a human being, produce an essay by yourself. You created all these ideas, and then you give it to ChatGPT and say, “Please improve the clarity of my writing.” That’s all you’re asking it. It will add a few em-dashes and a few words, and then everyone will say, “this was written by ChatGPT.” And you might decide, as an instructor, particularly if you teach writing, that even the use that I just described should not be allowed. But I’m going to suggest that at least for some subjects, that use is fine. And if that use is fine, an AI detector is going to say that this was created by AI. I think we’re in trouble.

John: Since the first edition of your book, openAI has released ChatGPT versions 4 and 5 more recently. You mentioned projects, but what are some of the other changes that have been added to ChatGPT since then?

Angela: Great question. So projects, as you very well mentioned, is one of the main features that was released. There’s another very interesting one, which has to do with the models that are available within ChatGPT. So before ChatGPT 5, there were multiple models available, as most people in the audience would know, where there was a basic default model, which was valuable for most of the tasks. And then there was a deep research model that is valuable for in-depth, multi-step, more complex tasks that require time to think and process before being able to generate an output. So this can be useful, for example, to summarize academic research, to create classes or provide feedback on longer documents, anything that is more complex than the average task. Now, what used to happen is that experienced users knew about this model, and they would change the model that they wanted depending on the task that they were wanting to do, but non-experienced users would just default to the basic model and would not be using the most out of the capabilities of ChatGPT and so with the release of ChatGPT 5, one of the key developments was that ChatGPT 5 automatically selects the model that best fits the task at hand. And so this is a great improvement in terms of being able to really put at the service of users all of the capabilities that ChatGPT has. One of the important things is that when it was first released, there was a big controversy, because some people claimed or complained about the fact that ChatGPT was not able to always optimize for the best model, and they wanted to retain that agency. And since then, openAI has backtracked and still provides everybody the ability to be able to choose the specific model that they want to use.

Dan: We’ve already alluded to this, but to me, a big development in the last year or so is the ability to customize and personalize your experience, not just through projects, through memory. and other things that we go into in the book. In fact, the chapter that we used to call Creating Custom GPTs, we’ve now broadened the title of that chapter to include many other ways in which you could customize and personalize your experience and that of your students through the use of this feature. So that, to me, feels like obviously ChatGPT 5 is better than ChatGPT 4, but back then, now there are these reasoning models that are automatically selected and so on, is useful. But the thing that you will notice more as a user, I think, is the potential for customization. And obviously the reasoning models can be very, very helpful for more complex tasks, deep research, which Angela briefly mentioned, is another important advancement for much more complex tasks.

Rebecca: As we’ve noted in this conversation and also in your book, generative AI platforms change quickly. [LAUGHTER] And when we talked to you in the first edition, you mentioned having a companion website that you would continue to update. Are these updates something that are going to continue with this edition?

Angela: Absolutely, that’s one of the main advantages of the companion side, the ability to be able to update it. As we know this is a fast evolving space, and that we felt that was a good format to be able to digest information. But one of the main inconveniences is that it’s not life, and so users and readers and listeners can always go back to the companion side for more up-to-date information.

Dan: And the companion side has all the prompts that were used in the book, including, for those educators that shared with us their prompts behind their custom GPTs, they’re also there. The site is freely available, and then it also has a lot of the examples from educators.

Rebecca: And we’ll make sure we have that link in our show notes.

John: And people found it really valuable when we’re doing the reading group to have all those examples there so that they could modify them for their own needs. We always end by asking: “What’s next?”

Dan: Well, I want to say something that’s next that is, thanks to Angela. So I think we are maybe one or two weeks away. Hopefully by the time you publish this show, it will be out. We have a edition of the book in Spanish that Angela gets all the credit for making it happen. So we hope that means that more readers around the world will be able to use some of the insights from the book. If you’re a listener and want the book to be available in some other language, let us know, and we’ll try to see if we can maybe collaborate with you and make it happen.

John: And Angela, what’s next for you?

Angela: Getting on a plane, flying back home for the weekend, and getting that book ready.

John: Well, thank you. It’s been great talking to both of you.

Angela: Thank you so much for having us. It’s always a pleasure to come and have tea with both of you and to talk a bit about AI developments in teaching and learning. So always a pleasure. And thank you so much. Hopefully we’ll see you again sometime soon.

Rebecca: Safe travels.

Angela: Thank you so much.

Dan: Thank you.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

John: Editing Assistance provided by Madison Lee.

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415. One Classroom at a Time

Posted in accessibility, assessment, authentic learning, diversity, engagement, equity, evidence-based practices, growth mindset, higher education, inclusion, learning, pedagogy, retrieval practice, teaching
October 15, 2025

Students have varied levels of preparation for traditional types of classes and assessments used in colleges. In this episode, David Gooblar joins us to discuss a variety of instructional strategies that we can adopt to help all students succeed.

David is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa, a regular contributor to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the creator of Pedagogy Unbound, and the author of The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You About College Teaching. His most recent book, One Classroom at a Time: How Better Teaching Can Make College More Equitable, was released in August 2025 by Harvard University Press.

Show Notes

  • Gooblar, D. (2025). One Classroom at a Time: How Better Teaching Can Make College More Equitable. Harvard University Press.
  • Gooblar, D. (2019). The missing course: Everything they never taught you about college teaching. Harvard University Press.
  • Cohen, G. L., Steele, C. M., & Ross, L. D. (1999). The mentor’s dilemma: Providing critical feedback across the racial divide. Personality and social psychology bulletin, 25(10), 1302-1318.
  • Yeager, D. S., Purdie-Vaughns, V., Garcia, J., Apfel, N., Brzustoski, P., Master, A., … & Cohen, G. L. (2014). Breaking the cycle of mistrust: Wise interventions to provide critical feedback across the racial divide. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(2), 804.
  • Canning, E. A., White, M., & Davis, W. B. (2024). Growth mindset messages from instructors improve academic performance among first-generation college students. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 23(2), ar14.
  • Elizabeth Canning (2021). Faculty Mindset. Tea for Teaching podcast. Episode 212. November 3.

Transcript

John: Students have varied levels of preparation for traditional types of classes and assessments used in colleges. In this episode, we explore a variety of instructional strategies that we can adopt to help all students succeed.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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Rebecca: Our guest today is David Gooblar. He is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa, a regular contributor to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the creator of Pedagogy Unbound, and the author of The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You About College Teaching. His most recent book, One Classroom at a Time: How Better Teaching Can Make College More Equitable, was released in August 2025 by Harvard University Press. Welcome back, David.

David: Thank you so much. I’m very excited to talk with you today.

John: We’re very happy to be able to talk with you again. Our teas today are:… David, are you drinking any tea?

David: I am. I’m drinking an I love lemon.

Rebecca: I have a Jasmine green today,

John: And I have a tea in my pocket, but because my meeting ran late, I am drinking diet Pepsi.

Rebecca: Oh, John. [LAUGHTER]

John: I think it’s only the second time in the podcast I haven’t been drinking tea, so

David: I won’t take it personally. [LAUGHTER]

John: I have it here. In fact, it was a tea that was given to us by one of our listeners in France, but I’ll save that for next time. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: So we invited you here today to discuss one classroom at a time. Can you tell us the origin story of the book?

David: Sure, back in probably 2019 I was working for the Center for Advancement of Teaching at Temple University. And as part of that job, I was doing a lot of reading of pedagogy research, and I was, of course, coming across a lot of research on ways to close achievement gaps within the college classroom. There was a lot of work being done on how to help marginalized students succeed. And it struck me as I was reading all this that I wasn’t seeing this sort of knowledge base being applied in the work of DEI offices across the country. It was a kind of high time for DEI offices. There was a lot of action, particularly starting in 2020. Universities, responding to Black Lives Matter and responding to a lot of activism, looking to reform universities, and so DEI offices were doing a lot to try to change the cultures within their institutions. What I wasn’t seeing was DEI offices doing really anything to change how professors teach. And that sort of contrast, looking at this sort of growing base of knowledge that the way that we teach can actually change student outcomes versus the part of our universities sort of devoted to remedying the inequities in student outcomes, sort of ignoring that. That was the kind of conundrum that started my research and really got me thinking about how can I close this gap, how can I communicate with the people who need to hear what they can do to help their marginalized students succeed?

John: Colleges have done a lot to recruit a more diverse student base, and we know that education can be a really effective way of escaping from poverty, but has that been as successful for the marginalized students that you’ve mentioned as it had been for earlier cohorts of students?

David: Absolutely not, no. So we still have really striking gaps, certainly the sort of more famous gaps that we know are between white students and black and brown students, where the gaps in graduation rate are essentially stagnant for the past 30 years, but similarly stubborn gaps exist between well off students and economically insecure students. If you look at students from the top family income quartile, 69% of them graduate within six years. That number for the lowest quartile is 26%. First-gen students are twice as likely to drop out within the first three years as their continuing generation peers. These are things that we know about, but there’s also a lot of research that suggests, not only are we not closing these gaps, we may be making them worse, which is kind of shocking to think about, but there are studies that look at the performance of marginalized students and control for pre-college characteristics like high school quality or pre-college academic performance, and find that they say low-income students still perform worse than you would expect and perform worse than their more well off peers. So I still think there’s lots that we can do, and it’s not for lack of trying, but it is, I think, lack of trying to influence what happens in classrooms.

Rebecca: So you talk a little bit about marginalized students entering into college, and we also know that a lot of these students have a lot of social inequities that impact them before they arrive at our institutions. The focus of your book, though, is, of course, on what happens in the classroom. Can you talk a little bit about why you decided to focus on in the classroom instead of what happens before?

David: Yeah, so part of that is that point that I just made, that I do think that there are things that a lot of colleges are doing that are actually making inequities worse, but the main reason is that in my work, I write to faculty members, I write to professors, and so my focus is really trying to be practical. What can we do? It would not make sense for me to advise professors to put their focus on housing policy or put their focus on ending racism. We know that most of the inequality that we confront in our classrooms comes from far afield of our classrooms, that our students are coming to us from really disparate backgrounds. They have all sorts of things going on in their lives, and most of the causes of the inequality that we see we can’t do anything about. And so that’s really dispiriting. So I wanted to sort of look at, well, what can we do? What are the things that we can change in how we teach that might actually change the trajectory of our students? I do think that most professors are hoping to transform their students’ lives, even if that’s a sort of modest transformation, of transforming the way they see their subject, or something more capacious, of transforming the course of their lives. I do think that we’re hoping to change our students for the better, and so thinking of, well, we can’t get to the root of these problems, but there are things that we can do. I think that really helped me sort of focus on what to write about and what to promote in the book.

Rebecca: I know it can be really frustrating to faculty to always talk at a higher level of like, what are all the underlying causes, but having something actionable [LAUGHTER] is really helpful.

David: Exactly.

John: And when we have students in our classroom, we have to deal with the students we have. We can’t go back and undo their past experiences with education and inequality and so forth. So we don’t want to ignore the students that we’re currently dealing with. And in the first chapter of your book, you call it imaginary students and imaginary classrooms. What are some of the ways in which faculty preconceptions differ from the reality they experience in classrooms, and what causes this disconnect between faculty expectations and the actual reality they’re working with

David: The broad strokes of the imaginary students problem, as I think of it, is that most of us imagine our students to be more privileged than they are. That’s the sort of broad thing. There’s lots of specifics into that, but generally, our students are worse off economically, aren’t as white as we think they are, or will be before we meet them, have all sorts of aspects of their identity that make their path through life trickier than what we imagine they’ll be. There’s lots of reasons for this. One of the sort of more, I think, persuasive things that I came across in trying to figure out why we have this kind of disconnect is the idea that within the sort of hierarchy of universities and what we think of as university quality, but maybe we should better think of it as university prestige. Almost every professor in this country teaches at an institution lower on the totem pole than where they were trained. It’s the nature of our industry that you get a PhD, and then you end up getting a job, usually somewhere with less prestige than your graduate institution. Only a small proportion of American colleges and universities offer doctorates. This is one part of it. What this means is that to the extent that professors are trained how to teach, they’re trained on a more privileged sub-population of college students than the ones they actually teach. So that’s one big issue. Another big issue is that for the most part, we don’t train professors to teach. This was, of course, the subject of my last book, The Missing Course. And so what this means, practically, is that I teach very much like my professors taught, because I learned by watching them, and they, of course, teach by the way their professors taught, but my professors taught a student body that was far more privileged than our student body. Now I think it’s easy to forget the sort of diversification of the American higher education system is actually a really recent phenomenon, as late as 1990, which…I don’t know about you, but I remember 1990… 8 out of 10 American college students were white. Right now, that’s 55% and dropping. And so the sort of our sense of what a college student is and what a college student can do is sort of based on an earlier version of who college students were. And so this comes out in all sorts of ways. One of the sort of more visible ways that we see this disconnect is in the amount of time we expect students to be able to put to our classes. And I can sort of feel every faculty member that’s listening to this nod about this. Because everyone is concerned about students not reading as much, not devoting as much time to their studies as possible. My students work 20, 30, sometimes 40 hours a week on top of being full-time students. An astonishing number of my students take seven courses a semester. Many of them have family members they take care of, many of them actually volunteer. They’re very, very busy. And when we have surveys of how students spend their time, typically, although we expect them to spend two hours outside of class for every one credit hour in class, the surveys suggest that it’s about half that that students spend, on average, about one hour outside of class doing schoolwork for every credit hour they take. Now I’m not suggesting that we lower our standards or even that we assign less work, but we’re not going to help our students succeed if we don’t acknowledge the reality that they don’t look like what we expect them to. So that’s one of the more visible ways that our students are kind of having more difficult lives, to put it bluntly, than what we may expect them to have.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about or maybe provide an example of a way that a faculty member can support students that have all these tugs on their time and attention?

David: Yeah, well, a couple of things. The first thing that I always try to do is acknowledge it. I do think that we can actually achieve a lot by letting students know that we understand that we are one important thing among many in their lives, and if we don’t treat them like our thing is the most important thing, and they have nothing else weighing on their time, we can sort of get to a better level of communication with them, where I can make the case to them that doing work for my class is going to be valuable to them. So that’s the sort of the case, or the psychological approach you can take. The other thing that I think is, like the easiest thing to do, it’s not that easy, is really focus on taking advantage of class time. Like, I don’t know what many of my students do outside of the classroom. That is their lives. That is their time. And they may have quite different and unequal circumstances affecting the amount of time and attention they can give to the work that I want them to do. I do know that they have to come to class, and so this isn’t me saying get rid of homework, but I’m much more aware of using class time to have students do the work that I want them to do. I no longer think it’s a responsible thing to just lecture at students and give them information. I want to take advantage of them being together, of being in a social environment where they can do work with my guidance and with the feedback of myself and their peers. So that’s one thing that I really think about when thinking about the inequalities of time and attention that we see.

John: Marginalized students often experience some degree of imposter syndrome or stereotype threat. What are some strategies we can do to break that down to create a better sense of belonging for all of our students?

David: Sure, this is one of the most well established psychological barriers that anyone that faces in academic domains, stereotype threat, the sort of concern that you may be the target of a negative stereotype, consumes part of the brain and takes away cognitive resources from the important intellectual work we hope students will do. So, one of the sort of most effective broad strategies we can put into place to combat stereotype threat is inviting students to share a broader part of their lives in our classes. One of the things that we know is that students who suffer from or who are targets of stereotypes around academic performances, those stereotypes can be mitigated if students feel that they’re not just their academic selves in the class. If students are reminded that they are not just students, but sisters and brothers and children of parents, that they are friends, that they are soccer players, that they are interested in crocheting, whatever it is, they’ll have a broader base of self integrity, of self confidence to fend off stereotypes. It’s not that they’re going to stop understanding that they might be stereotyped. It’s going to have less power because they’re not just going to see themselves as students within their classes. And a lot of how students see themselves within our classes is based on how they think we see them. So if they believe that we as professors see them as more than just their academic performance, they’ll be more likely to have that broad base to work from. So part of that is conveying an understanding that students have a lot going on in their lives, but also there’s lots of little things you can do to invite students to share parts of their lives in class. I do this thing that I know a lot of professors do, that I call question roll, where to start the class. I always ask students a question, and everyone has to answer it. And for me, this question almost always has nothing to do with what we’re going to talk about in class, and it is a no stakes, no wrong answers. Type of question I’ll ask, what’s the first thing you wanted to be when you grew up as a kid? What’s the best thing to eat for lunch in Iowa City? What’s the best fruit? There’s a lot of food related ones, but it’s a way to ease students into class, get them talking before there’s any stakes, but also, in a kind of subtle way, it allows them to share who they are, without them even sort of realizing that that’s what they’re doing. And what I’ll find is that I start every class with this, and that if I ever forget to do it, my students are completely up in arms and like they cannot imagine starting class without doing question roll if I didn’t ask my question. So they really get into it, even though at the beginning of the semester, they’ll think it’s silly and they’ll resist answering questions. It kind of lays down that precedent that in this class, yes, we’re going to do hard work. Yes, we’re going to try to understand difficult concepts, but we’re all people coming from various places and that we’re going to have a more successful time if we don’t deny those parts of ourselves. So I really sort of believe in this sort of broad strategy of trying to invite students in, invite more parts of students. That, to me, is the kind of subtle thing, or a broad thing that can show itself in lots of different ways throughout a semester, but I do think that if we can think about part of our job as inviting students to share parts of their selves that may not be obvious to them as relevant to their academic selves, that we can really help to mitigate stereotype threat for them.

Rebecca: One of the things that we’ve talked about on many episodes of Tea for Teaching is growth mindset, and that’s something that I know you cover in your book as well. Can you discuss some strategies that help nurture a growth mindset in our students?

David: Sure, one of the more interesting things I learned in doing the work for this book, I of course, had read a lot about growth mindset, and I’m a parent, so I understand all the research into the encouragement of a growth mindset in individuals, but one of the things that I saw is that a lot of the big studies that look at the effects of promoting a growth mindset in the students, the results aren’t as good when the environment students are in work against the growth mindset. So when their peers have a fixed mindset, and/or when there’s a school culture that has a fixed mindset, any promotion of a growth mindset within an individual is kind of blunted, which makes a lot of sense to me. And so what I hope to do in the chapter I have on growth mindset is move away from the idea of growth mindset as sort of teaching students that their brain is a muscle. I think there’s a kind of limitation to sort of telling students to have a growth mindset, and we should focus more on the signals we send to students about the environment of our classrooms. That much more important is looking closely at the way that we do things in our courses and asking ourselves, “Is this focused on student growth, or is this focused on sorting out the better students from the worst students?” So I think about how we talk to students in our syllabi, how we literally talk to students in classes. Are we focused on persuading them that we’re working for them, that the course is designed to help them grow, rather than persuading them the course is going to root out the people who don’t have it, or look to your left, look to your right, one of you won’t be here, or even sort of the purposes of assessment. If we can explain to students that assessment is really important for teachers to understand how students are doing so that we can help them better. Students generally assume, and a lot of professors talk about it like this, that assessment is to sort out whether they know it or not, to give them a grade. And of course, that’s part of what we do, but to me, that takes a back seat to the formative aspect of assessment. The main purpose of assessment, for me, is to see how students are doing, because I want to help them get better. So those kind of more sort of environmental aspects of a class, I think, make a bigger difference in promoting growth mindset than talking about it directly and promoting it to students a sort of individual version of that, one of the sort of strategies that I think goes along with this idea of a growth mindset culture, is something called wise feedback. Came from research by Jeffrey Cohen and his colleagues that looks at particularly how we give feedback to students on their work. They looked at student writing, but I think it can be for any kind of student work. And essentially, wise feedback has three aspects, where you start by invoking high standards. You sort of say, I’m giving you this feedback because I have very high standards for you, either because of this class is really difficult and hard and I’m trying to bring you to a high level, or because I believe that you’re capable of meeting these things, following that invocation of high standards always has to be encouragement. So I’m giving this feedback because I have very high standards, and I know that you can get there, that you can work on it, and then you sort of fill out that encouragement, or you prove that encouragement by giving specific guidance as to what students can do. So most of us, I worry, have been sort of taught by experience and trained to give feedback to justify our grade. I think of particularly the early career instructors I work with, who are very concerned with, for good reason, being challenged about grades, and so their feedback they give to students on paper, essentially, is, here’s why I’m giving you the B minus. Instead, if we think about this kind of growth mindset approach to feedback, here’s where I think you can get, here’s why I believe you can do it, here’s how you can get there. I think that’s a much more effective way to get feedback, where you’re actually teaching through your feedback.

John: You just noted that one of the issues is that it’s not just something you can do in your class with students or encourage them to have a growth mindset if that’s not what they’re observing, and one of the studies you cite is a study done by Elizabeth Canning and colleagues, who looked at the impact of faculty mindset on student learning outcomes. Could you talk a little bit about that study?

David: An amazing study they looked at science professors at a big midwest University, and I think they surveyed all these faculty members about their mindsets, not their students mindsets, but the faculty members mindsets. And they found that the faculty members with a fixed mindset had much larger achievement gaps in their classes than the faculty mindsets with a growth mindset. This was independent of faculty identity, by the way. So this was even the case for faculty with marginalized identities themselves. So it seems that, at least as I interpret it, that our students are taking cues from us a lot of the time about what’s expected of them and what the course is about. And so if we have a growth mindset, if we come at the world with a sort of theory of mind that people can improve, that people can get better with practice. Our students will notice that, and they’ll take what we tell them in a constructive way, in a way that they’ll actually work at something. If they suspect from the way we talk, from the way we carry ourselves, from the way we structure our courses, that we actually have a fixed mindset, that we believe that generally talent is doled out somewhere, and either you have it or you don’t, they’ll get the message that when they struggle early on in a semester, that there’s essentially not much they can do. And so I do think it really matters how we talk about our subjects, classes, how we talk about our disciplines, how we talk about what student work is for. There’s been really interesting research done on the concept of brilliance, and certain disciplines value brilliance in their fields. Philosophy is one that comes to mind a lot, that if you survey faculty members about what it takes to succeed in this field, philosophy and some other fields, for sure, rank being brilliant really high. You need to really be smart to do well in this class. Well, research has shown that those disciplines that value brilliance most highly have the biggest gaps between privileged students and marginalized students in their fields; they have the fewest black PhDs, for example, the fewest women PhDs. And so how we think about what it takes to succeed in our field really matters to students, and whether we tell them it explicitly or not, it comes across to them.

Rebecca: So we’ve talked about a few different challenges related to inequity that our students face, and your book explores many others. Can you talk about a few more examples of strategies that can be used to promote more equity and student success?

David: One of the sort of best supported strategies for what certainly used to be called inclusive teaching, I don’t know if people still use that phrase, is structure. There were a couple of really huge, really sort of ironclad surveys about the inclusion of structure into large lecture classes, and how that helped to narrow gaps that were really, really stubborn, and nobody seems to know what structure is, so I’ll explain it a little bit. Structure in the context of educational research is really just having students do stuff. It’s the opposite of a lecture, where all students have to do is sit and listen to a lecture. Structure is where you make students answer questions before the lecture, where you put them in groups and talk about the concept, where you do a survey in class and have students respond to it, where you have students do writing in class. It’s structuring class time so that students have things to do for their learning. And so we know that that is really effective, particularly for marginalized students. One of the reasons why this helps is because privileged students need less from us than marginalized students. One thing that privileged students have that marginalized students don’t have is a positive experience with school. They like school much more than marginalized students do. They’ve had a good experience. They know how to be good students… I’m speaking very broadly, of course… but on the whole, and they have more resources to help them with that. And so a class period where all students have to do is sit and take notes and do the work themselves, is going to favor those students who are good at being students, and it’s going to disadvantage those students who have had a less positive experience with school, who have fewer resources to help them out, with less time to do the work. So the more that we can structure class time is what I was talking about, taking advantage of class time, the more that we can help those students. I’ve also sort of been convinced that the best kind of structure is transparent and predictable. Transparency really helps students for lots of reasons. I think part of it is that growth mindset piece, that if we explain to students why we’re doing what we’re doing, we will most likely persuade them that what we’re doing is to help them learn, which we can’t take for granted that they believe. And the predictability piece, I think, is really interesting. There’s been really, I think, provocative and powerful research done on the value of taking high-stakes exams, and instead of giving, say, two or three exams over the course of semester, dividing up the points you’d give to that and giving students weekly exams, weekly quizzes, and where you ask about the same material, you just do it more often. This strategy seems to really help economically insecure students, and there’s some sort of disagreement as to why this helps, but one of the reasons why I think it helps is that economically insecure students are used to and good at focusing on pressing concerns. We know a lot about how economically insecure students struggle with long-term planning. What they’re good at is short-term planning. Living in near poverty means that you have to focus on pressing needs, because it’s a life of instability and scarcity. And so if the task is study for this quiz on Thursday rather than study for an exam next month, we’re going to help those students who have fewer resources to do that kind of long-term planning, the long term thinking that is involved in preparing for a midterm or an exam in a month or two. So thinking of our structure as, yes, having students do stuff, but wherever possible, make it transparent, so that students always know why we’re asking them to do the work we’re asking them to do, and if possible, predictable, so students can sort of count on our classes as being a reliable source of support and help in a world that is less than reliable for them.

John: So one of the things your book addresses that’s often ignored in many books about effective teaching is a focus on student disability. Can you talk a little bit about this chapter and some recommendations on what institutions and what faculty can do to help create a more supportive environment for students with disabilities?

David: It’s one of my favorite parts of the book, partly because I learned a lot, and so we know that disabled students struggle in our institutions, that they graduate at a much lower rate than their able bodied peers, and that the numbers we do have about their success are probably under selling the problem, because something close to a half to 1/3 of students with disabilities actually report their disability to their institution. So we know that plenty of students, even plenty of students who get institutional support in high school, aren’t telling their institutions in college, and so aren’t getting the support they need, and aren’t getting recorded in these studies. What I did in the course of my research was I kind of looked at the history of disabled students in the academy, and I found, probably unsurprisingly, that the Academy had to be sort of dragged kicking and screaming to care of and educate disabled students. It was only by force of law in the 1970s that American institutions of higher education began admitting disabled students in large numbers and admitting them into mainstream classrooms. But going over that history, which was of course, also the history of the creation of Student Disability Services offices and the accommodation system really made me think of how we take for granted this system that we really shouldn’t accept as being the way things should be. Essentially American colleges and universities were told that there was this new population of students with different needs coming into the academy, and that they had a mandate to give them as good an education as everybody else, and that was an opportunity to tell professors in particular, look, you’re going to get a lot of new students with different needs. Maybe you should change the way you teach. Maybe you should change the way that you approach your students, because your students are going to have some different needs. We didn’t do that. We didn’t do that at all. We didn’t touch the center of our institutions at all, in terms of what I think of as the center of our institutions, our classrooms. Instead, we created an office on the margins of our institutions, and a system that too often allows professors to change very little about how they teach. In fact, seems designed to allow you and I to change very little about how we teach, and even if we look at the language that universities use around accommodations, it very much is about students have a right to an accommodation, but only if it doesn’t interrupt the educational standards, are very often the way they’re phrased, and I just don’t understand what educational standards could be if they’re not helping all of our students learn. And so this idea that we can help certain students, but only if it doesn’t interfere with some vague sense of standard that is unconnected with helping our students that I just don’t understand. And so I really want faculty members to sort of rethink how they approach a class before they meet their students. We very often think of our disabled students as an exception, as something that comes after the fact. We meet our students, we tell them the syllabus, we tell them the way it’s going to be, and then you start to meet some disabled students who say, by the way, I have an accommodation request, and you make an exception for them. So I’m very much drawn to, of course, Universal Design for Learning, which is, of course, a long time, broad approach to teaching, it comes from many disability activists, that seeks to, before we meet our students, design our classes so they’ll work for everybody. This is an ideal. It’s not easy to do, but it’s the right approach, rather than pretending that all of our students are able bodied and then being surprised every time that we get X number of disabled students asking for a change. So I go into a lot more detail in the book, but that’s one of the reasons why I love writing despite how much I hate writing, is that sometimes you can learn something. Is that actually doing this research really opened my eyes to kind of what we take for granted about the place of disabled students on campus and how the system seems set up to cast them as exceptions. In my opinion, that underlies a lot of their struggles to succeed.

Rebecca: It’ll be interesting to see how the updated regulations to Title II of the ADA, which addresses public institutions, helps move this work along, because it does require this proactive approach around access, especially around digital technology.

David: Yeah, I don’t have high hopes, but I do have hopes.

Rebecca: So we focus a lot on in-person classes. Can you talk a little bit about the relationship of the contents of your book to online classes.

David: The reason why I mostly address in-person classes is because that’s most of my experience. I am skeptical of a lot of online education. I know that there’s a lot of people who’ve done really great work, and there’s a sense in which sometimes that online educators have had to focus on some of these issues before people in person have had to, particularly around generating good community, where you sort of have to work harder. I do hope that all the principles that I advance will work in sort of any classroom. I just think that we do faculty and students a disservice if we pretend that online education isn’t harder. I think it’s harder. I do think that we are doing people work, care work, and that good teaching has to do with forming relationships with our students and helping them as human beings. I used to have this joke when I worked for a teaching center when people would come in for advice about their teaching. I’d say half jokingly, all right, I want you to imagine that this is your student, and you’re their teacher, and you’re trying to help them. I do think that sometimes we sort of get away from the idea that these are people that we have relationships with, they’re professional relationships, they’re educational relationships, they’re relationships. I think that that relationship is harder to see in an online environment, at least it is for me, and so it takes more work to nurture and make work. It certainly can work, but it’s harder.

Rebecca: Challenging, both for the students and for the faculty. [LAUGHTER] It goes both ways.

John: We always end with the question: what’s next?

David: Well, what’s next for me is, I’ve just been recently made Director of Programming at Iowa called Gen Ed. Lit is what we call ti, general education literature. It’s a class offered by the English department that every undergrad at Iowa, except for English majors, has to take. So about 3000 students every year take it, 150 sections, something like 60 or 70 instructors. Most of them are graduate instructors, and my role is I oversee this course, and I’m a supervisor of all of these instructors. So I took the position because I’m really passionate about training new instructors and helping people learn how to teach better. And so for me, it’s an opportunity to put a lot of the ideas that I’ve been thinking about and writing about for years into practice with people who are actually on the front lines, which is a terrible metaphor, but I’ll use it anyway. But teaching our undergrads, and in particular in this course, teaching students who, for the most part, haven’t chosen to be in the class, which is, as you know, one of the more challenging teaching challenges that we face. And so I’m really excited about helping new instructors find their feet and helping figure out, particularly at this time, where everyone is worried about AI, helping to figure out how to teach literary reading skills to a generation that I think could really benefit from developing them.

John: And a generation that spends much less time reading than prior generations. So it’s a nice challenge to be addressing and working on it, and I hope it’s successful, and maybe, if so, you can share that more broadly so we can all improve this.

Rebecca: Yeah, definitely sounds like a challenge that might keep you busy for a little bit anyway. [LAUGHTER] Well, thanks again for joining us and sharing your work.

David: Well, it’s been my pleasure. Thank you so much for the work that you do and for talking with me today.

John: Thank you. We’re looking forward to future conversations with you.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

John: Editing assistance provided by Madison Lee.

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414. Federal Policy Impacts Education

Posted in diversity, equity, higher education, learning, teaching
October 8, 2025

The U.S. higher education system has been a primary source of research that fuels innovation in science and industry, provides students from low-income communities opportunity to escape from poverty, and enriches the lives of graduates. In this episode, Rebecca Winthrop joins us to discuss how changes in federal policy are affecting the U.S. educational system and, ultimately, our society.

Rebecca is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, where her research focuses on education globally. Rebecca leads the Brookings Global Task Force on AI in Education and co-leads the Family Engagement in Education Network. In addition to her work with many other global education initiatives, Rebecca has served as the U.N. Secretary General’s Global Education First Initiative’s Technical Advisory Group and served as co-lead for the Learning Metrics Task Force with the UNESCO Institute of Statistics. Rebecca is also a lecturer at Georgetown University and, with Jenny Anderson, the co-author of The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: The U.S. higher education system has been a primary source of research that fuels innovation in science and industry, provides students from low-income communities opportunity to escape from poverty, and enriches the lives of graduates. In this episode, we explore how changes in federal policy are affecting the U.S. educational system and, ultimately, our society.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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John: Our guest today is Rebecca Winthrop. She is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, where her research focuses on education globally. Rebecca leads the Brookings Global Task Force on AI in Education and co-leads the Family Engagement in Education Network. In addition to her work with many other global education initiatives, Rebecca has served as the U.N. Secretary General’s Global Education First Initiative’s Technical Advisory Group and served as co-lead for the Learning Metrics Task Force with the UNESCO Institute of Statistics. Rebecca is also a lecturer at Georgetown University and, with Jenny Anderson, the co-author of The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better, which we talked about on an earlier episode of the podcast. Welcome back, Rebecca.

Rebecca W.: Lovely to be here. Thanks.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are: Rebecca, are you drinking any tea today?

Rebecca W.: I’m not drinking any tea because I’m at the office, beavering away, and I have a cup of water next to me. But this morning, I had a turmeric chai tea, which was delicious.

Rebecca: That sounds delightful.

Rebecca W.: … and ostensibly good for me and my immune system. [LAUGHTER] We’ll see.

John: I have a Tea Forte black currant tea today.

Rebecca W.: Oh, yum, black currant.

Rebecca: I have a English afternoon, because I need some energy. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca W.: Oh, that sounds right. It is the afternoon when we’re recording, post lunch.

Rebecca: Need a little boost. [LAUGHTER]

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss the rather dramatic changes that have occurred in the federal government’s relationship to U.S. education institutions at all levels. In a February 26, 2025 Brookings Commentary that you co-authored with Emily Markovich Morris and Sweta Shaw, you argue that this administration’s policies at the very beginning of the administration were already beginning to weaken the United States global competitive edge through its dramatic cuts to the US Department of Education, USAID and federal grants that support education. Let’s begin with the cuts to the Department of Education. What have been some of the consequences of the funding and staffing cuts at the U.S. Department of Education?

Rebecca W.: Well, the big picture that I’m most worried about is the U.S. federal government, with all of our tax dollars, who are US taxpayers, not necessarily even citizens, non-citizens pay taxes, plenty of them… have traditionally invested a lot in research and development, which is educational, enterprise and learning, and we have been for many years, and I have to say I have been very proud myself, as an American born here and raised here, of being a beacon of inquiry, investigation, creativity, innovation that is powered by our education system. Yes, our K-12 is a feeder, but especially our higher education system, it’s long been seen as one of the best in the world, and that is really undercut by, I would say, a very, very chaotic and not well organized sort of plan of sort of undermining the programs in closing or shuttering many of the offices in the Department of Education, and it’s been fascinating to see. It has just been very chaotic. So for example, early on, the Department of Ed’s Office of Technology was closed, and then shortly thereafter, an executive order came out saying that we should push technology into schools. And oops, the Department of Education, who actually that team was probably the team who knew how to do it well, weren’t involved because they were disbanded. It went to other sources. So I’m not sure there is some master grand plan. Of course, there is the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint, which is fairly high level, but there’s a lot of big things in there, but I think that the general approach is to burn the house down. And I think the goal of burning the house down is to try to then come and rebuild something else in a likeness in which the new Trump administration wants, or perhaps it’s the Heritage Foundation, because much of what they’re doing is out of that, you know, has some other vision of what they want to see. And it worries me that education, sort of an engine of R and D and creativity across many institutions, if you think about Silicon Valley like that came out of government money and Defense Department money and really laying the architecture and building the platform for a lot of those innovations that we all use today, and I just think that it’s undercutting our competitiveness, our innovative edge. Certainly people are going to be going elsewhere. You’ve got other countries that are just pleased to bits to attract talent, students, professors. You’ve got Macron of France saying, “Choose France.” And frankly, we’ll get into this, I’m sure, but globally, it’s China who really stands to benefit as the US backs away from its investing in its own R&D and human capital development internally, as well as globally.

Rebecca: As you’re talking about all these various pieces of institutions getting shut down, how does this impact students? What students are most affected by funding cuts and departmental cuts.

Rebecca W.: You’re talking about U.S. Department of Education, I think, but we can also talk globally. A lot of the U.S. Department of Education funding, which is again federal tax dollars that largely went to equity. So it’s really a transfer from rich [LAUGHTER] Americans to poorer Americans. In many ways, it was a transfer from blue states to red states, and that is probably going to be maintained in some way, shape, or form. And then there’s, broadly speaking, the support to higher education, again, equity… It’s helping kids without a lot of financial resources get to college, Pell grants and all that. And then there’s the data piece. Information is power, and one of the first things they’ve done is sort of actually take away a lot of data and some of the ability to sort of track outcomes. So the argument is, “No, don’t worry. These things will stay alive in other places and forms in other parts of the federal government bureaucracy.” Now, a number of programs have been shut down, that would normally have been continued, things like community schools, et cetera, and all of those are really heavily focused on equity, and the kids that are the farthest left behind.

John: Along those lines, we’ve already been seeing a decline in student performance on standardized test scores that had been going on for quite a while, but became much worse during the pandemic, and most of the solutions for this that are proposed involve spending more resources on education, rather than less. With some of the cutbacks here, is it going to be possible to work very effectively to reverse some of that downward trend that we’ve been seeing in K through 12 education?

Rebecca W.: Well, I think many, many school districts across the country are really worried about a fiscal cliff. But it’s not by any means, just the U.S. Department of Education. Actually, the U.S. Federal Department of Education did not provide very much money. It was important, it was strategic, it had R and D elements, etc. But it wasn’t like all school districts across the country are bankrolled by the federal government’s Department of Ed, [LAUGHTER] so it’s a small portion financially. So that is a piece, and certainly the process of sort of uncertainty of, “Will we have a budget? Won’t we have a budget?” There’s been a lot of, “Oh, you have your budget,” or “We’ve awarded your contract. Oh, never mind. We’re not going to spend the money.” I mean, it’s incredibly poorly managed and chaotic and uncertain and amateur, really. That piece has caused a lot of uncertainty with the small federal money that does get distributed around for school districts. School districts are nervous about spending money because they don’t know what they’re going to have in the next year or two. So that’s one reason, but there are other forces and reasons. One of them are big demographic shifts. There’s just less kids, and we fund often per pupil. And so we’re going to have to think about how to get economies of scale if you have more and more buildings that are less and less full [LAUGHTER] as time goes on. And then another sort of worry and cause of this fiscal cliff is the support that had come because of Covid. The extra support to schools and kids in the education sector at local level is drying up, that had come sort of under the Biden administration. So there’s a mix of reasons that is by no means only the federal government sort of chaos at the federal level, but the chaos does lead to uncertainty. If you’re a school leader or a district leader, you don’t exactly know what’s in your budget next year. You’re not going to spend the money. It makes it a very hard operating environment.

Rebecca: The lack of knowledge of funds, as well as lack of other data available, makes it really hard to make all kinds of decisions or to look into different pieces of information and understand what’s happening in some cases. Can you talk a little bit about whether or not the cuts in the Department of Education will result in less data being collected, and how that’s going to harm our system,

Rebecca W.: We’ll see where things ultimately pan out. But IES, which is an important function in the U.S. Department of Education, has traditionally held a wide variety of data that we all need as researchers, those of us in higher education and research use these databases, but it’s not just for researchers to write papers and get journal articles. The real reason the data is important is so the leaders and the people doing the work, and those of us who are helping and advising the leaders have an informed vision of what’s happening, and can make good decisions about where to spend money, what types of things should be done, what works, how kids are doing, who needs help, who doesn’t, etc. So that’s a worry.

John: And one of the main uses of that data was to see how educational outcomes differed by income, by race…

Rebecca W.: …and by geography, by rural versus urban. I’ve interrupted you, John, but there’s plenty of rural district leaders and principals and caring people who are really concerned that they’re going to be left out in the cold.

John: One of my concerns is that they’re going to stop collecting data on those important issues because of their attempts to downplay diversity, equity, and inclusion, and one of the good ways to move that issue aside is just not make data available on all those issues.

Rebecca W.: Yes, it is a strategy that I’ve seen employed in other moments of time with other leaders and countries we might not want to live in. If you remove the data, it doesn’t actually remove the problem. [LAUGHTER] It just makes it a lot harder to track and have accountability.

John: And just a few weeks ago, we saw a satellite being crashed because it was being used to collect weather data that they no longer wanted to collect. And we had that whole issue with the BLS Commissioner being removed because the administration did not like the data on employment trends.

Rebecca W.: Yes, it’s very, very worse, and from anyone in higher education, anyone working in education, the core of education is knowledge and insight and illumination. The opposite of learning and education is delusion and confusion, [LAUGHTER] and that’s not what we want in education, and removing data doesn’t change the actual facts on the ground. It just makes it harder to really understand what is happening and to be able to have healthy debates about best ways to proceed forward.

Rebecca: USAID, an agency that long had bipartisan support, was effectively shut down at the start of the administration, and you noted in your blog post that roughly 85 countries received support for educational programs through USAID. What types of programs were supported, and how expensive were they? What are these impacts?

Rebecca W.: First of all, the USAID budget, in terms of size of the federal government budget, is tiny, teeny, tiny. I think probably just a couple Defense Department contracts make up the entire USAID budget. And what you get from investing in international development assistance is hugely beneficial to the United States foreign power, and frankly, our self interest. Now USAID, The mission is very much to serve others in other parts of the country, but the USAID has always doled out its funding in a way that was incredibly self serving. So we spent a ton of money through USAID in Pakistan when we were fighting the war in Afghanistan, for example. There’s always been foreign policy interests and priorities closely aligned with our development assistance. Now it is largely in countries around the world that are low income, or perhaps middle income. The way USAID doled out its money, if you had put like the poorest kids to the richest kids, it wouldn’t have all made linear sense. It’s not like the poorest countries [LAUGHTER] got the most, etc. So there’s always been a really strong soft power argument through diplomacy and development, which is usually considered in most countries around the world as the two legs of the stool that sit around with defense. as sort of defense, diplomacy and development as sort of the three legs of the stool for how you interact in the globe and advocate for your national interest. Programs that USAID supported in education… again, it’s a tiny amount of money compared to the US budget, barely anything… but significant in terms of small countries in sub-Saharan Africa that have lots of minerals that the U.S. wants, remember, to help with our manufacturing, especially chips and technology. It’s not an insignificant amount for countries that are small and have themselves small budgets and have many kids who are out of school and not learning well. A lot of the support and money from USAID went to helping kids get to school, build schools, give them textbooks, and learn to read. That was a very large [LAUGHTER] part of the financial support, and of course, they did a wide range of other things too that were all worthy causes and really helped children around the world. And virtually, Republicans and Democrats alike, for years, have seen that when we helped other countries grow their human capital, if you want to use an economic term, they will be more productive themselves. They will purchase more U.S. goods. So it’s great for us to create more trading partners. And in fact, USAID had always heavily supported U.S. product exports [LAUGHTER] through its development assistance, food, school meals, and also just hunger programs… helping feed the world. USAID and other parts of the US government heavily bought U.S. agriculture, and it was a really important part for a lot of local farmers. So we get a lot out of foreign assistance through USAID. And in addition to all that, which sounds very, perhaps not aspirational or moral, but in addition to all that sort of benefits the U.S. gets, we get something that is incredibly hard to replicate, which is soft power. And I would say the Trump administration knows very well how to use hard power… are very effective at it, but they are missing entirely the soft power strategy and soft power is when you have development assistance programs, let’s say in sub-Saharan Africa, which is, by the way, going to house shortly here in the not too distant future, the majority of the world’s working age population and talent, [LAUGHTER] as the rest of the world gets older, U.S. companies are going to be interested in hiring [LAUGHTER] in sub-Saharan Africa, and they might want to be setting up shop, but that would have gone great with a foreign leader who might want to create a partnership with perhaps an overseas office or a company, until the Trump administration really abruptly, sort of pulled the funding. And I would say that some of the countries would be okay having less funding. It was just the way it was done, really rude, abrupt, not respectful. And those countries are thinking, “Hmm, China seems pretty nice,” because China just walked right into the vacuum we created. “Oh, rather than letting a U.S. company come and set up an office and recruit from our talent pool, etc., I think we’re going to have a partnership with China. And it could be higher ed partnership. It could be an Employment Partnership. It could be an infrastructure project partnership,” which is largely what they’ve been doing, and might have more favorable trading, including for minerals, with them. So it’s a big misstep in terms of thinking about US dominance, which is what the administration has said they care about.

John: And these cuts were made on the grounds of improving government efficiency, but it’s perhaps the most wasteful set of actions that I’ve ever seen or read about in the U.S. , because, as you mentioned, these things were cut off very abruptly. There was a lot of food that was just left to rot in warehouses and storage. And also you mentioned that historically, policies have often been tied to political interests, but for the first time, they had a chief economist there whose goal was to look at the most efficient way of improving economic development, Dean Karlan, who we’ve had as a guest on the podcast in the past. His research basically has been focused on coming up with the most efficient ways of achieving development goals, and he was implementing a lot more randomized controlled experiments evaluating the effectiveness of these programs, and all that just completely stopped. That’s really troubling.

Rebecca W.: I would agree with you, though, John, because I think the guise was government efficiency, but that wasn’t really the purpose. Because if it had been government efficiency, there is lots and lots of ways to make government more efficient, and in fact, we at Brookings have spent a lot of time suggesting ways to make our government institutions, which are very important, work better, more effective, faster, more efficient. Spend money on things that actually are shown to work versus not. And there are lots of ways to make government more efficient, and you would have had to go in and really look at what those are. And frankly, it could be across the board. It’s not that USAID was the only department that could do things better. Lots of government departments can do things better, but I don’t think that was the real goal. Because, frankly, the idea was, we’re going to be efficient, we’re going to spend more money. That’s was sort of the narrative. And the truth is, it was just cutting things that didn’t align ideologically, and then funding things… lots of money has been spent. If you look at the big, beautiful bill, I mean, the debt is higher than ever before. This is not fiscally conservative government by any means, and a lot of it is boosting majorly in anti-immigration policies, staffing up ICE and Department of Defense, absolutely, getting lots and lots of things, including contracts for Elon Musk’s company. So the narrative might have been this is about government efficiency, but if you really wanted to do that, you would have had to kind of study and go slower. What I saw was just putting money where you want stuff to go, and slashing and burning things you don’t like… it was basically the action.

Rebecca: One of the things you mentioned earlier is the global aging population, and where certain parts of the world have younger populations, and they have historically wanted to come to the United States to study and U.S. institutions have been trying to entice them to come, but we’re seeing a lot of actions from the government to slow that process down, revoking visas, making visa appointments nearly impossible to have, searching social media accounts and things like that. Can you talk a little bit about the current administration’s policies on international student enrollment and how that’s affected the enrollment and the future investment that sometimes those enrollees have in our country?

Rebecca W.: Well, higher education is a really big industry. There’s 1000s and 1000s of higher education institutions across the United States. It’s one of the wonderful things actually about the U.S.. We’re a big country, but there’s many pathways to higher education. We have a really robust community college system. So if you maybe don’t love high school and don’t do great, it’s not it, it’s not over for you. You have a second chance. I’ve always been extraordinarily proud of that, because many other countries that I visit don’t have that. You have to either get your act together and be brilliant in high school and then you’ll go into college, and if you don’t, that’s it for you. There’s no second chances. Higher education is itself a big part of the economy. And then, of course, higher education institutions bring a lot of livelihoods to the communities they’re in. Their students, they spend money, they go to restaurants, they need laundry machines, they have activities, not just the professors and teachers and educators who are there to teach students, but there’s a whole economy around them, and the U.S. has long been a sort of star attraction for foreign students, for countries around the world, in part because we have had such a deep, robust, innovative, sort of R and D engine, heavily powered through universities and a variety of higher education institutions, that there’s a lot of excitement and opportunities and very interesting new insights and discoveries being done in the United States in the higher education sector. And that for sure… I mean, I’ve had conversations with people around the globe… that sort of sparkle has faded rather quickly, [LAUGHTER] because again, as you say, there’s been a real clamp down on international students, revoking J visas, which are very hard to get. And I think again, what it does is just the students aren’t not going to college. All these students who would have come to the U.S. are not going to stay home and say, “Well, that’s it for me. I’m not going to pursue my studies and try to contribute and try to help solve society’s problems and invent something cool. I’m going to stay home.” They’re not doing that. They’re saying, “Oh, the US doesn’t want me. I think I’ll go elsewhere.” They’re going to Canada, they’re going to China, they’re going to Europe, even possibly India, Latin America. These are losses for the U.S.. They’re losses for higher education as a sector. And I think it’s very, very short sighted if the goal is American dominance and keeping U.S., and I keep saying, if this is the goal, I’m not sure that’s my personal goal. I’d rather us have a sort of co-equal, collaborative stance to try to have a better society, but there is a stated goal by this administration, to have America be number one. This is the wrong strategy to do that. It is absolutely reducing America’s glory, sparkle, brilliance, attraction, and going to be handing pretty much for free the competitive edge to some of the world’s brightest and best talent who are going to go elsewhere and boost the economies and insights and knowledge networks of other places in the world.

John: And in addition to the contribution these foreign students make while they’re in college, many of them stick around, and that’s particularly true in the STEM fields. And in terms of innovation. Immigrants account for a relatively large share of patent applications. What are some of the implications of limiting the number of top students coming to the US who have in the past played such a large role in innovation and economic growth in our economy?

Rebecca W.: This gets back to the previous point, and it’s specialized. We’re talking about tech companies. We’re talking about innovators. We’re talking about R and D, advanced robotics. This is the type of thing that you are talking about, John. Now, those companies are desperate always to hire talent. They’re always in a talent war. They’re going to have less talent, and they’re going to need to find talent elsewhere, in other parts of the world, where, as I said before, other parts of the world might not be so interested in U.S. companies or doing sort of collaborative work with U.S. entities, because soft power is real. When you’re mean to your neighbor and then you go ask to borrow a cup of sugar, they’re less likely to give it to you. I mean, it’s just as simple as that, it’s human nature.

Rebecca: So one of the other things that we’ve seen happening is the federal government targeting specific institutions like Harvard and Columbia, where they’re cutting federal funding, visa approvals and threatening termination of accreditation. What are the consequences of threats like these?

Rebecca W.: Well, it’s a very frankly standard practice. I’ve seen it happen, and I’ve worked in many countries around the world, the standard practice for leaders who really want to dominate and control with a very tight fist. The models I have of people who’ve gone after universities in the same way are authoritarian figures. So you can make your own judgment there, but when you go after universities and higher ed institutions, it’s usually for a couple of reasons. It’s like going after the press. It’s to dampen critical thought, and frankly, a lot of movements start with university students: the civil rights movement, the movement for the entire nation of Pakistan, [LAUGHTER] there’s a lot of sort of social movements that start with the university students. So it’s not just also the freedom of thought of the professors. It’s also sort of going after an entire institution that usually is known for new ideas and critique, and frankly, critique of any status quo, whichever political party exists, that’s almost the role of research and universities, is to look at what we have and say, “How can this be better? What isn’t working?” And I can’t think of a single time in history that there wasn’t something to critique at some point. So yeah, I think it’s a very straightforward, obvious strategy. You want less critique and you want less dissent, go after universities. And I would say to universities, don’t expect it to stop after one or two high profile cases. Most of the time, universities need to really band together and figure out what their approach is going to be collectively.

John: And we see some broader attacks on education and expertise and evidence in general, and that’s particularly troubling. One of the things economists have studied for quite a while is the impact of human capital investment, as you mentioned before, on economic development and research, going back to T.W. Schultz, to Gary Becker, and many other people have indicated that investment in education is one of the most important ways of encouraging economic development, and within a country, it’s one of the most effective ways of moving people out of poverty. And yet we’re seeing a general shift in public perceptions of higher ed, or education in general, where the public perception of the gains from higher ed had been falling pretty steadily for the last few years. And that’s kind of troubling. Why has this messaging which is so inconsistent with all the evidence, been so effective in changing public attitudes towards education.

Rebecca W.: So I’d be interested in your take too, because I see a couple of things mixing together. One is the runaway costs of higher education. So when parents, who are voters, [LAUGHTER] are doing the cost-benefit analysis of helping support their kid go get a college degree. So let’s talk about undergrad here. For a long time in this podcast, prior, we’ve been talking about really R and D and sort of graduate level, and really the sort of top-level research and innovation that comes from higher education institutions, but at a pure sort of undergraduate level, this cost of college is so burdensome. The fact that kids are coming out with undergraduate degrees and huge loans to try to repay in a job market where they can’t really sustain themselves and repay loans, I think, gives people a lot of pause. So I would put that very much on the shoulders of higher education themselves. That is something that a higher education sector needs to grapple with… should have addressed long ago… and it’s one of the reasons people are making the determination that it’s not worth it, because for many kids, it might not be. They might pay an arm and a leg and not actually get a super top quality experience and come out the other side, not markedly, massively better. Now, I would say, if they’re reasonable students, and they go to a reasonably good institution, they’re going to get a lot of benefits. We know that. But the other piece I think, and I think this is where we also can put this at the feet of the university and higher ed institutions to grapple with, is basically a runaway woke-ism that was frankly silly, [LAUGHTER] and there’s constant ridiculous stories of students in a classroom on Muslim art. I’m thinking of a particular case, I think it was in the Midwest, saying they were triggered by a picture of the Prophet Muhammad, and then the professor getting fired. And this is a class on Muslim art, and you don’t take the class. [LAUGHTER] So that’s really silly and ridiculous, and I think that is, at least in my experience teaching at Georgetown University, I never really saw that much of that. I think that these were sort of often the exceptions, but they are stupid, and it does also undermine freedom of thought and discussion, and people got pissed, rightly so, and they were used to create a narrative that our entire higher education institutions, or frankly, schools, were sort of overtaken by radical, woke ideologies. And I have to say, having visited many, many schools [LAUGHTER] for the work that Jenny and I did, maybe in some elite, private, sort of top of the line, suburb or urban schools, that might have been a problem. I did see that, but very, very rarely did I run into any, any of these issues that people were theoretically so worried about in just your run of the mill school in a rural community or an urban community in a sort of middle class or lower income neighborhood, very rarely. And also, I would say the same for my experiences, at least personal experiences, talking to students and visiting colleges at the higher ed level.

John: I think those cases were probably quite a bit the exception, that when you look at most courses, courses in computer science, classes in math, classes in science, classes in art and in general, just simply don’t address many of those sorts of cases that made it to Fox News and that got so widely disseminated. But going back to the other issue, the evidence that I’ve seen at least up until the last few years has been that the rate of return to a college education is still pretty much at historically high levels. Now that’s partly because college graduates do earn quite a bit more, but the other part of it is high school graduates and high school dropouts earn so much less today than they did 20 or 30 years ago, relatively. So for an average student, the gains to an education more than pay off. The place where the problems occur are for those students, and that’s a very large share of students who enter college but don’t graduate, but still leave with student debt. That’s a nationwide tragedy.

Rebecca W.: That is a very, very good point, and I’m glad you corrected me, because you’re totally right, and that’s what we have to guard against.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking, what’s next?

Rebecca W.: Well, I’m really hoping that we start connecting with each other, and I mean that universities start banding together, schools start communicating [LAUGHTER] with each other and saying, “No, education is important.” Education, obviously, I work in it, and I’m deeply passionate. I think education makes a huge difference in your life trajectory. I also think it makes a huge difference in our societies. Education is not just about math and reading, it’s about how you learn to live with other people, and how can we, especially now in a polarized community, make sure that education is about forging bridges, connecting with others and solving real problems.

John: Well, thank you. It’s always great talking to you, and we hope we can have future conversations on these and other topics.

Rebecca W.: Lovely to talk to you both too. Take care.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple podcasts or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

John: Editing assistance provided by Ryan Metzler.

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413. Faculty Perspectives on AI

Posted in artificial intelligence, edtech, educational technology, higher education, learning, pedagogy, teaching, Uncategorized
October 1, 2025

Faculty adoption and use of AI in higher education varies widely. In this episode, three colleagues from the University of Mississippi: Josh Eyler, Emily Pitts Donahoe, and Marc Watkins, provide their perspectives on AI use in higher education. Josh is the Senior Director of Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and Assistant Professor of Teacher Education, Emily is the Associate Director of Instructional Support in the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and Lecturer of Writing and Rhetoric, and Marc is a Lecturer in Composition and Rhetoric and Assistant Director of Academic Innovation.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Faculty adoption and use of AI in higher education varies widely. In this episode three colleagues at one institution explore different perspectives on AI.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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John: Our guests today are Josh Eyler, Emily Pitts Donahoe, and Marc Watkins. Josh is the Senior Director of Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and Assistant Professor of Teacher Education, Emily is the Associate Director of Instructional Support in the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and Lecturer of Writing and Rhetoric, and Marc is a Lecturer in Composition and Rhetoric and Assistant Director of Academic Innovation. Welcome back, Josh, Emily, and Marc.

Marc: Thank you. Thank you for having us.

Emily: Thank you.

Josh: Thanks, great to be here.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:… Josh, are you drinking tea?

Josh: Well, you know that I never drink tea, but I have a delightful water here.

Rebecca: I will continue to say that that’s the foundation of tea.

Josh: It is.

Rebecca: How about you, Emily?

Emily: I’m appalled that so many people come on this podcast and don’t drink tea. I am drinking a Scottish morn tea, one of my favorites.

Rebecca: Very good choice. It aligns with mine this morning. And how about you, Marc?

Marc: I am drinking a tea called Red Dragon that my wife got for me in Portland, and it’s quite good. I really recommend it. It came from Willow Tea House.

Emily: That’s what I like to hear.

Rebecca: Very nice. That sounds like legit tea.

John: And I am drinking a black raspberry green tea.

Rebecca: That’s a good choice. There’s no cherries involved.

John: I almost did.

Rebecca: Oh yeah, I know. And I have a Scottish morning tea.

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss the impact of generative AI on teaching and learning in higher ed. We see a pretty broad spectrum of opinion from faculty. Some faculty oppose all student use of AI because of concerns it will impede student skill development. Other faculty have fully embraced student use of AI and argue that we need to prepare students for their futures in a world in which generative AI tools are ubiquitous. Most faculty, though, are somewhere in between those extremes. To start this discussion, could each of you provide an overview of your general position on AI use in higher ed by students?

Marc: Oh, boy, that’s an interesting conversation to begin with. I don’t really know about my own personal stance, if that’s even something that I have much control over, because so much of this isn’t being directed by faculty members, it’s being directed by students bringing these products into the actual conversation. I think that changed a little bit last year when the new dimension came where we had a lot of this technology starting to be embedded in existing university systems. So I try to provide my students guidance. I don’t advocate for them to use AI in assignments. I don’t make them use AI in assignments, but I do make it clear that if they are going to use them, they have certain responsibilities, and they also should have certain expectations from me as a teacher to be a little bit more informed about this, and also from their peers, if their peers are using AI with them in some way, shape or form, too. So really, it’s about just kind of guiding them in certain ways. What this is going on depending on what style class I teach. If it’s a small low-enrollment class too, I’ll have a values-based statement when I talk about… I invite them to discuss how they’ll use or not use AI, versus a large class that might be a writing intensive course too, like our first year writing classes, where I use a stop light approach, where Emily has actually helped develop this too, about red light, yellow light, and green lights for students to do so.

Josh: I thought a lot about what I was going to say today, because I want to not seem like I’m the physical manifestation of that Simpsons’ meme of “old man shakes fist at clouds.” So what I’d like to lead with is that, as a faculty member who believes very strongly in shared governance and academic freedom, I completely support any of my colleagues who want to experiment with it, build it into their courses, support students, all the things that we’ll hear about in some shape or form today, but as an individual faculty member for my own courses, I will never build intentional use, and I want to clarify what that means in a second, intentional use of AI into my courses, and I don’t want students to be using it either. And what I mean by intentional, because I know Marc very rightly says people are using AI even if they’re not aware that they’re using AI, right? If I’m using Google and I forget to phrase it correctly, AI is giving me things like that. So when I say intentional use of AI, what I mean is me as the instructor intentionally building it into courses or assignments or activities, and students intentionally going to AI to do the work of the course or engage cognitively with it. So there are labels for these things. I don’t put a label on myself, “refuser,” “resistor,” things like that, but that is my own position pedagogically.

Emily: Yeah, I think I agree with a lot of what Josh and Marc have already said. I think on a curricular level, students should be exposed to generative AI at some point during their college careers, because they’re going to encounter it as students and kind of beyond school in their professional and personal lives. So I think it’s important for them to know what it is, how it works, and to develop I think what some people have called critical AI literacy, understanding the kind of implications ethically of AI use,. understanding who benefits from AI and who benefits from the narratives that we have around AI. And so I think all of that is important. There are some classes where it’s really appropriate to incorporate AI and think about how it might be used in a specific field, and some classes where I think it’s totally inappropriate. In my own classes, we do talk about AI a lot, and I give students the choice of whether or not they want to engage with it. And I think it’s interesting that Josh brought up the word intentional, because I was going to say what I really want for my students is for them to use AI intentionally if they use it, or to refuse to use AI intentionally, if they want to refuse it. And by that, I mean they should know kind of where it is appearing in their lives. And they should be able to say, “I want to use AI and I want to use it for this specific purpose, and here’s why,” or “I don’t want to use AI for any of these purposes, and here’s why.” So one of the things that I think I want to work on most in my own classes is developing that sense of intentional use, instead of just like, “uh, I guess I’ll use it because I’m late on this assignment, or I guess I’ll use it because everybody else is using it. Or I guess I’ll use it in this way just ‘cause.”

Rebecca: I think all of you have kind of mentioned this idea of intentionality around student use. Can you talk a little bit more about why the frame of intentionality… I mean, I think we can kind of make some guesses… in relationship to maybe some of your general concerns of students using AI.

Marc: Sure. I think it’s deeply important that everyone in the process is intentional about AI, whether you’re a teacher bringing it up in the class, setting up a course policy too, or thinking about designing certain assignments where students might be navigating the technology or might be using tools to bring in assessments that you would think you don’t want them using it for too. So you have to look at this from the basic framework of every single person that’s going to be involved in that sort of process: student, teacher, in some cases the actual librarians were actually helping them navigate resource materials that are available to them, maybe even administration. We want everyone within this process to be intentional about the technology. Just the past month alone, we’ve had actual reports from police officers using it to write a crime report, lawyers using for criminal and civil cases, all undisclosed. We even had a report of a judge using it. We want to really be thoughtful about how this technology is playing out in broader society, too, and start thinking about our roles as educators, and how we can start talking with students about what is ethical, what’s appropriate, and what is actually a good, helpful use case of this tool. I’m very concerned that we’ve been looking at usage in terms of augmentation, collaboration, automation. I think we can handle the first two in some ways. They all have their own ethical issues with that, too. But I’m really getting more and more concerned with the automation aspect. We are starting to see students also do the entire assignments. We’re also seeing these new tools, like AI agents with promises of being able to completely automate the entire coursework for students and also for faculty too, and actually grade and assess student writing and other types of student assessments.

Josh: Yeah. I mean, for me, intentionality means a couple of things, but I think awareness is an important pillar of intentionality, knowing all of the different questions that one must consider before engaging in intentional use of AI. So what are the ethical dilemmas? What are some of the key questions? And for myself, the ethics are divided into two categories. There’s the outside of the classroom ethical debate and the inside the classroom ethical dilemmas. So how are people aware of the choices that they could potentially make, and then a critical thinking process for working through the actual decision to use AI.

Emily: I think for me, the reason that I’m concerned a lot about intentionality is because I’m really concerned about student agency. And my biggest concern about AI is the way that it can take away our agency. Agency is something I really highly value in my teaching… I think, a guiding principle for my classes, as well as one of my most desired outcomes for students. I want students to leave my class with more agency in the world and the skills and knowledge to make better, more informed decisions for their lives. And so I have a lot of concerns about how AI, but also just our general technological developments in this moment are making it really easy for people to give up their agency. So I’m thinking of things like in the book filter world, Kyle Chayka, and I’m not sure I’m pronouncing that name correctly, but they talk about how algorithms control our tastes and our consumption and our lives. It kind of used to be the case that we would go out and seek out the media that we wanted to consume, and now a lot of that is kind of determined for us, and so there’s this, I think, huge loss of agency. And you could say the same about generative AI. When you allow AI to tell you what something means, or what you think about something, or what to say about something, you’re giving up some of your agency, and you know a little bit less about what you think, or what you want to say, because you haven’t really kind of wrestled with that. So I think giving up your agency in that way can be really seductive for students who are under a lot of pressures and when the tasks that we’re asking them to do are very difficult cognitively, but it’s also really important and rewarding to go through those processes and develop that sense of agency, and I don’t want students to give that up just because they think they need an A in the class, or because they don’t have the time to finish an assignment. So intentionality is so important for me because it’s a huge part of agency.

John: So there’s a lot of concerns that you’ve all expressed about students using AI to reduce their agency and to develop their skills, but are there some ways in which student use of AI might perhaps support student learning, or might also reduce some of the equity gaps that we observe because our students come in with very different backgrounds, and it’s hard to design courses that will address all the needs of all the students in classes.

Marc: Yeah, I think we’re seeing some really interesting experimental research designs coming out of California, but they have something they’re called PAIRR, which is peer review from a human being, followed by AI, followed by review by instructor, and then actually the reflection and review all put together. So it’s an augmentation type of process in that way too, where you get a standardized peer review and a writing sort of session too, and you can add AI on top of it. But what they’re finding is that the students that use the AI can actually go through multiple rounds of peer review, then the actual teacher can review both the peer’s comments, the AI’s interactions with them, and ask the student to reflect on the entire process holistically. So it’s able to do a lot more in terms of giving feedback and rounds of feedback than it is just from one human being or a series of human beings. We’re also seeing lots of other different examples come out here about AI being used in research and actually looking to use different types of breakthroughs, but also being used to support students and different student learning outcomes by going through a process of coming up and attaching different research points to student learning processes throughout this. Sometimes this can be as simple as a static sort of like summary that you give to students. Sometimes this could be as wild as an AI voice, which I have some problems with, talking with the student too, and interacting with them. So from every sort of response, there’s a lot of caveats about what we’re seeing from the research studies and databases popping up here with AI in them. But it does look like that if it is intentionally designed, there are some benefits for students and student learning.

Emily: I feel like I should jump in here to build on what Marc is saying, because I suspect that Josh is going to have a totally different take. So in my view, I think that the question about, are there ways that students can use AI to increase learning is really less about the kind of particular usages and more about student attitudes toward AI, or the kind of orientation they take to using AI. So I’ll give an example to illustrate kind of what I mean. A couple of years ago, I surveyed students at the end of this semester in my writing class about their uses of AI, and I had one student say I used AI to correct my grammar, and so I learned a lot from that. And then I had another student say I only used AI to correct my grammar, so I didn’t learn very much. And so the difference is not about the usage. They were both using AI in the same ways, but it was about how they were approaching that use and what they were trying to get out of it. One student was approaching it with the idea that AI could help them learn something here, and the other one was approaching it with the orientation of AI can kind of correct a product that I’ve created. So I think that the key is that when students approach AI, they need to be approaching it with a learning orientation, or they’re not gonna get much out of it. I mean, this is just like anything. And I think the students you interviewed on this podcast recently, Kaija, was a great example of that, and one of the things that she said is that she really wants to figure out things for herself, and she uses AI in ways that support her in figuring things out for herself. I think the trick here is that students don’t always know where the line is, and have trouble determining when am I actually learning, because we don’t often ask them to think about that. So I think one of the things that we need to be doing right now is working with students to develop their metacognitive abilities. If they’re going to use AI, they need to know what’s going on in their brain when they’re using it, [LAUGHTER] what specifically they’re getting out of it. So, what uses of AI can be productive? I think lots of them as long as students are able to understand and articulate what they are getting from their use of AI. I think the question about equity gaps is maybe a little different, and I feel like I need to think more about this, but I’m a little suspicious, to be honest, of a lot of discussion about using AI to reduce equity gaps, because I have a kind of suspicion that AI might just Be a band aid here on a larger problem, and we should think about how to fix the larger problem, like if students are not educationally prepared, or if they are going into a workforce situation where they’re being judged unfairly by, for example, their proficiency in English, then I think we need to change the thing that creates the equity gap in the first place, rather than trying to paper over that with AI. I’m not saying that AI can’t be used productively to reduce equity gaps. But I’m a little suspicious of some of the ways that have been proposed for that.

Josh: Right, that’s a really great point. So I’m deeply skeptical that either of those two things that you said, John, will ever be true. I think the major issue right now is that, as Marc was indicating, the research is so nascent, it’s just developing. So for every study that someone holds up in support of AI and learning, I can find one that says the opposite. We’re just at the early stage where it’s more like a tit-for-tat kind of process than it is revealing anything that I think we can draw on to make truly evidence-based claims about learning. So I think at this moment, we are embedded in true academic argumentation. We’re bringing to bear research that we know from other fields and other areas and other aspects of the cognitive processes of learning, and applying it to the AI question right now. Now that will change over the next few years. We’ll get more research. We’ll be able to, I think, draw together claims that rest on a more solid foundation, but I would need someone to be showing me evidence that using AI is more effective for learning than other strategies that we have. It’s really as simple as that. I think Emily has a great point about the equity gaps here. So I think we learned a lot during the pandemic about access equity, specifically with technology. In Mississippi, especially, we were learning a lot about what access students had to technology and how that was unequally distributed. And so that’s one aspect of it. Another aspect is, when we talk about equity gaps, we’re talking about systemic problems and systemic solutions. So what systemic problem is AI supposed to be addressing? And how is it a systemic solution? And so I think that it’s hard for me to see how AI is a better answer, or a more productive answer than other things that we have been talking about and looking at that themselves have been incomplete answers to the equity gap problem, but that are drawn from a wider body of research at this moment.

Emily: Just to respond to what you said, Josh, you’re making me think that in the same way that I was arguing AI can paper over or be a band aid for pre- existing equity gaps. I think it can also be a band aid for problems in the learning space, in that a lot of people are turning to student uses of AI, or even instructor uses of AI, because it has become unmanageable to teach so many students at once. for example. Students need AI feedback because the instructor can’t provide the volume of feedback that’s needed. And so, I mean, I do think that insofar as that’s happening, we should be looking at what are the problems in the learning space that we can and should fix. Can we get smaller class sizes? [LAUGHTER] Can we get more support and time for instructors in that kind of thing, instead of turning to AI? And we see a lot of universities making these huge investments in AI tools or access to certain kinds of AI platforms, when they could be using that money to support the kinds of learning interventions and teaching support et cetera that we already know can improve student learning. So I do take your point about that, and I agree that there are a lot of problems. [LAUGHTER] I think ideally AI can be used by students in learning focused ways. But the trick is that it’s actually hard to do in practice.

John: In terms of equity gaps and fixing the underlying problems, that ultimately is what I think we should be doing. But those problems start back in our elementary school system and go all the way through with inequitable support and funding and quality of education, and we do have students who are the product of that system, and we do want to do the best that we can to address the students we have. And one of the things we do know is an effective way of doing this is small classes, one-on-one interaction, and providing more tutoring support and so forth. But we also know that first-gen students and students who perhaps face some degree of imposter syndrome are less likely to be going in for extra help, less likely to visit office hours. And if we could break that down, then we may not need as much support. But one nice thing about having Socratic tutor AI systems, potentially, is that they’re available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and they’re available to everyone without any fear of being embarrassed by admitting to someone that you don’t understand something. My personal view is, I think there may be a role for some of those things.

Rebecca: John’s in the debate now.

John: Well, I just built a Socratic tutor [LAUGHTER] for my class of 270 students.

Josh: So here I am John, shaking my fist at the cloud, because when I hear you say that, my mind immediately goes to Justin Shaffer’s high structure course design. He was on campus presenting a lot of different workshops, which is a pedagogical strategy to handle exactly what you were just talking about in a way that doesn’t involve AI. I mean, there are analogs to this question, Emily and I think a lot about equity gaps related to alternative grading practices. And as soon as you begin to peel one layer of the onion, what you see is that every aspect of our educational systems in America are wrapped up in the question of the problem of grades, and I won’t go on that train, we’ve been there before, but I’m saying that there are analogs to the question of AI and equity gaps, and that Emily’s metaphor here of band aids is, I think, really an instructive one for thinking through the ability of AI to address those gaps.

Rebecca: We’ll put a link to that podcast that discusses those learning assessments in the show notes.

John: As well as a discussion of Justin Shaffer’s work. And I do use some very similar techniques, but even then, students, when they’re working outside of class, sometimes get stuck on things. And it might be nice to have some sort of tutor, if it’s designed in a way that doesn’t directly just provide answers, and that’s hard to do, because most systems do break down when they’re repetitively queried.

Emily: And I’ll add, to carry the metaphor of band aids, sometimes a band aid is all you got, right? And if a band aid is what you have, like, systemically, we need something else; on an individual level, if what you have as a band aid, and the band aid is helping like, I don’t judge anybody for that, right? We all have to use band aids sometimes.

Marc: Yeah, I think that we should be thoughtful about this in terms of not just students and interacting with them, but John did mention K through 12 and how this is actually becoming a major issue within their landscape. In fact, the Walton Family Foundation report that was through Gallup came out about a month and a half ago. It indicates that teachers are using it to address the material conditions of their labor in K through 12, saving between six to seven hours of labor a week, translated about six weeks of labor a year. That’s going to have a huge effect on our world coming into higher education too, because students are going to have certain expectations about when their assignments are going to be returned. And if teachers are using AI in K through 12 to grade student assignments, they’re going to be expecting us to hand that back to them very quickly. And that deeply concerns me. I was just talking with some of my students here for the first week of class, one of them said that her mother is a 10th grade English teacher and uses it to grade essays. We need to start really thinking about this in terms of how we are approaching equity within our landscape of teachers here at the university level, and how this is going to be addressed on campuses. As Josh mentioned, academic freedom is the sort of law of the land in terms of technology usage here. That door swings both ways, in terms of someone who wants to not use this tool, but then someone who wants to go overboard and start just automating everything. We need very clear guidance, and we really need to start talking as communities about where we think this technology belongs, in terms of that space for our own labor.

Rebecca: I think Marc just opened up the door to a policy discussion around AI use to some extent, because institutions are making some decisions about the availability of tools, putting guardrails in some places and not others, and the entire university system includes a mix of faculty, staff, and students who may or may not be using AI. So can you talk a little bit about the role faculty might want to play in policy development around this topic, or even what it might look like at the individual level in a class when you’re trying to negotiate the absolute use that some students are using AI, and maybe the learning outcomes that you have or the policies that you have in place. Like Josh, I’m thinking about if you’re not allowing the use of AI, but obviously some students are going to use AI, how do you navigate those situations?

Josh: Right, and a lot of that’s tied to my grading strategies of collaborative grading, and so removing some of the incentives to use AI in the first place is a part of that. And Marc has done a lot more at our university in thinking through kind of institutional policy. I’ve been on a committee. Mark, do you want to talk a little bit about this? I mean, my own view is that faculty should absolutely be deeply involved in creating a policy at an institution. But Marc, do you want to say some things?

Marc: We are doing a pretty good job of involving faculty in the actual conversation. It does feel like we are kind of in this endless loop, though, that the main guidance that we’ve established, and also, I think other universities have established too, is it all goes back down to faculty freedom. We’re giving individual faculty members wide leeway in deciding what is appropriate and what’s not appropriate inside their classroom, what’s appropriate in their discipline. We don’t really know how certain faculty are going to be experiencing using these tools to completely automate certain things that I have troubles with because of my values, like, I would never want to automate completely feedback. I would never want to automate grading, or emails even, or letters of recommendation. Those are all things that I value, being a human being with my students and the relationship that we have. It is becoming apparent, though, from some different research that we’ve had too and some conversations with people that’s other than faculty, think very differently about that, and I think we’re gonna have some problems with this. I don’t really know. I know, John, your background is in the economy. I don’t really know many economic examples where some members of the workplace choose to automate the majority of their labor while others don’t, and how that works out long term. So I do think we need some very firm guidance about automation that keeps the role of AI into words of collaboration and augmentation. And really does have that to be a little bit of a hard line about using that to be incorporated so heavily that it starts impacting a person’s day-to-day job, their day-to-day life.

Emily: The only thing I’ll add is that I think students should be a part of this conversation as well, like both on an institutional level and on the individual classroom level. I try to involve students as much as possible in creating my AI policies and letting them choose kind of the pathways that they want to take, especially when they’ve got all these different instructors doing different things in their different classrooms, they don’t always know what’s going on across the university, but students do? Students have a good eye about what’s happening in their class on this side of campus versus the class on the other side of campus, and I think can give us some really good insights. So I want to advocate for involving students in policy discussions as well.

Josh: Yeah, completely agree. Great point, Emily. I was having a discussion with my students on our classroom compact yesterday, and this was one of the discussion questions technology and AI use in education more broadly, but in our class, specifically.

John: From faculty’s perspective, one of the things we hear most often is concern about assessing student work when it may not necessarily be their work. What are some strategies we might use to encourage students to behave ethically, or perhaps to design assignments that are less subject to inappropriate or unethical AI use.

Rebecca: And I’ll add interventions that might need to occur when unethical behavior has occurred, because I think that’s one of the things that faculty are deeply struggling with.

Emily: So one of the things I keep repeating about AI use these days is that we don’t actually have an AI problem in higher ed. We have a crisis of purpose that AI has exacerbated, and AI has made this whole [LAUGHTER] kind of higher education project untenable given the crisis of purpose that we have. So I mean, I think that school is increasingly viewed by students as a transaction. I think a lot of faculty have noticed this, and they’re doing work to get grades, to get a degree, to get a job, and of course, that’s not students’ fault, because that’s what we’ve told them college is for since they were kids. But I think maybe we’re just starting to wake up to all the ways in which we as teachers have inadvertently encouraged that transactional mindset. So I think a good response to AI would be thinking about how we get that out of our classrooms. And so grading systems, I think, are the main way that transactional approach shows up. So if you take grades away, you take away a really important token in that transactional economy, and then what’s left, right? If you take the grades away, well, like hopefully learning is left, and it takes students a little students a little while to adjust to that [LAUGHTER] and to understand what the new purpose is when there aren’t grades. So that’s what I’m always trying to do in my classes. And we could talk forever and ever about alternative grading and different approaches to grading systems that help students move out of that transactional mindset, but if they’re not in that mindset, if the point is not just to create a product to get a grade, if the point is to go through a learning process, and if we incentivize going through a learning process as opposed to just generating a product. In my classes, I’ve had good success seeing less AI use or misuse than one might expect. But the other thing, I think, is just talking to students explicitly about purpose. Why are we here? [LAUGHTER] What are we doing? And one of the things that I really like to cite when I talk about this, Josh and Marc will have heard me talk about this, and maybe tired of it already, but there’s a study that came out about 10 years ago by David Yeager and a whole host of co-authors called boring but important, a self transcendent purpose for learning fosters academic self regulation. And one of the things that they found in this study, or that they show in this piece, is that giving students what they call a self-transcendent purpose for learning, so that’s a purpose that’s about doing something good in the world or helping someone besides yourself, giving students that kind of purpose can help them better persist through tedious or challenging tasks. So I think one of the mistakes we’ve made when we’re talking to students about purpose is to focus exclusively on their self interest. How is this going to help you pass the next test or get into the next class, or succeed in the next class, or succeed in your job or whatever? And I really think we should lean into kind of bigger questions about the purpose of our discipline. What kind of good does the work that we do here do in the world, and how can you use the knowledge and skills that you are developing here to do good things, to help other people? Because I think, you know, none of us are here in purely self-interested motives, right? We don’t get paid enough for that. And I think the same is true of students. We all want to do good things in the world, and so one of the things that I’m really trying to lean into as a way to motivate students and kind of mitigate the temptation of misuse AI, is to talk to them a lot more about purpose and help them buy into that, create structures that incentivize their engagement with the process.

John: We’ll put in a plug for David Yeager book 10 to 25 because it contains a summary of that and much other research done on student motivation. And it’s a superb book to address those issues.

Rebecca: I believe we have a podcast episode on that that we can link in the show notes.

JOSH I would just add two things to what Emily said, I completely agree about the motivation structure that grades bring to courses, we’ve incentivized the use of things like AI when we put all the emphasis on extrinsic motivators. So there was a piece Inside Higher Ed today that was basically a recap of survey results, and there the two top motivations for students to commit acts of academic misconduct or cheating. One was the pressure to get good grades, that was the top, and the second one was short on time. And so there are pedagogical innovations to address both of those things. Emily addressed grades. I would say that there are some alternative grading practices that address the second one as well, the time. But there are other things, like flexible deadlines. There are ways to address the time issue as well that take those top two reasons that students might turn to AI off the table. So that’s one thing. The second thing is, we have a lot of great work, Cate Denial, Peter Felton, etc. many people who are pointing to relationship building, trust building with students. Now, there’s this great facet of human nature that when we feel like we are trusted, we want to be more trustworthy, and so creating classroom environments that really build those kinds of connections and relationships, I continue to feel, will mitigate some of this use as well.

Rebecca: I think one of the things that we see faculty doing, I think, out of desperation, really is turning to AI checkers and things to evaluate or find a way to identify whether or not it’s the student’s real work. And obviously a strategy is to try to mitigate the desire to cheat in the first place, but some people will still do it. Rather than going to an AI checker or something, what are some other ways to maybe address the issues that arise when students do cheat?

Marc: Well, I think cheating is a very loaded term here, too. This is what becomes very complicated, because some faculty have policies that are banning AI in every aspect of learning, which I’ve told them is not really appropriate or acceptable, because you can’t possibly enforce this. And we’re starting to see a lot of students using this on their own time outside of class to work through problems, to research. So we have to really define what is academic misconduct using AI in different terms. We also have to be aware of what the actual technology can do, too. And now multi-modal AI is here, it’s free, the voice in ChatGPT, the actual turn on the camera, it can actually start scanning things around you. That adds more dimension to this than just text, and so we have to be really aware of that, and also the fact that AI agents can now automate quite a few different things in the research process, are all adding to this sort of process. So to me, it’s always going to come back down to a conversation with a student that goes back to openly disclosing how an AI tool or process was used, and bringing that up. And that works really well in a small classroom where I’m supported and have time to do this. It does not work well when I’m teaching a large lecture class, too. If I have 80 or 100 students, that’s where this completely falls apart, and people turn to AI detection services or tools. And there are a lot of them out there right now. In fact, I think Turnitin just released a humanizer detector, because a lot of people have been using AI to humanize the writing, to make it sound more human. And now Turnitin now has a system that supposedly is going to detect when you’ve humanized it, and their other system that they just released too is called Clarity, which is a process tracker that allows you to view students writing long term for days, even weeks at a time. And I’m really against surveillance in this sort of sense, because, again, it’s not really a pro teaching sort of strategy. It also doesn’t really work very well. At the same point in time, I’m very aware that a lot of faculty are sort of struggling with this. And what I tell them, if you do turn to AI detection and you’re starting to bring your students up on academic misconduct charges, you need to be aware of the fact too that there’s very little procedural fairness involved in this. And I do flip that around on them. I said, Look, if you’re going in for promotion and your dossier got ran through an AI detector and somehow came up as positive, what defense are you able to offer it? And I’ll give you a hint, there really isn’t one, unless you’re keeping track of all your documents five or six years ago and how you wrote them. So we need to be really cautious about how we’re dealing with this. And I think the best thing to do is to obviously bring them in and do this. University of Texas has a really great restorative justice program for academic misconduct. Penn has been piloting one for 10 years now, in fact, that’s the second most likely outcome that they have for an academic misconduct is they go through restorative practice to see if they can’t mend the trust that was broken in the classroom before taking a student up on charges.

Emily: Yeah, I appreciate a lot of what Marc said, and I appreciate the question Rebecca, because I feel like sometimes, especially when Josh and I start talking about this, people think that we’re a little like out of touch or something. [LAUGHTER] Because when we’re talking about student motivation and engagement et cetera, some people are like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, that’s fine, but that won’t solve the problem.” But obviously, as you say, there’s no kind of perfect solutions to this. I think that we should lean into that student motivation and engagement piece, because really, I haven’t seen any kind of viable solutions for mitigating AI use outside of that that I’m comfortable with, but I do think there are room for some kind of assessment security measures, or kind of, however you want to phrase that, as long as we’re varying the kinds of ways we assess students, occasional in class, worker assessments. I think oral assessments are tricky in a number of ways, but may have a place. And I think in terms of what to do when students have misused AI when you’re following up, I think Marc is absolutely right that conversations are the way to go when you can do that. I’m also like Marc, pretty uncomfortable with a lot of process-tracking measures. I tried to do this on my own. I recorded myself writing a blog post, and that totally changed the way I wrote. And I did not have a good time when I was writing, knowing that somebody would see that later. And so I have a lot of mixed feelings about it. One of the things that I do is I do ask students to write in Google Docs. I do tell them about version history and show them how version history works. We talk about this. We set these guidelines together at the beginning of the semester. If I have concerns about your work based on my own reading of it, I might go into the version history to like, look at how your piece came together, and I will ask you questions about why did you write this? What was your process like? Can you tell me what you meant when you said whatever? And again, that’s something you can do with smaller classes. It’s a lot harder in larger classes. So there’s no perfect answer here. And I have a lot of mixed feelings about all of it. [LAUGHTER]

Josh: That’s for sure. There is no perfect answer. And when I hear Marc talk about all the twisting and turning that ed tech companies are doing to try and pile band aid on top of band aid, I guess I just immediately think, if only we use this much time and money to solve other problems in our world of education, that’s ultimately what I think. Continuing my theme for the day, when I was a graduate student and first started teaching writing, it was before Google launched, and so we were taught how to handle plagiarism, was to have a conversation with students, was to ask them about their ideas, to say, “Oh, this is an interesting word. Could you help me understand why you used it in this context?” And that part of what would emerge from those conversations would be either an admission, “Okay, you’re right. I didn’t write this” or it would be a really interesting intellectual conversation about their work, “I used it because of this, and here’s why I…” you know. So I still think that, rather than using machines that may or may not have various degrees of fallibility in this, I think those conversations are ultimately a productive, pedagogical way to handle it. Marc’s right. It doesn’t scale very well, though, so large classes present a problem. In my own classes, I use collaborative grading, which means that I don’t give any grades. Students do a lot of self assessment. I give a lot of feedback. They propose their final grade at the end. I know Emily does this as well. I take grades out of the equation. I take deadline pressures out of the equation by having best buy dates that they can petition to change for themselves if they need to for some reason. If ultimately… I realize I’m an outlier here… if ultimately, even within that context, a student is going to use AI that’s going to be their decision. If that’s what they want out of it, then I’m gonna teach the way I feel like I need to teach, and I’m gonna work with the students in the way that I think will be as meaningful as possible. And people, ultimately, Rebecca, to your point, are going to continue to be people.

Rebecca: I just wanna just note that if there’s a tool that’s detecting humanization, I wanna know like, is the opposite then the dehumanization like, it’s an interesting word choice. I just want to put that out there. But I was just mostly sitting here thinking that’s really like an interesting word choice. [LAUGHTER]

Marc: It is. I do think something for both Emily and Josh that might be helpful to talk about… Grammarly just launched a new product about AI agents that supposedly can actually grade a teacher based off of a rubric that the student supplies from the teacher, and also includes sort of a scan of the sort of public persona of who that teacher is, and gives it a best guess. I have some very personal feelings about this that are not very positive, too, but I wanted to get you guys take on this about how we’re seeing that sort of transactional framework being taken up by other companies as well, too.

Emily: Yeah, I’m not a fan. [LAUGHTER] I mean, there’s so many reasons. The main thing for me is that it keeps students tethered to that grade motivation, right? Like, if you’ve got these Grammarly tools that are gonna guarantee for you, I can help you write an A paper, and I can grade it for you and tell you that it’s gonna be an A, then students are writing to conform to whatever Grammarly tells them an A is. And of course, I think the idea that it would scan the Internet to determine what your instructor might think based on their like Rate My Professor comments or whatever, is incredibly disturbing. And the only good thing that might come out of it is that instructors might get a sense of what it is like to have AI reading you in a way that might make them more cautious about putting their student work into an AI.

Josh: Yeah, I wrote a little bit about this on LinkedIn, and I just want to thank Grammarly for helping Emily and I to make the case that grades are truly subjective and kind of pointless. If the machine can gather some of these random bits of information and suggest what might possibly be a grade that I myself would give, I think that that just explodes the notion that a grade is something that meaningfully measures learning. It’s absurd to me, but I think that that has been a through line here, of a lot of my comments, but that especially, I think, takes it to a new level.

Emily: I guarantee Grammarly does not grade the way that I would. [LAUGHTER] My priorities are not Grammarly priorities.

Marc: I think the big picture we’re seeing, too, is that there’s the performance versus the reality, and that’s what we’re kind of getting back into the overall concept here, where we’re talking about. Teachers are human beings. We’re still flesh and bone for now, hopefully that’s going to remain for this future too. Yet there’s still a huge desire to have that performance. I’m sure Grammarly too thought about this. I’m sure they beta tested it too, because it’s what students want. I want to know what my teacher thinks about this essay at midnight that I’m writing this. So I think we need to start thinking about how we can communicate our value and what we provide to students too, in a way that is better than what a company or a product or just AI in general can offer. And that’s going to be incredibly challenging, because right now at higher education, we are on the receiving end of a fire hose of these different products.

John: We are reaching the end of the time we’ve scheduled. So we always end with the question: What’s next? …which, in anything dealing with AI is something we’re all asking on a daily basis, it seems.

Emily: Well, this semester, we are doing at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning a reading group on the book The Opposite of Cheating: Teaching for integrity in the age of AI, and Marc is also doing a number of AI workshops with our academic innovations group. And to go back to the grading conversation, I think what’s next is I’m continuing to work on a book on collaborative grading, and Josh and I are working on another book on alternative grading, and so we’re not going to explicitly talk about AI too much in those books, but I think they have a real bearing on some of the AI stuff that we’re seeing right now.

Josh: I think an important message to share what’s next is keep doing the work. We’re going to keep doing the work of understanding, learning, and working with our students. I think certainly we will continue to have conversations about AI, but a message from my what’s next, the message that I am continually promoting to administrators here on campus is that AI is one thing among many things that are still at issue in the world of teaching and learning, and so we need to still be addressing those as well.

Marc: Yeah, I think that’s a really great point to end on, too. For me, I’m focusing much more about how multimodal AI is affecting our mental health, in some ways, especially teen mental health. We’re seeing a lot of use cases for therapy and companionship, for these tools that you can talk with. I think that’s going to be something that explodes as a topic over this next year. I also think it is going to be imperative for us to have conversations with our students about how they’re using these tools, because very few people are really talking to them about it and asking them if you are using it, are you thinking you’re talking to a person or to in it, a machine or private company giving all your private information to it? So I think more or less caution is where I’m headed for this with AI, I think we’ve got far too many different products and different use cases out on the market to really keep track of, so I would hope we’d be going to slow down, but I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon.

Rebecca: Well, thanks for a really great conversation. We always enjoy talking to all of you, and it was great to have a diversity of perspectives and a more nuanced look at this topic today.

John: Yes, thank you. It’s great talking to each of you, and we’re looking forward to many more future conversations. And I’d also like to put in another plug for the Opposite of Cheating. We’re going to be doing a reading group on that here as well this semester.

Emily: Thanks, John and Rebecca,

Josh: Thanks everyone.

Marc: Thank you guys.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

John: Editing assistance provided by Madison Lee.

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412. Higher Ed Instructional Design

Posted in accessibility, assessment, diversity, higher education, learning, online learning, pedagogy, professional development, teaching, Uncategorized
September 24, 2025

Instructional designers have played an increasingly important role in supporting instruction in all modalities. In this episode, Safary Wa-Mbaleka and Gianina-Estera Petre join us to discuss a new resource describing effective instructional design practices in a global context.

Show Notes

  • Wa-Mbaleka; Chen, Baiyun; Petre, Gianini-Estera; and deNoyelles, Aimee (2025). The Sage Handbook of Higher Education Instructional Design. Sage.
  • Journal of Educational Studies
  • Petre, Gianina (2022). Training Pre-Service Teachers for Classroom Management through Study Groups.
  • UDL Guidelines
  • Means, B., Toyama, Y., Murphy, R., & Baki, M. (2013). The effectiveness of online and blended learning: A meta-analysis of the empirical literature. Teachers college record, 115(3), 1-47.
  • Showers, B. (1982). Transfer of Training: The Contribution of Coaching.
  • TILT Higher Ed
  • WCAG
  • Petre, G.E. (2025) ed.,. The Alphabet of Values. Stanborough Press.
  • Wa-Mbaleka, S., & Thomas, D. (2022). Qualitative Research in a Multilingual Setting: Principles and Strategies. In The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research in the Asian Context. SAGE Publications Ltd.

Transcript

John: Instructional designers have played an increasingly important role in supporting instruction in all modalities. In this episode, we discuss a new resource describing effective instructional design practices in a global context.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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Rebecca: Our guests today are Safary Wa-Mbaleka and Gianina-Estera Petre. Safary is an associate faculty at University of Arizona Global Campus. He has authored and co-authored more than 60 scholarly journal articles and more than 30 books and book chapters. Gianina is an Associate Professor at Adventus University of Cernica, Romania. She is the Research Center Director and Editor-In-Chief of the Journal of Educational Studies. Safary and Gianina are two of the editors of The Sage Handbook of Higher Education Instructional Design, which was released in July 2025. Welcome, Gianina and welcome back, Safary.

Safary: Thank you. Glad to be back.

Gianina: Thank you.

John: Today’s teas are:… Safary, are you drinking tea?

Safary: I’m having water today. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: The foundation of tea. [LAUGHTER]

Safary: Yes. [LAUGHTER]

John: And Ginanina?

Gianina: Yes. Actually, I like drinking ginger tea. I think two hours ago I had one. I like tea, but also water.

John: Very nice. Ginger tea is one of my favorites, too.

Rebecca: It’s a good choice, for sure. I have Lady Grey this morning.

John: And I have spring cherry green tea.

Rebecca: So we invited you both here to discuss the Sage Handbook of Higher Education Instructional Design. Can you tell us about the origin story of this book?

Safary: Actually, I think, John and Rebecca, you’re part of the origin of this book, because when we had another podcast last year, you asked me the question, so what’s next? [LAUGHTER] And I said, I think we need to look into one of the dimensions and try to dig deeper into that. And as I was looking around, I quickly realized that instructional design is a big deal. And so that’s how it started. I talked to Gianina. I talked to two other colleagues who are co-editors, and we all agreed that, yeah, it was time to have a book on instructional design and specifically for higher education.

Gianina: For me, I just joined the team, a little bit late, compared with the three other colleagues. And what can I say? I collaborated in many projects with Safary, and from this collaboration, when he told me about this project, I said, “Wow, I really want to participate. I really want to be involved in this. I think it’s a need.” And you know how it is, the natural way of appearing, the project’s appearing. You are working on something, and suddenly another idea appears, and you are saying, “Oh, we need to do this.” So I was very happy to be involved in this project with Safary and the other colleagues.

John: And this is a rather large project. This volume has 50 chapters organized into seven sections. Could you give us a brief overview of the types of topics covered in each section, and maybe with a few topic examples?

Gianina: As you mentioned, 50 chapters organized into seven sections. I will give some titles. For example, section one is about general foundations of higher education instructional design. Here is the introduction of what instructional design is. what instructional designers do, understanding and addressing common instructional design challenges and so on. The second section is theoretical foundation of instructional design. Here we have ideas or topics about historical foundations, instructional design theories, instructional design models and other. Section three, it’s about practical foundations of higher education instructional design. And here we have topics about learner needs and analysis, keeping teaching in mind while designing classes, addressing issues of inclusion. I am just selecting some topics. Section four, it’s higher education instructional design at the course level. And here we have exactly the topics, how to design standards, the goal, the syllabus, how to design an online course, flipped class, hybrid class, more micro credential courses and other topics here. With section five, higher education instructional design and the curriculum. And here we discuss about quality assurance, partnership between subject matter experts and instructional designers, mobile learning, designing content for learners with disabilities and other topics. Section six, it’s about technology in higher education instructional design. Hot topic, no? Using technology [LAUGHTER] when designing instruction and when conducting instruction. Here in Section six, we have also about artificial intelligence, how to integrate artificial intelligence in teaching and learning, and the last one, research in higher education instructional design, with the focus on research trends in higher education instructional design, conducting research in higher education and instructional design, investigating learners experience and so on. So a lot of topics, interesting and very actual, I would say.

Safary: Yeah, and thank you so much, Gianina for this summary. You will see that it is true that we have a number of textbooks on instructional design, but as an instructional designer myself, I’ve been in instructional design for many years, there was always something missing. If it is the leaders who design the textbook, it tends to be mainly leadership. If it’s the IT people, it tends to be technical. If they’re just the instructional designers, it’s just the instructional design part. But as you can see on this one, we have a variety of all the different stakeholders, the people who are involved in instructional design, from leadership to technology to the curriculum, to many other things, evaluation, assessments, we tried to capture as many things as possible, so that you have one resource that captures most of what is needed in instructional design, especially in higher education.

John: And you brought in a lot of voices into this volume. How did you select the contributors for this project.

Safary: You know, I think that it started with the selection of the focal editors, because the selection of the co-editors was very strategic, making sure that we’re getting people who have a lot of connections in the field of instructional design. The other two who are not with us on this podcast are from University of Central Florida Baiyun and Amee, who were my colleagues before, actually I worked together in the same department, so they have a large network. And we said, “Okay, we need to look outside the United States, because we don’t want this to be just the United States.” And quickly I thought about Gianina, and she has a large network in Europe. And so with the four of us together, and each one having our own network, we’re able to quickly put together a group of contributors trying to make it as diverse as possible. So we have contributors from many different countries, from North America, Central America, Latin America, Europe, Africa, Australia, I think New Zealand and Asia, of course, we covered almost the whole world.

Rebecca: One of the things that I really appreciate about this particular volume. in your past work, too, is this international perspective. And not just because you have a wide variety of authors representing a wide variety of perspectives, but that a lot of the chapters are co-authored by folks of different perspectives. Can you talk a little bit about those decisions?

Safary: Gianina, do you want to go first?

Gianina: Yes, you know, because we are connected, the editors are so connected and involved in so many projects, research projects, collaboration projects, it’s not very difficult to have a group to connect with of experts, of course, in this field, and also inviting those experts, they have also connections, and they invited other experts in the field. So we tried to motivate them to work by teams, because this different perspective brings a lot of good work, a proper view, a proper image on the topic. So because we are people of collaboration, and we love collaborating, it was not so difficult to work by groups. For example, I had a chapter with three other colleagues, one was for Valencia University, Spain, and the other two were from Montemorelos University, Mexico. So this diversity, I think it’s a very positive and strong point in the book, because different perspectives can bring rich approaches in the topic.

Safary: Yeah, and in my case, and I agree with Gianina actually, collaboration brings synergy that you didn’t get from just a one-sided thing. And this is from the different projects that I’ve had with Sage. This is my third one with the handbooks. I have come to realize that this is actually the strength that we bring into Sage. I have been privileged to work on three continents, and I see that there are many different perspectives, and there are experts everywhere in the world, and not just in one place, as much as I am pro America, because this is where I am, and this is where I study, and this where I’ve spent many of my career years, but there’s just a lot of knowledge out there. And I think this is the strength that we get from collaborating. When you have people from the Middle East contributing, people from Europe, from Africa, from Asia, from Asia Pacific, you’re getting multiple perspectives. Sometimes I read some of the manuscripts, some of the drafts people have submitted. I never thought about that, or we have never addressed that here in the West. And so from the conferences I’ve had with other people, other projects have worked together, connections like Rebecca, I think you were one of the contributors. I don’t know how we got connected, if it was from the podcast or something. And some of the people, my students now, who know other people, you find that the final product is very solid. It’s much richer because it represents the global perspective, because the field of instructional design is not only one sided, it’s everybody’s involved in it.

John: What is the target audience of this book? Is it designed primarily for instructional designers as a resource? Is it designed for faculty to see how instructional designers can assist them? Or is it designed for administrators to better understand the role that instructional designers play?

Gianina: The book is for all the mentioned and for the others also. So we have in the list of the target population, let’s say this or audience. We have instructional designer, but also university students, online education leaders, researchers, faculty, team leaders, support personnel. So it’s a variety of target audience here, and I think based on my experience during this process, from the beginning to the publication moment, I could connect with all these categories. I discuss with them. I presented the book also in Romania and with other researchers and administrators I collaborate with. So I could see that it’s a need, and they were waiting the book to be published so that they have this global perspective on instructional design in higher education.

Safary: And while we focus primarily on that, and we kept that in mind, we made sure that all the contributors kept this audience in mind. We understand that there’s a lot there that can be used in the industry, a lot of information. For example, we have instructional design models there, quality assurance in instructional design. These are things that can be used even K through 12. But we didn’t want to claim that we’re writing it for all those other places, because in case we missed something that is very much relevant to them, then we wouldn’t want to be accountable for that. But it can be expanded to anybody really who is interested in instructional design or learning instructional design, or applying instructional design or doing research in instructional design. They can definitely do that.

Rebecca: I can see it as a really helpful guide for new faculty who don’t have experience [LAUGHTER] designing their instruction, because it is so comprehensive and it allows you to kind of dip into spaces that you may be less familiar with. Maybe there’s areas that you are familiar with, but there’s other topics that maybe you want to explore more, like AI or other topics like different models or different ways to structure a course. So you each co-authored or authored chapters in this book. Can you tell us a little bit about your contributions to this volume?

Safary: I contributed to quite a number of chapters, obviously chapter one and the last chapter. I always contribute to that If I’m a co-editor, I always love that, because it’s like this where we’re going, and this what we have learned. I like that. So the first chapter and last chapter, that’s what it is. But the two chapters that I really contributed to substantively, one is on instructional design models. I like instructional design models. I don’t know why. The first book I used on instructional models, textbook when I was doing PhD in instructional design was, I think, Gustavson, 2002, that’s old now. And when I was going through those instructional design models, I was just amazed. It’s like, how did they come up with this? And so we have one chapter on instructional design models, just a synthesis to have things in one place. I know that books that are just books for instruction design models, but this is like a synopsis of 10 or more designs, something like that, the most practical ones that people can use. Anybody who is new to instruction design can easily follow and we tell them, here are the strengths of each design, here are the weaknesses, and you can use them in this and this area. So I co-authored that with a gentleman from Chicago. actually. I don’t even remember how I got to know him. We have never met, but we have collaborated like we have known each other forever, but we just got to know each other on this project. And he’s an instructional designer in one of the universities there, and so he was equally excited about instruction design, and he teaches instruction design. The other chapter that I really, really loved, and I contributed alone because I just wanted to put in my own concepts of quality assurance in instructional design. I basically took the same things that people have, but presented them in a different perspective and integrated research in that chapter as well, which tends to be left out when you’re talking about quality assurance. People talk more about the strategies to use, but not so much emphasizing the research aspect of that. And so I was able to create an acronym for that to present the different phases that have to happen. And for each phase, I have questions that people have to ask to assess that specific dimension of instructional design, and it’s much more comprehensive, not just at the course level, but in the whole instructional design process. I contributed to others, but at a minimal level, but those two are the ones that I really got carried away with, because it’s just my passion. I love instructional design, step by step and the instructional design models, and also to make sure that the quality is taken care of.

John: So while we have quite a few instructional designers in our audience, we believe, a lot of people in the audience are faculty who may not be familiar with instructional design models. Could you just talk a little bit about some of your favorite instructional design models, the ones that you use, just so that people who may not be as familiar get a feel for them.

Safary: Well, all of us, we know this elusive ADDIE model. You know that is kind of the leader, even if, when you want to go around it, you’ll find that you’ll always find some dimensions of that in whatever other people come up with. We have rapid instruction design model that is also out there. We have spiral designs, those who just feel like you go in circular ways. And looking at the different models, I have come to realize that some look at it as strategies, while others look at instruction design models are more into processes and the ones that I like the least, they look at it primarily as a philosophical or theoretical thing, which I prefer not to go from that perspective. If we talk about instruction design models, I want things step by step, things that I can easily find in what other people did.

Rebecca: So what I’m hearing you say is a lot of these models are really actionable. So if someone is getting started in designing their own course, they can follow a process. And there’s these different processes folks can follow.

Safary: Yes.

Rebecca: …as a way to develop their course.

Safary: Definitely, and for me, if it is not that user friendly, that people can follow step by step, then there’s an issue with that instruction design model, because we are going to introduce these to people who are new to the field, we don’t want them struggling: “Okay, how do I implement this?” They should be able to read and understand most of what is being said and be able to apply that.

John: The other chapter you mentioned focused on quality assurance. You mentioned that you’ve presented some research there, but is there any particular quality assurance technique that you use, or that you encourage people to use?

Safary: I wouldn’t say that I have one specific technique. What I have done in that chapter, I created the different phases of instructional design, somewhere between five to seven phases, and each phase, I have the specific elements that have to be taken care of. So I created a table that shows the different phases and each phase exactly what needs to be taken care of. It’s a long list. It’s a long list, but that makes it very practical, so that anybody who is still new to instruction design can follow, and once they have addressed all those steps, they can move to the next phase and easily address what is happening.

Rebecca: And how about your chapters. Gianina?

Gianina: Of course, I contributed to the first chapter and the last one with Safary, and I met the other colleagues, but I wrote, as mentioned, one chapter with three other colleagues, one from Valencia University and the other two from Mexico, on hybrid class, how to design a hybrid class. And because all four, we are excited about blending face to face and the online instruction, we focus on different aspects on how to design, and we provided specific examples how to use different tools, how to integrate them in instruction. And I wrote a chapter by myself, so it was about addressing issues of inclusion in instructional design. And in this chapter, I would say that it was blending my model, the model I developed during my PhD thesis, the model just saying a few words in between. So I am coming from a former communist country, so in my country, in Romania, only in the last years, we are speaking about cooperative learning and how to train future teachers to use cooperative learning. So during my PhD studies, I developed a model named CoLearnItt, cooperative learning for initial teacher training. And in this chapter, I’m presenting my model blended with the UDL principles. So it seems that all the components of the model are very well connected with the UDL. So I am presenting with specific examples from my classes, because in the last years, I conducted action research in my inclusive education class. So during the years, I came up with different action plans and models. So I improved them year after year. And in this chapter, I’m presenting the last version of my model. So I’m very excited because it’s very practical and each professor can implement in his teaching when designing the class, these elements from the CoLearnItt model and UDL principles. And this is very exciting for me.

John: Let’s go back to the first chapter you referred to on hybrid learning. This is an area where which I think is probably underused given the meta-analyses that suggest that it’s often more effective than either face-to-face or purely asynchronous or online learning. What are some things though, that faculty who first engage in hybrid learning might do wrong? What are some common errors that perhaps you’d like to encourage people not to do when designing a hybrid course.

Gianina: From the readings and the research I conducted, I could identify that is not a balanced way between the face-to-face and synchronous or asynchronous part. So in my opinion, it should be a training before designing such a class, because it’s not easy. So it’s about how to use technology, and not all of the teachers are used to the new technology. It’s about how to create the content, how to organize the content, how much of the content should be explored before the class, in a flip class format, and how much in the class, in the physical class, how to organize or to design the assessment, because it’s important to have part in online, synchronous or asynchronous, and also in face to face. So all these aspects should be in a balanced way, introduced in a hybrid class. And I think the teacher should be trained in doing this, because it’s not an easy task, let’s be honest, and also the technology. How do you use what kind of platforms so that they should be user friendly and easy to access, easy to understand and so on, how to explain your students how to use the platform, how to respond to the assessment tasks. So all this should be in a balanced and very organized way. And yes, the teacher should be trained before organizing such a class.

Safary: And if I may add to that, the other challenge that personally, I have seen with people who are not trained. Training is very, very important. The challenge has been people over loading their students, because here, let’s say this started as a face-to-face class. They have 100% of face to face, and then they have another 50% online, and so students are overwhelmed with a lot of work.

John: That course and a half phenomenon that people often talk about with hybrid courses when people are first designing them.

Rebecca: It’s a problem for both for the students and for the faculty, right?

Safary: Yeah, yeah, true. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about your inclusive model and share some insights that folks might include in their classrooms to make their classrooms and their courses more inclusive?

Gianina: In the model I developed each component… let me list the components…. so it’s about using the training model of Showers, because only following a specific steps the students you are preparing to be teachers can learn how to apply, from the training to the class, everything. It’s about, how to design the classroom management so that it’s inclusive, how to organize your interactive lecturing so that address each type of the students you have in the class, how to evaluate the students, how to design, how to offer or to give expert feedback, so that mastery learning takes place in that class. Also how to use dimensions of learning to build step by step this inclusive class, because we have such a diversity in our classes today, and we need to be so creative and to bring so much diversity in our teaching, so that each one of them can be touched by our teaching, to be motivated by our teaching. So all these components are related to the three directions in UDL, how to diversify the teaching methods, so that the students can learn how to diversify your evaluation, your assessment, so that each one of them can respond in his or her own way due to the diversity that I mentioned, and how to engage them in the classroom. So in these three directions, I think my model is very well connected with the UDL principles. And I showed in the chapter how each component or how each part of the component, it’s very developed. So I cannot just say in a few words the entire model, but I can show with specific examples from the classroom and from my research, how the CoLearnItt model is connected with UDL principles. It’s really nice. You know, for me, it’s very exciting to achieve this point with my model, because I don’t know, in future, maybe something new will appear. Because I’m continuing with the research, I am conducting action research in each class, so after each class, something new comes up.

Rebecca: Probably one of the best parts about working on a project like this is getting to learn a whole swath of new things. [LAUGHTER]

John: And that’s also one of the benefits and challenges of running a podcast. We get so many good ideas from our guests that we try to implement, perhaps sometimes too many of them, and it can be a bit overwhelming at times. We also have another co-author of one of the chapters… Rebecca, could you talk a little bit about your contribution to the book?

Rebecca: Sure, I had the honor of working on a chapter about designing for students with disabilities, which is something that is certainly dear to my heart. As listeners of our podcast know, and I think I got to co-author with a colleague that, Gianina, I think you maybe had recommended that I write with Chip and so it was really wonderful to work with a colleague from Romania, who I had not met before. And one of the things that we explored in this chapter is some of the digital accessibility standards, the web content accessibility guidelines in combination with UDL or Universal Design for Learning and TILT, Transparency in Learning and Teaching, and how there are some really interesting synergies and overlaps between these three models and strategies, but also where they differ, and how those differences and implementing some of those other pieces actually really help support a variety of different kinds of students with a variety of different kinds of needs and different kinds of technology that they might be using to access information. So it was really fun to work on this particular chapter, to explore the different kinds of things that we often recommend, but also like you Gianina, to like put them lined up next to each other and see where some of those overlaps are, and to really make those explicit, so that it also made the differences very explicit.

John: And how did you connect TILT with digital accessibility?

Rebecca: Well, you know, one of the most important things is not necessarily the technical standard around digital but all of our digital content needs to be transparent in the way we’re organizing it. And there is a WCAG, or a web content accessibility guideline that really points the idea of like clear language and TILT is all about clarity and transparency. So it was a way to kind of bring that to life, I think, in a much more obvious way, and really provide steps that someone could take to implement that into their coursework. So there was a lot of examples that are like that, where there’s one here that seems like something I need to do, but maybe it’s in a language that doesn’t make a lot of sense to a teacher, but then you bring in another model that talks about that same kind of concept or content in a different way, that can be really helpful.

John: Very good.

Rebecca: So one of the things that I know is covered in this really comprehensive volume is assessment of instructional design, but we haven’t really talked about that in as much detail. Can you share a little bit of insight of what is captured in this volume on that topic?

Safary: Assessment has always been a challenging topic, and from this volume, it became clear that it’s not just a matter of strategy, it’s not just a matter of technology. It has a whole lot of things related to the philosophy of education, cultural background of the education setting, the historical background, the political background. So these are things that we never really thought about. Because, like, as far as I’m concerned, when I look at assessment, immediately I put on my American lenses. I look at it from that perspective. But other people, it’s like, remember this place where I was in a specific country in Africa, where assessment is about policing and making sure that students struggle, students suffer. So students who get an A, it’s like it’s a fight between the students and the faculty. So when I found myself in that specific country, my first few months, I was struggling because it was an expectation on me that I should assess students from that perspective. But I said: “No, assessment for me is to help students learn and make their learning effective and efficient. And so if I see that there’s something that’s not working, how can I support the student better?” But no. So there was a tension between my philosophy of assessment, of learning and assessment, and what was being expected from me. And so you’ll find that when we are dealing with assessments and instructional design, you’ll find that the context where the assessment is going to take place has other elements that have to be taken into consideration. We cannot have universal principles that everybody will abide with. You will always find variations based on specific context with the specific countries’ specific culture and maybe languages as well.

John: I can imagine that being a challenge, given all the variety in the audience that you’re writing for, given the different histories of higher education and the role of higher education and the traditions of higher education. One other issue, though, related to assessment, that I think we all wonder about, especially in forms of online assessment is AI, and you do have some information on AI in the book. Do you have any recommendations for people who are teaching in terms of being able to adequately assess work when students might perhaps have access to a wide variety of AI platforms that can respond to many different types of assessments?

Gianina: Actually, I listened some presentation of some experts in AI, and I understood that we should not be afraid of AI, but we should learn how to use it properly in our classes. So regarding assessment, let’s say that in Romania, because of the background, as a former communist country, we are not so how to say attached, for example, to formative evaluation. So we are focused on summative evaluation. And sometimes this is a big issue, because our students are learning just for grades, not all of them, some of them, of course, based on what this expert was presenting, that we should not be afraid of AI, but learning how to use it, I was thinking, why not inviting some experts in AI in my university and training our teachers how to use AI, not only to evaluate, to assess, but also to teach, to present and to create content to help students to understand how to use it in an ethical manner. And yes, I connected with some experts from Portugal, and they will come probably in March, April next year, to train us on how to use AI. So I think it’s not anymore that moment to just to be scared about AI, but just addressing properly, because it’s the reality. So why not teach our students how to use it in an ethical manner? And I think many things can be created and time saved with the use of AI, but in a proper way, of course, and also assessment, I think the teachers very fast, can identify if the homework is done with AI or by the student, if you know your students, of course, if you have 200 or 300 students, it’s very difficult. In my university, because we don’t have so many students, it’s a small university, we can, in a moment, identify that this is not the voice of my students. These are not the words of my students. So it’s not difficult. But go back to my first idea, why not collaborating with AI in an ethical manner?

Rebecca: So one of the other topics that’s covered in such a comprehensive volume…. we can’t emphasize how comprehensive it actually is… is leadership. Can you talk a little bit about the role leadership plays in instructional design?

Safary: I was so glad that we were able to include at least one whole chapter on leadership in instructional design, for many different reasons. Number one, when those who are with online, but this volume covers both online and face to face, when people want to go deep into instructional design, they want to have instructional design team or instructional design department, usually [LAUGHTER] they will just try to identify somebody who is an IT, because in their mind, instructional design means somebody who’s good with the computers, which is not true. I mean, yes, you know some of the computers, but instructional design is not primarily computers. It’s really about thinking and doing things, planning instruction, and that’s basically what it is. And so because of this, we do not really have a lot of leaders who are trained as instructional design leaders. People just grow into instructional leadership, but not really train. And so you find that if somebody didn’t go through like a leadership training, or they didn’t study instructional design, because they may be instructional design team leader without actually having done extensive training on instruction design, you’ll find that there’s always a disconnect between the instructional design team and the leader, that’s one side, somebody who can provide the vision, the mission and design the whole department, provide the leadership for the whole department and connect that to the university. It has to be somebody who understands very well instructional design but also knows how to deal with higher administration, because the instructional design leader is not necessarily the president of the college or the university. And so how do they do this? That chapter covers that extensively and is written by people who have extensive knowledge and expertise in the area. The other aspect of this, and I’m going to speak now from the online education perspective. I’ve been in universities where online education was being integrated at the beginning. I’ve been twice director of online education to start the department of online education. And the common challenge has always been, “Oh, since you have a computer and you have internet connection, and we have online library, okay, you don’t need anything, you just do everything, and we’ll have online education.” The administrators do not understand that this is a whole different thing. We need a team, we need a budget. We need resources, and this is something that they have, if they want to go into online education, they will have to invest significant money into this. And so the chapter helps with that. If you want to start an instructional design team, what needs to be in place? How do you relate with the top administration to make sure you get the buy in and the support that is needed to lead your instructional design team? What are the challenges? How do you fund resources? How do you connect? How do you deal with things when you have limited resources, because that tends to be a challenge, especially when the department is new. What kind of personnel do you want to have on board when you have your instructional design team? How do you establish the standards, the policies? All these are things that have to be dealt with when you are a leader of instructional design.

John: And as the role of instructional designers has become much more developed and much more extensive in terms of how they’re used, that’s an important point, and it sounds like that’s an important chapter too for potential leaders to be looking at.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking, what’s next?

Gianina: Many things are next, are coming. One of the projects I finished, it’s The Alphabet of Values. It’s a book for teachers, for parents, and for kids. And next week, on Wednesday, is the launch of the book here in Romania. I’m very excited, because the book, it’s with the contribution. I’m the editor and the one who designed the pedagogical part with strategies, methods, for children, for parents, and for teachers. But 26 authors from around the world, with MA and PhD in education, business and public health, wrote the stories. So all the continents are covered. And the beauty of this book is that it’s inclusive, has different aspects. It’s also interconnected with other fields, with geography, history, languages, religion, and others, and it’s very practical. The illustrations are done by a specialist, by an expert or professional in this field, and I’m very happy that it was published, I think three or four weeks ago, and the next week is the launch of this and also another book I’m sending in two weeks to print. It’s qualitative research, a practical guide for early career researchers, also with the contribution of different experts, researchers around the world. And I really hope that it was more for Romania, because we still believe that qualitative research is not so important, but step by step, we can show that has its place, and it’s very relevant in many fields. So printing, publishing in English, of course, I will translate it into Romanian language. So I am very excited about this, and also about our next year international conference, Safary participated. He was two years ago, the keynote speaker, but next year, we have competing perspectives in the AI age. This is the theme, so it’s very interesting. And these are my future projects, only a few of them, because we are involved in many projects. But I’m happy because two of these are done.

Rebecca: I love that you are supporting learners and educators of a wide variety of ages [LAUGHTER] and education settings and moments in their career.

Gianina: When I come back from my PhD studies, I studied in the Philippines. By the way, Safary was one of the best teachers I had there, and we continued, as you can see, to collaborate since I came back. I wanted to help the education system here in Romania, because we are making small steps towards Western approaches, but I want to contribute to this development, and I’m very happy to do this.

Rebecca: How about you, Safary?

Safary: You know, writing is my addiction, and Gianina knows this, because ever since I met her, I don’t know if it was 2016, somewhere around there, when we first met, I’ve always written, and for the first time, last March, after I published my recent book on qualitative research, I said, I’m going to take a break until October this year. So I’m on break. I have not been writing. It has been hard. It’s been very hard because I have so many ideas that are popping up in the head. I said, “No, no, I’m taking a break until October.” So in October, of course, I have a few ideas that are already in mind. I’m thinking of going back to qualitative research, because the first handbook I published was on qualitative research in Asian context. Then there was these two for higher education. And so I want to go back to qualitative research and probably create a textbook for quality research designs, because I see that a number of people are struggling with that. This is not going to be a handbook. It will be just a textbook, probably 200 pages and that’s not not too long, just to guide people to distinguish between the different designs, so that they don’t confuse that. I tend to be a little bit of purist as far as qualitative research is concerned. So I want things to be done right. You know, the structural design mindset is still influencing my other things that I do. So that’s the plan I have in the near future.

Rebecca: So although taking a break from writing, the mind is not taking a break. [LAUGHTER]

Safary: It’s not, but at least I get time to relax and oh, well, not so much. Gianina and I have a conference next week at a qualitative research conference starting on Monday, so Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Again, it’s covering different countries, but it’s a lot less thinking than when you’re leading a handbook.

John: Well, thank you. It’s great to hear from you, and it’s great to hear about this project and your future plans.

Gianina: Thank you.

Safary: Thank you so much for inviting us. It’s been a great privilege to be back on the podcast.

Rebecca: Yeah, thanks for joining us.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer. Editing assistance provided by Madison Lee.

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411. The War on Tenure

Posted in faculty, higher education, teaching
September 17, 2025

Tenure is an employment protection threatened by changes in the labor market as well as declining public attitudes toward higher education and expertise. In this episode, Deepa Das Acevedo joins us to discuss the history of tenure, the value proposition of tenure, and what the cost to society and higher education would be if it were eliminated.

Deepa is a legal anthropologist at Emory Law, the Editor of PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, a past Trustee of the Law & Society Association, and has held leadership positions in the Association of American Law Schools, the American Anthropological Association, and the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology. Deepa has published extensively in scholarly journals. She is the author of The War on Tenure, which will be released in September 2025 by Cambridge University Press.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Tenure is an employment protection threatened by changes in the labor market as well as declining public attitudes toward higher education and expertise. In this episode, we explore the history of tenure, the value proposition of tenure, and what the cost to society and higher education would be if it were eliminated.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

John: Our guest today is Deepa Das Acevedo. She is a legal anthropologist at Emory Law, the Editor of PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, a past Trustee of the Law & Society Association, and has held leadership positions in the Association of American Law Schools, the American Anthropological Association, and the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology. Deepa has published extensively in scholarly journals. She is the author of The War on Tenure, which will be released in September 2025 by Cambridge University Press. Welcome Deepa.

Deepa: Thank you so much for having me.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are… Deepa, are you drinking any tea today?

Deepa: I am. I have a cup of roobois here, which I began drinking when I was in college, thanks to a South African friend of mine,

Rebecca: And perhaps the beginning of the journey to tenure. [LAUGHTER]

Deepa: Yes.

Rebecca: How about you, John?

John: I am drinking Kyoto cherry rose organic green tea, which came from a tea store in Canandaigua. Somehow, I ended up with this unexpectedly.

Rebecca: Why? Because I don’t like cherry tea, John? [LAUGHTER]

John: Yes, because you tried it, because you liked the way it smelled, but you didn’t like it. So I got two bags, one a green tea and one a black tea, of cherry-flavored tea.

Rebecca: And it smells so good.

John: And it does smell very good, and it tastes delicious too.

Rebecca: I’m glad I’m not drinking it. I have an old favorite English afternoon tea today.

John: That’s always a nice, good, solid tea. We’ve invited you here today to discuss the war on tenure. Before we discuss this, though, can you tell us about your own educational path to your tenured position?

Deepa: So I always meant to go to law school and become a lawyer, but I like to say that I got a little bit sidetracked into a PhD program. Academia is kind of the family business. My parents are professors. My grandparents, one of them, was a professor. I have an uncle and a few cousins, all of whom are professors. So I decided to pursue a research interest that I developed in college. I started grad school with a project that focused exclusively on religion among second-generation South Asian Americans, but I very soon switched over to a project based in India that was at the intersection of religion and law. And by the time I came back from my field work, I was reading Law and Society scholarship and legal scholarship as much as I was reading anthropology. So I decided that, yes, I did want to stay in academia, to stay in the family business, but I wanted to do so at a law faculty, rather than out of the disciplinary faculty. So I went to law school. While I was in law school, a very prescient advisor told me that “you’re not going to get a job on an American Law School faculty teaching Indian law, so you need to develop a second research area.” I kind of poked around to find an area of scholarship and teaching that would integrate my anthropological background and my interests, and settled on labor and employment law, or work law, and eventually that is what I was hired to teach. So I teach courses in legislation and regulation, employment law, employee benefits, and I eventually found my way to studying academic employment and tenure.

Rebecca: That sounds like a nice segue into our next question, which is: Can you talk a little bit about how you began your book project, The War on Tenure?

Deepa: So I was sitting at home during the pandemic, working on a different book project because even though I’d developed a body of teaching and research interests in Labor and Employment Law, I studied gig work for a while before moving on to faculty tenure. I maintain an active research agenda in India, and so I was working on a book about India during the pandemic and doom scrolling in between chapters. And like everyone else, I read a lot about the reductions in force, the closures of committees and departments, the kind of mass layoffs of faculty, both tenure stream and non-tenure track, that were going on during this period. And it just made me wonder, how often do the terminations of tenured faculty happen despite the fact that these faculty have tenure? I kind of thought that this would be an easily answerable and long-answered question. So on my writing breaks, I kind of poked around higher education literature. I read a lot of industry news sites and blogs, and I couldn’t find an answer. So in a way, this entire body of research on faculty tenure, and academic employment began in the way that I think a lot of academic research projects begin. I had a fun question; I thought it was an easy research question. It turned out to really not be an easy research question, and five years later, I have an original data set, several research articles, and a book.

John: It’s really nice to have a book on this because it has been so understudied. Critics of tenure often argue that it’s somehow different than other types of employment contracts. It stands alone. It’s unique. But you note in your book that there are a lot of other similar types of contracts out there in the form of these “just-cause” contracts. Could you elaborate a little bit on tenure, what a “just-cause” contract is, and what other types of jobs provide similar types of employment protection?

Deepa: Sure. So when I started thinking about how often tenured faculty get terminated, and what it means from an employment perspective to have or not have tenure, I was a little bit embarrassed by how little I had thought about it, despite being from an academic family and despite teaching employment law, because one of the things that I spend weeks teaching my employment law students is about the different kinds of employment contracts that exist out there. So I can kind of break this down into maybe four steps or four different stages of analysis. The first is that we want to distinguish between indefinite employment relationships and definite or fixed-term work contracts. So most of the time, whether you’re a bank teller or an architect or a tenure-stream faculty member, when you start a job, you think that you’re going to keep having that job until either you move, you get fired, or you quit. Those are indefinite employment relationships, as opposed to a job that you begin knowing that it’s going to last for two years or five years, or what have you. In the US, indefinite employment relationships are governed by a very unique default rule or baseline rule, and this is called the “at-will rule” governing employment relationships. The at-will rule, as I make my employment law students recite in class, means that either party can terminate any relationship for good reason, bad reason, or no reason at all, for any reason, except an explicitly illegal reason, with no notice and no payment in lieu of notice. What does that mean? That means that you can walk into work and decide to quit because it’s Tuesday. Your boss can walk into work and decide to fire you because it’s Tuesday. Firing somebody because it’s Tuesday is a really unwise reason to let go of an otherwise satisfactory employee, but it’s not explicitly illegal, and the at-will rule says that that’s okay. Your boss doesn’t owe you any money. They don’t have to give you any advance notice. And so, as you can imagine, the at-will rule creates a lot of insecurity for the employees who are subject to it. “just-cause” is a type of indefinite employment relationship that creates a carve-out from the at-will rule. It basically says your employer needs to have reasonable or just-cause to terminate the employment relationship, and just having that requirement makes the employment relationship much more secure from the employee’s perspective. Tenure is a form of just-cause. It’s not the only type of just-cause contract out there. It’s also definitely on the more protective end of the spectrum of employment contracts, even on the spectrum of just-cause contracts, but it’s not sui generis. It’s not even alone on that most protective end of the spectrum. There are actually a lot of different kinds of employees who are governed by just-cause principles. So part of the reason that we see a lot of litigation around federal employees right now is because the federal employee workforce is by and large governed by very protective just-cause principles. A lot of workers who you might not expect to have above-average protections at work, meaning that they’re not subject to purely at-will principles, actually do receive higher protection. So, for instance, I think in 2020 or 2021, New York City passed a law creating last-in first-out time requirements and various other limiting principles applicable to the hiring and termination of fast food workers. All of those principles constrain the employer’s ability to terminate the employment relationship, and they impose a weaker version of just cause. Anyone who is employed pursuant to a union bargaining agreement is employed pursuant to just-cause principles. So the kind of employment contract that tenured employment relationships are one specific variation of is actually, it’s not common. It is probably about 20% of the indefinite employee workforce. But it’s definitely not unique to tenured faculty.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about when the concept of tenure first arose and what the purpose of it was?

Deepa: I think, like with a lot of these timeline considerations, there’s a lot of possible answers. So with respect to the start date for tenure, we could say that it’s 1940, that’s when the AAUP developed the Statement of Principles on Tenure that most tenure policies at American universities are based on, and this is the most common origin point that people give for the invention of faculty tenure in the United States. We could go a little bit further back to the late 1800s when Walter Metzger, who’s one of the foremost historians of academia, especially in the United States, says that some tenure-like practices began to be common among American institutions of higher education, but Metzger is careful to note that there were no due process-like features attached to employment contracts in that period. We could go even further back to medieval Europe, when scholars working at the major centers of learning across Europe had benefits like the freedom to pursue and teach ideas without fear of repercussion. They even had benefits like freedom of passage across borders. Some of them were exempt from taxes that were generally applicable. All of that was rolled into what was considered tenure, and in that stage. So there are many possible answers— 1940s, 1800s, medieval Europe. There are also many possible answers as far as what the purpose of tenure has been. But I think Walter Metzler, the historian I mentioned earlier, has one of the best and most broadly applicable responses: “in all the ages of academic man, the age of the master, the age of the employee, the age of the professional, the desire to protect the academic office has run strong.” That’s it. Tenure is about protecting the academic office. What protecting that office means entails various things at various points, depending on what the pressures from the outside and from the inside on the Academy are. It could be freedom of inquiry, it could be sustained employment. One of my arguments is that it’s all of those things.

John: When people argue for tenure today, under all the threats that tenure is being faced with, which we’ll talk about later, they often focus primarily on academic freedom. But as you already suggested, there are many other reasons for tenure besides that, including just this employment protection being an important component. Could you explain why employment protection and some of these other issues may be important in justifying tenure, even in the absence of the academic freedom argument?

Deepa: It is true that faculty often hesitate to frame tenure in the light of employment security. And I think one of the most obvious reasons why is also one of the most correct reasons why, which is that saying that tenure gives me, the jobholder, employment security feels selfish. It doesn’t feel noble. It doesn’t have a higher purpose. It’s about protecting the individual employee’s job security. But the thing is, most people like job security, and most scholars need it in order to do the teaching and research work that they’ve been hired to do. I think that one of the most obvious reasons why tenure matters for individual faculty is also one of the reasons why they are so hesitant to articulate tenure as an employment protection, which is that tenure helps the individual employee keep their job. It’s a personal benefit in addition to being an institutional benefit or a professional benefit. But most people like job security, and I think that most scholars need job security to do the kind of teaching and research work that they’ve been hired to do. I absolutely believe that tenure’s ability to protect academic freedom is a real and valuable function of the employment practice, but my point is just that tenure’s ability to provide job security is real and valuable too. I think that tenure provides job security in a couple of different senses, and breaking it apart may also help us become comfortable with thinking about tenure in this way. So first, I think tenure as a form of job security provides a non-monetary type of compensation for a job that, in many ways, is this a tough sell. Getting into tenure stream or full time academia, even if it’s not tenure stream involves long training and apprenticeship periods that are expensive, either in terms of your explicit costs or your foregone opportunity costs. Most academics do not earn well relative to their credentials, and what those credentials could buy on the general labor market. Most academics have unusually low job mobility because there are relatively few and very geographically dispersed employers. If you’re an academic, this is a phenomenon that I call “quasi-monopsony” in the book, because we think of monopsonies as being markets in which there are few buyers for whatever is being sold, and there are few buyers for academic labor. More importantly, those buyers are clustered, so that we think of a major city as being a rich job market for academics when it has five universities or colleges. There aren’t many fields in which you would say that a particular city presents a rich labor market because there are five potential employers, but academia is such a labor market. I also think that the job security tenure offers provide a form of compensation for the fact that academic labor is hard. It involves serious thinking, careful work, highly intensive, emotional labor, dealing with students and colleagues. It involves free labor in many ways, when we do all of these peer reviews, when we sit on committees in the summer, the fact that most academics do not actually even get paid during the summers, although they are working and doing job-related tasks, job security is a form of compensation that makes up for the lack of monetary compensation attached to all of these tasks or times a year, and for the hard work that these tasks represent. I think the last thing that job security as a form of compensation does is that it provides a safety net for a group of workers who have to do all of this hard, long hour, under-compensated work at the end of expensive and long training. All of these workers have to do this work and do the work well: learning how to teach well, how to mentor well, how to write and publish articles or books well, means that you are less eligible, less desirable for work in the general labor market. You have to essentially depreciate your own skill set in order to succeed as an academic, and so you need some job security for that reason, too. There is a second set of reasons why I think job security matters in academia, and this has more to do simply with the work that being an academic entails. Whether we think of that work as doing research, lab sciences, archival research, field work, what have you. Whether we think that as publishing based on that research, or whether we think of that work as being teaching, mentoring, guiding, the time scale that all of these tasks involve is really long. You spend years planning, devising, executing research, and then you spend years seeing it to fruition as a published output. You spend an entire semester teaching a class, learning what went wrong, what students need, what went right, what to do more of, and then you don’t get to put those lessons into practice again for another year, maybe another two years. And so the risk of not getting something right, whether that something is a research result or a publication or a teaching strategy, is really high. We don’t think of academic work as risky because it doesn’t involve physical risk, but it is actually very risky, and the security that tenure offers helps mitigate that risk a little bit as well. So there are multiple reasons why job security matters for the work that academics do, and I think that we need to get comfortable with articulating those reasons, because in addition to the way that tenure protects academic freedom, it also provides security that is necessary to make the job a rational choice for potential performers of the job and a feasible job for holders of that job.

John: I’m a labor economist, so one of the things we talk about quite a bit in labor economics goes back to Adam Smith, the notion of compensating wage differentials, that if jobs are more pleasant, the compensation does not have to be as large. If jobs are less pleasant, they have to be paid more. And that’s basically, I think, part of the argument you’re making here, that because academics have this tenure, they don’t have to be paid as much as they would to attract faculty of equivalent training, skills, and quality. You’d have to pay people a lot more if they didn’t have that sort of job guarantee, especially because of the risk.

Deepa: I think what you’re saying is absolutely true. There’s a point that I actually don’t remember if I make in the book or not, but when I was hired in my first tenure-track job, I made less than I would have made as a newly minted law school graduate three years earlier. You take a wage cut in order to be able to do this work, and most people who pursue academia are quite happy to take that wage cut because they believe in the work that they’re trying to do. But there are limits as to what people can tolerate, and of course, also limits as to what they will tolerate. We absolutely think that lots of different types of workers pursue their chosen paths for reasons other than purely monetary gain. There’s a lot of scholarship showing how government workers, civil servants, don’t simply go into that line of work because it’s prestigious, it’s whatever. They go into it because they believe in the mission, and because they find the prospect of job security appealing, and they’re willing to take a pay cut, essentially, in order to achieve that job security and fulfill that mission. Academics are very similar. I don’t think that they’re engaging in a rational cost-benefit analysis, saying, “I’m willing to trade X number of dollars for X level of security or Y type of job requirements.” But there is some type of analysis of that nature going on. And I think one of the things that we are seeing is that as it becomes harder and harder to do the work that academia supposedly and ideally, entails, and as the conditions of that work become harder and harder to bear, academia becomes a less viable and, of course, a less desirable line of work.

Rebecca: I think that transitions nicely into this idea that tenure is providing all these protections that we’ve clearly described, but also we’ve seen a decline in the number of positions or faculty that are even eligible for tenure-granting positions. Can you talk a little bit about, like, why that decline has happened, and what that might mean for academia moving forward?

Deepa: It’s been well documented for a few years now, so the statistic is probably outdated, but I’m going to quote it anyway: around 20 to 25% of faculty are, in fact, tenure line, which means that 75 to 80% of faculty are not. That’s a huge decline and essentially a reversal from where the professoriate was, say, in the mid-20th century. Part of the reason for this flip between non-tenure-stream and tenure-stream faculty employment ratios has to do with a common dynamic across industries… it’s not limited to academia… which is that the relative commonality of indefinite employment relationships that I mentioned earlier, the kind that even when they’re at-will come with more benefits and more protections than independent contractor or fixed-term relationships. There has been a decline in those kinds of relationships over time. A lot of industries have gone from being based on an employer-employee model to an independent contractor and client or contract model. A very well-known example of this is the taxi industry, and this is even before Uber and Lyft came onto the scene. Taxis through the early to mid-70s, taxi drivers through the early to mid-1970s, were mostly employees of taxi companies. Now, they are overwhelmingly independent contractors who lease their cars, their medallions, whatnot, from owners of those resources, of those medallions or those cars. They’re not employees; they don’t receive the suite of legal protections or benefits that employees receive. They’re independent contractors doing business as part of a broader, more diffuse network of employment relationships. We’ve seen something similar in computer programming. One of the most famous cases that I teach in my employment law class about how to distinguish between employees and independent contractors has to do with software programmers who worked at Microsoft in the early 90s: How people who were working side by side in the same office, wearing the same lanyards, doing the same work, some of them were employees who were protected by various federal and state statutes. Some of them were independent contractors who weren’t protected by those statutes. So again, in a lot of different industries, we’ve seen this slip from long-term kind of full-service work relationships to discrete, shorter-term, less protective types of work relationships. It’s not just academia, in other words. At the same time, I think that there are some developments that are either uniquely or particularly impactful for academia that also help explain this shift from largely employing tenure-stream faculty to largely not employing tenure-stream faculty. One of those is the declining public valuation of higher education. This is something that we see in the news all the time: “How worthwhile do you think a four-year college degree is?” And if you don’t think a college degree is very worthwhile, you don’t think it makes sense to fund higher education institutions. If those institutions don’t have as much funding through public resources or through grant mechanisms or what have you, then they don’t have the ability to support long-term faculty like tenured professors. Another kind of development that is particularly relevant for academia, I think, is the always shaky, but recently more vulnerable public attitude towards expertise, technical expertise, specialization, kind of highly trained elite knowledge forms and systems. Tom Nichols has a book called The Death of Expertise. If you think that expertise is not valuable, then why would you invest in creating it? Why would you invest in supporting its perpetuation? But if you think that expertise isn’t that valuable, if you think that you don’t need advanced training to be able to do certain kinds of work or to have informed opinions about certain types of issues, then why would you fund the labor that is involved in generating or advancing or perpetuating expert forms of knowledge? So there are both general labor market changes that are also applicable to academia, and there are specific attitudinal changes that are uniquely impactful for academia, and I think both of these combined help us understand why universities in general now are staffed by people who are not full-time tenured faculty.

John: Whenever I have students who are considering graduate study, I warn them that the probability of getting a tenure-track job today is quite a bit lower than it used to be, but they’re often still really excited about it. And I remind them of the costs they’re going to be facing, and you talk about those costs quite a bit in your book, one of the quotes that I really liked was: “The life of the mind is also often and literally the life of the empty stomach.” Would we have as many people being willing to go through this whole process of many years in graduate school, of struggling to get by and pay bills, if they didn’t have that prospect or that possibility of arriving at a tenure-track position at the end of the process?

Deepa: Well, I would like to hope not, but I think it’s important to remember first that academics are no more universally rational maximizers when it comes to their professional decision-making, and I think the last several decades of higher ed employment suggests that academics are uniquely not rational maximizers when it comes to their professional decision-making. So I don’t think it’s simply or simplistically the case that making academia a worse job prospect is going to have a linear effect on the number of people who want to break into academia. That said, I’ve clearly thrown a lot of statistics at anyone who comes to me for this kind of advice, because nobody has come twice. I do think that there is some hope that even if academics or aspiring academics don’t completely lose the hope that leads them into this line of work, that they will be more mindful and more strategic about choosing this line of work, and the reason I have some hope in this way is because of what I’ve seen with law school enrollments. So for years, law school enrollments continued to grow by a few 1000 a year, actually, until they reached a peak first year or 1L enrollment level of around 52,000, that was the highest. That was also around the time when a lot of different actors moved to create more transparency around law school job outs. How likely were you to get a reasonably paying JD requiring job upon graduation if you went to such and such a school? If you had such and such entering statistics, like an LSAT test or undergraduate GPA, where would you expect to land in the hierarchy of law firms, which also correlates, unsurprisingly, to the hierarchy of salaries? And the movement for increased law school transparency, both in terms of admissions and in terms of graduation or post-graduation outcomes, had an effect on law school enrollments. So after that peak of around 52,000 1Ls in 2010, it’s more or less stabilized around 38,000 entering first-year law students every year. And I don’t know, because I don’t study this in a kind of focused way, whether 38,000 1Ls a year is an optimal number or something, but it gives me hope that aspiring professionals, aspiring practitioners of any kind of advanced professional field, if you give them the data, if you throw the information at them, eventually, they will begin to absorb it and make decisions in light of it, maybe making different decisions, maybe making decisions with their eyes fully open to the costs and the consequences and the potential benefits of pursuing their chosen professional path.

Rebecca: If tenure is eliminated and the proportion of faculty and tenure track lines continues to decrease and shrink, what are the costs to students and society?

Deepa: Well, I think the first thing to note is that making tenure less common or less protective means making academia less desirable and less viable as a profession, and without discounting the extent to which academics are not unusually rational maximizers of their own best ends, maybe they’re even less rational maximizers of their own best ends than the average person, I do think that at some point, the consequence of eviscerating tenure is going to be that fewer people are going to try to become academics at all. But I think a second consequence of eviscerating tenure is going to be not just that fewer people try to do the job, but that fewer people are going to be able to do the job well, whether we think of the job as teaching or mentoring or research and analysis, and I don’t mean that fewer people will be able to do the job well because we’ll have fewer good people in the job. I mean that fewer people will be able to do the job well, because the conditions of work will not allow them to do the job well. Job security is a condition of doing academic work well. So if you do not have job security, you are not going to take the risk to do research, to undertake publications that, let’s face it, in the peer review universe take months, years, sometimes decades. You’re not going to fine-tune classes and spend hours off of your regular workday guiding and mentoring students. You’re just not going to be able to do all of that because your job is not secure enough to allow you to do all of the things, and we can debate how we provide academics with job security, what exact name we use to describe the employment format, the contract that provides academics with the level of job security that they need. I don’t think that tenure is a magical word; I think that what tenure provides is magical and necessary. The one thing we can be quite sure of is that if that level of job security is not there, then people are not going to be able to do all of the things that they are required to do for the job in question.

John: Outside of academia, a lot of people believe that tenure provides a sort of lifetime guarantee, that pretty much no matter what you do, if you stop doing any productive work and so forth, you are going to be guaranteed employment. But is tenure really a guarantee of permanent employment as long as you stay out of jail?

Deepa: So describing tenure as a job for life is one of those things that just makes my blood pressure rocket right up because, for one thing, there is no such thing as a job for life. And secondly, if there was, tenure would not be it. I’m walking a very fine line here, because on the one hand, I’m saying “tenure is a valuable form of job security,” and on the other hand, I’m saying, “but it’s not ironclad.” The thing is, those are not mutually exclusive positions to hold. One of the things that I ended up researching and discovering in the course of my quest to find out how often tenured faculty actually get terminated was studying and building an original data set, because we don’t have this information of individual terminations of tenured faculty; there are a lot of smaller studies that look at how often faculty quit or want to quit. There are some studies about how faculty leave academia before they get to tenure. There’s not a lot of information about terminations of tenured faculty, so I did a lot of data scraping and cross-referencing and built a data set of individual for-cause terminations of tenured faculty. That means that these are people who achieve tenure, they were fired for what the university felt was just-cause. The university said, “You did something that warrants the termination of this relationship, despite the fact that you had tenure.” Now, the data set that I built, which covers every four-year institution in the United States, over 20 years, roughly, 2000 to 2021, the number of individual for-cause terminations in that data set, which are presumably because the tenured professor in question behaved badly, whether they behave badly enough or what have you, you know, is up for debate. The number of terminations in that data set over 20 years across all four-year institutions in the United States is less than the number of tenured faculty who lost their jobs through reductions in force at 13 universities in five years. What do we make of that little fact? Fewer people, fewer tenured faculty, lost their jobs because of ostensible wrongdoing at all institutions over 20 years, then lost their jobs through no fault of their own at 13 institutions over five years. That tells me that tenure does not grant a job for life, because even when you do nothing wrong, market forces alone will mean that you are extremely vulnerable to losing your job. You are more vulnerable to losing your job through no fault of your own than because you did something wrong. If you lose your job, whether through your own fault or not, because you spent enough time to get tenure, you learned how to jump through all of the hoops, how to craft the courses and the syllabi, how to publish the articles, how to construct the research. You unlearned, or you forgot, or you failed to learn, the tasks that might make you on the general labor market an employable applicant. So more people are losing their jobs despite having tenure for reasons that have nothing to do with wrongdoing, and then because they did all the things that they had to do to get tenure, they’re going to struggle to get a position in the general labor market. All of these things are so many ways of saying tenure does not provide a job for life, even if you do everything right.

Rebecca: So, given all of this information that you’ve just shared about contracts and not permanent employment, should faculty be concerned who are on tenure-track lines?

Deepa: I think that one thing that faculty should always keep in mind is that academia is still an industry. Tenured employment is still employment, which means that it’s a contractual relationship, and there are no guarantees in contractual relationships. But they should also remember that tenure is still more protective, more security-enhancing than the baseline rule of at-will employment that applies to most indefinite employees in the United States, and even more security-enhancing than most forums of just-cause employment. So tenure is still worth having, but I think that one thing academics should remember is that academia is still an industry. Tenured academia still represents an employment relationship and employment relationships are contractual. You always have to keep your eyes open. One of the reasons why we have all been able to benefit so much from the wide variety of tasks that faculty perform is because there is this idea that you pursue academia, not because it’s the best paying job, or it’s the easiest job to get, or it’s an obvious career path, but that you pursue it because it’s a vocation, it is mission aligned for who you are. And I think that faculty would do well to balance that commitment to the job and what it entails and what it really can be, which I think is magical. After all, I’m doing this work, but that they balance that commitment with an understanding that this is a job. This is a contractual relationship, and you need to maintain an eye on the relationship between yourself and the other contracting party, which is your university employer. At the same time, I do think academics shouldn’t go off on the deep end by saying that, “Well, tenure is meaningless.” It’s really not. It is worth having because it is far more security-enhancing and protective than the baseline at-will rule that applies to most indefinite employment contracts in the United States, and it is even more security-enhancing than the various forms of just-cause contracts that apply to a lot of indefinite employees. So tenure is worth having, but it’s worth being clear-eyed about what exactly a contractual form can offer you and how you should approach a relationship that, in the end, is an employment relationship, and should be treated as such.

John: In your book, you note that at-will employment is much more common in the U.S. than it is in much of the rest of the world. Are we seeing the same attacks on tenure in other countries as we’re seeing in the U.S., or critiques of tenure in the rest of the world, as we’re seeing in the U.S.?

Deepa: That question is a little bit tricky to answer, because at-will employment simply doesn’t exist anywhere else. So carve-outs from at-will employment, just-cause contracts, and specific forms of those carve-outs. Tenured employment has different implications in contexts where the baseline assumption is different. So I think that it’s worth beginning from an understanding that security of employment for academics contrasts with something else outside the United States, and as a result of that, there’s less of a contrast. Even the word tenure doesn’t get used as frequently in many other countries. It does exist elsewhere, tenure. Canada has tenure. Germany, famously, has tenure. There are other countries where the particular employment relationships between faculty, or at least some faculty, and their university employers, are called tenured relationships, but the implications of having or not having tenure are very different in those countries. That said, even though tenure either doesn’t exist in a lot of other countries or doesn’t have the same implications for job security in those countries, because none of those countries are operating on a baseline assumption of at-will employment, attacks on Higher Education, on the security of faculty at universities on the freedom of inquiry of faculty at universities, those are not unique to the American context by any means.

Rebecca: So, following up on that, what are some things that we can advocate for to protect against the war on tenure and against this war on higher education more broadly?

Deepa: So I think that there are a handful of things that we in academia can do, and some of them may seem like they are mutually exclusive, maybe they are, but I think they’re all important. One is that I think we need to change the framing of why the things we’re fighting for, in this particular instance, say, tenured employment structures, matter. So what matters most to us from within academia, what seems the most compelling argument in support of something, may not be what resonates outside academia. I think that a lot of academics want to defend tenure purely because tenure makes academic freedom more possible. That’s a valid argument, but I don’t think it’s one that is resonating particularly well socially or politically right now. On the other hand, I think that job security and the ability to perform a job that you’ve been hired to do and that at least many people still want done and done well, that is an argument that may resonate more broadly outside the academy, and just because many of us think that academic freedom is the reason we should have tenure, doesn’t mean that it is the only reason we should articulate support for tenure, especially when engaging in public-f acing conversations. A second thing we could do is kind of the opposite. So if, on the one hand, we want to change the way we frame arguments in support of tenure, to account for what resonates well with a public audience or even a political audience, as opposed to what seems most significant or relevant to us, we also need to be unafraid to claim what is necessary to describe how things actually happen within academia. We need to be unafraid to say that research and teaching are long-horizon endeavors. We need to say that you need flexibility in order to be able to do the range of tasks that academics are asked to do: teaching, devising syllabi, mentoring, guiding, conducting various forms of research, conducting peer review, engaging in shared governance practices, publication. These are many very different types of tasks. They require flexibility. Flexibility requires security. It also requires long time scales, and it is okay to say this is what it takes to do the job and do it well. I think a final thing we could do to help defend academia against the war on tenure is to try to resist the urge to dig in our heels or circle the wagons around what we have grown up professionally, thinking of as the industry ideal or industry norm. If we think that we are in a period of flux where attitudes towards higher education, understandings of what expertise brings to an individual or to a profession, what the good life is after you complete your education, as you search for a job, then we need to be willing to change with that transformation. Insisting that nothing about the way academia has existed so far in the United States change during a period of extreme flux is unrealistic, and I think it’s also a little unfair. And so even as we say, “this is what it takes to do academic work well. It takes time, it takes flexibility, and those things take security, and that’s why tenure matters.” We also need to be able to think expansively about how to provide those things, instead of saying it must remain as it always was. Where that will take us, I don’t know, but flexibility is not simply something that we do every day in our own jobs. It has to also come into play when we talk about our jobs and think about what they might look like in the future,

John: We always end with the question, what’s next?

Deepa: Well, the more I’ve studied tenure and faculty relationships, the more I’ve become interested in how those practices and these professional structures exist within a broader social context. And so I really started thinking a lot more about and leaning into the study of the academia-society relationship. The way that I’ve been doing this most recently is by thinking about public scholarship and public engagement, an example of which we’re engaged in right now. I’ve been working as part of a fellowship program here at Emory under our senior vice president of research’s office. That’s allowed me to do a mini institutional ethnography on how faculty colleagues across the university, across disciplines and career stages, think about what it means to translate academia and scholarship for a public audience. What are the various ways in which we do this? How do we make ourselves understandable and approachable for the people who ultimately we want to reach? That kind of research, I think, is where I’m headed in an intellectual and professional sense in the near future, but in a more literal sense, I’m about to take my six-year-old son for his birthday dinner.

John: Very nice. Well, I’ve really enjoyed reading your book and public scholarship, I think, is a great way to go. If we just keep talking to each other about our research, it’s not going to have as much of an impact with the public in terms of the public views of higher ed unless we can show that we’re doing things that actually matter in some way to society.

Deepa: Absolutely, I think that this next line of research, or next direction of my research, is basically me trying to do as I say, and to explain and reach out widely, because I think that both academics and the public need to adjust as we figure out where academia is heading next.

Rebecca: Well, hopefully we can have you on again to talk about that topic.

Deepa: I would love that.

John: Well, we look forward to our next conversation. Thank you.

Deepa: Thank you both so much.

Rebecca: Thank you.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts, and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

John: Editing assistance provided by Madison Lee.

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410. A Summer to Learn

Posted in active learning, engagement, higher education, learning, motivation, pedagogy, professional development, reflective practice, teaching
September 10, 2025

Imagine exploring alternative teaching methods in a classroom focused on learning and not grades. In this episode, Russell Marcus joins us to discuss how this occurs in a two-week philosophy summer program. He is the Christian A. Johnson Excellence in Teaching Professor of Philosophy at Hamilton College. Russell specializes in the philosophy of mathematics and the pedagogy of philosophy. He is a Past-President of the American Association of Philosophy Teachers. Since 2018, Russell has been running a philosophy summer camp at Hamilton College designed to help faculty develop more effective teaching practices while also benefiting students.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Imagine exploring alternative teaching methods in a classroom focused on learning and not grades. In this episode, we discuss how this occurs in a two-week philosophy summer program.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guest today is Russell Marcus. He is the Christian A. Johnson Excellence in Teaching Professor of Philosophy at Hamilton College. Russell specializes in the philosophy of mathematics and the pedagogy of philosophy. He is a Past-President of the American Association of Philosophy Teachers. Since 2018, Russell has been running a philosophy summer camp at Hamilton College designed to help faculty develop more effective teaching practices while also benefiting students. Welcome Russell.

Russell: Thanks for having me.

John: We’re very happy to talk to you today. Our teas today are:… Russell, are you drinking any tea?

Russell: I have peppermint tea. I don’t do caffeine, so I’m all on herbal tea, and I have a box of peppermint tea in my office… constantly.

Rebecca: You can’t go wrong with mint. I have English afternoon today, relying back on an old favorite, John.

John: And I am trying to cut back on caffeine, but not today. [LAUGHTER] It’s a busy time getting ready for workshops next week, so I am drinking a black currant green tea from the Republic of Tea.

Rebecca: Nice.

Russell: Lovely.

Rebecca: So we’ve invited you here today to discuss the Hamilton College summer program in philosophy, which we read about in the July 21st, 2025, article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. Can you tell us how you became interested in philosophy pedagogy?

Russell: Sure. So I started my career after college as a math teacher. I was a high school math teacher, and then I did that in New York City for a couple of years, and I worked also in a high school in Costa Rica. I taught there, and what I discovered in my first years of teaching was a real love of curriculum design. I taught something like 24 different classes in my five years between college and graduate school. After about four or five years, I started feeling both the pull of philosophy. I wanted to go back to graduate school, and I knew that I wanted to. I wasn’t quite ready for it when I came out of college. I also saw a kind of waning ability for me to be creative as a high school teacher. My first love in philosophy was mathematics, but I found the community in philosophy of mathematics to be kind of disappointing and frustrating as I started to develop as a scholar. And in 2008, I went to a meeting, this biennial workshop conference of the American Association of Philosophy Teachers, and there I found my people. So, after I got tenure, which was like 2016, I really turned my attention more fully to the scholarship of teaching and learning. I was kind of looking to teach some topics that students found naturally interesting, which was not the case with philosophy of mathematics. I kind of had to convince students that those topics are interesting, but when I turned more to teaching… I started teaching a philosophy of education class… I was connecting with students where they were a little more closely.

John: My experience was somewhat similar. I started teaching, and I was disappointed, though, with how much students were learning. So I started reading more about what other people were doing, and attending sessions at conferences related to pedagogy. And those are really great things for people to start getting involved in, and I’m still very much involved in all of that. As noted before, you began the summer camp at Hamilton. Could you tell us a little bit about how that came about?

Russell: Well, I’m going to start by telling you that we have kind of a running joke at the HCSPiP (That’s our acronym. It’s a terrible acronym, but anyway, we’ve embraced it.) It’s a summer program, not a summer camp. And so every time people call it a camp, I wince. I have to make a face, and this is around leadership, because I think of this as a serious academic program, but the students discovered very quickly the first year, they’re like, “Oh, it’s philosophy camp.” So yes, it is a summer camp, and they called it a summer camp at The Chronicle, but I’m calling it the summer program in philosophy. When I started working with the American Association of Philosophy Teachers and just getting involved in that organization very actively, I recognized that I had a lot of creative people around who had really interesting ideas about teaching and what they kind of wanted to do with their teaching. I also recognized that a lot of them were in places that were not as welcoming of pedagogical creativity as Hamilton was for me. I loved hanging out and talking, teaching with thoughtful and creative teachers, and when I talked with them, a lot of times, they’re like, “We can’t really do this because my students are like in these certain ways, and I’m not sure it would work,” or “my expectations of my department,” or “I’m not really allowed to do the kinds of things I would like to do.” Of course, I worked with lots of contingent faculty in the organization who are really concerned about their abilities to be creative in the classroom, and what happens if it doesn’t work out, and what does that mean for them in their attempts to get jobs or to get tenure, and so I thought, “wouldn’t it be great to have a space where people could just experiment, innovate in ways, and not ever have to worry about who’s looking over their shoulder and who might be skeptical of the kinds of innovations that they’re developing.” So I wanted to find a way to encourage more creativity, and also to just bring folks to me, so I could just sit here where I am and have folks bring creative pedagogy into my orbit. So that’s really how it got started. We have a fund for philosophy at Hamilton College that supports the program, and when I brought it to the department as an idea, they were enthusiastic to let me take it and run with it.

Rebecca: Sounds like some sneaky moves there to bring everyone to you?

Russell: Yeah, well, we have this money in the department, and I wanted to see how could I use it to support the community that had been so sustaining for me in my career.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about who the students and faculty are that participate in the program?

Russell: The way the money works is such that we need to have a certain complement of Hamilton College students in the program, and our current dean has been a little more liberal than the previous Dean about that. The previous team was like, “you must have half the students be Hamilton College students.” This year, we had eight of the 20 students were Hamilton College students, and then the other students, the other half, or more than half of the students, are from anywhere and everywhere. So we have an application, we send out calls for students to come to the program, and we get applications from all over the country and world. Most of the students are thinking of themselves as potential graduate students. They’re all undergrads, of course, for the program. So they apply. We get quite a few applications from students… again, all over the country and world… and our HR department has been just wonderfully supportive in granting visas. So we usually have three or four international students. We’re able to get visas to come in and do the program, so we really have a global population. That’s very exciting. But we actually start with the faculty. So the first thing we do is send out a call for proposals from faculty to teach in the program, and that just goes through regular like philosophy calls for papers or calls for conference presentations or something like that and we just send it out on the listservs and post it on the websites that are useful to get philosophy teachers. And then some years we only have, let’s say, 10 or 12 applications to teach in the program. Some years, we’ve had as many as 50 applications from faculty all over the world to come and teach here. We offer three classes a year, so we’re really looking for three creative, interesting class proposals from folks who want to come here and how they fit together. We have a committee that evaluates them, and so we get the three courses, and then once we have the three courses down, then we advertise for student applicants. Usually in the fall, we get the courses settled, and then over the winter, we get the students coming in.

John: How large are the classes? And when students sign up, do they sign up for just one course for the entire two-week session, or do they move from one course to another?

Russell: I’ll just say a little more about the overall structure of the program. So the three courses run simultaneously every day for the two weeks, Monday through Friday. So there’ll be 10 class sessions for each of the three courses. All 20 student participants will be in each of the three classes. So those classes are typically 90 minutes, sometimes we run them two hours. So the students are in class a lot during the day. The program is not graded. They’re not for credit, these classes. They’re really just for the love of philosophy. The students, they’re working hard, but they are not typically doing a lot of outside work. There’s not a lot of assessment of their work during the program. So we exhaust them, but they kind of like it. They come here because they love philosophy, they love trying to do it here. We warn them about it, “you’re going to be exhausted, you gotta be careful.” But they’re so excited to be with each other, to just be in a community of people who want to do philosophy together. They push through.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about the support available for faculty? Because you mentioned that this is an opportunity for faculty to experiment. So, can you talk about that aspect of the program?

Russell: Absolutely. When I was designing this program, my fantasy was having three excited instructors coming in here, and we would all talk about philosophy teaching all the time, and I would be in all the classes, and we would go to each other’s classes, and in the evenings, we would talk about them and think about and work collaboratively on that. And then I discovered very quickly, as we started to run the program, that directing the program meant that I just had to be wandering around with buckets of water putting out fires all the time, so I didn’t have a lot of time to sit and talk with the instructors about what they were doing. I got to go to some of the classes and see what they were doing a little bit, but then we had a student bit by a bat one time, and then I had a run around Utica trying to find how to get her rabies shots. This year we had a power outage, we had two tornadoes touched down locally, and then Hamilton College was out of power for the first two days. It was 96 degrees, 98 degrees. There were no fans, let alone air conditioners, and so we had to move everybody to a hotel for a couple of days. And these things happen when you bring these people together. And I thought we would just be sitting around talking teaching. In terms of running the program, it’s me, and I’ve always had an assistant director working with me. That has changed over the years. It started as an undergraduate who I thought would just help me, I don’t know, make photocopies or something, and then that turned into a real leadership role as well. This year, I had three assistant directors, an assistant director and two student assistant directors. So there’s a lot of work running the program, just making sure people can get to where they’re going. And we’re also ambitious about developing the program, putting in extracurriculars and other kinds of activities that build community, activities that expand on the work done in the classroom. We do field trips and have visiting speakers here, and there’s all sorts of stuff that we have to arrange. So a few years ago, my assistant director at the time said maybe we should hire someone to do that job. And so we put together a grant, and we got a grant from the American Philosophical Association to hire what we call a pedagogy resident, and that’s someone who works with the instructors and the tutors. We haven’t talked about the tutors yet, I should mention them, to develop the courses over the years. So by November, we really have the courses picked, and we have a pedagogy resident who’s an expert in philosophical pedagogy. And this year and last year, we were very lucky to have Emily Esch, who is a professor of philosophy at The College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University in Minnesota, and she’s been working with instructors and tutors in preparing the classes and thinking about what kinds of classroom activities would be useful in this context, and refining them, and just thinking about teaching in general. This year also, we sent around a new book on teaching philosophy called The Art of Teaching Philosophy, and we sent that to all our leadership, our instructors and tutors and assistant directors and the pedagogy resident had conversations about that, rooted in that book, just having them think more about pedagogy. So it’s been a real learning experience for everybody now that we’ve included the pedagogy resident every year. We had the grant for just the first year, and then we got to include it in our budget. So on the run up, the time preparing for the program, as the instructors are refining their plans, they’re working with the pedagogy resident, as the tutors are preparing together with the instructors, they’re working with the pedagogy resident and some use the pedagogy resident more and some less. Once we get to campus, the pedagogy resident is sitting in on classes and working with the instructors just to process what’s happening and to think about how to take it back to their home institution.

John: When I saw a report on this, it reminded me of a couple of programs I’ve been working in. I taught at the Duke Talent Identification Program for gifted high school students from 1987 up until 2020, and then I’ve been teaching in the Duke Pre-College program, and one of the things that I’ve done in both of those programs is I’d often experiment with things before I tried them in my regular classes and it sounds like this is a great opportunity to do that, where the students aren’t really put at much risk, and they often appreciate the variety in the instruction, because they often don’t see that in their regular classes. Are faculty in this program often then taking what they’ve experimented with here and then going back and using it in the classes and perhaps sharing it with other professors after this experience?

Russell: John, you get us. That’s exactly what we’re hoping will happen, and it seems like it’s happening. Yeah, we have immodest aims. We want to change the world of philosophy instruction, and we’re hoping that people are going back to their home institutions and working, not only teaching their classes, but talking to other people about the work that they’ve done here. We’ve also been encouraging our faculty to disseminate the work that they do here and we’ve been successful in a couple of ways. We’ve had some people publish the work that they’ve done at the HCSPiP in journals, teaching philosophy journals. I’ve had a piece coming out in December that I co-authored with one of the instructors here, and one of the students who was here, who is now going on to graduate school at TC at Columbia. So that’s been very satisfying to see the work start to filter out from here. We also have been pretty successful because our student population is pretty ambitious, some of them do go to graduate schools, and we have one student who was in the first year of the program in 2018, she’s just finishing up her PhD now, and she’s got a position at Harvard, and she was at Wesleyan last year, and I think she’s at Harvard now, and bringing that kind of interest in pedagogical innovation to what is often… you know, philosophy classrooms tend to be kind of staid and stiff a lot, and we’re trying to really make them student centered and active learning experiences. So I think it’s happening, I don’t really have good measures of how much it’s happening, except that I know that I’m in touch with a lot of the people who’ve come through the HCSPiP and I hear from them about what they’re doing, and I know that I’m doing it myself. So this article that I just mentioned that we’re publishing, Ashley Pryor from University of Toledo came here, I think it was summer of ‘22, and she taught a class on philosophy of comedy. So the class was, in the first place, some philosophical theories of comedy. There was some dry stuff, but then she’s also an improv artist, and she brought improv activities into the philosophy classroom. She had the students outside just doing all sorts of activities. And I thought this was fun, the students loved it, and it did have some philosophical content to it. And then the next year, I was teaching a philosophy of education class, and I had as a course mentor for that class, one of the students who had gone to the HCSPiP, and now she was a senior at Hamilton, and she was working with me with the first- year students. And she was like, “why don’t we bring some of that improv into the classroom?” And I was like, “Well, I’ll try some!” And so she and I worked together on some activities that were useful philosophically in the classroom, partly to build community in the classroom and partly to enable some quick thinking. In philosophy, we’re often thinking very carefully and slowly, but there are moments when it’s useful to think more quickly. And so that was really great. I noticed it was working just as I wanted it. Yeah, bring people in with ideas, and then I would steal them. I’ll say this, every good teacher is a thief. We see other people doing like, “I’m gonna steal that and make that mine.” So that’s what I did. I started taking some of these improv activities and making them my own, turning them into productive exercises that I think helped to build trust in the classroom. And I think this is something that we’ve been thinking about a lot over the past few instances of the HCSPiP is, how do you help students to dialog across disagreement? I know we’re all thinking about this these days. How do we help students really engage each other despite the worries they have about how they might be judged for what they say, and how do we get them to speak honestly and really work out honestly their views? And I think that it’s important to build trust in the classroom, and so sometimes you have to build trust in various ways. So I found that the improv activities sort of helped to build a little trust in community that then we could take advantage of that in having conversations that are more difficult. So anyway, I do know that I’m not the only one who’s learning from the program, but I don’t know that I have good ways of talking about how much that stuff gets used after they leave here.

John: One of the things I really like about that is the fact that some of these students do go on, and one of the things we talked about a lot on our podcast is how so many faculty come into teaching, emulating the people they’ve just observed. And often in graduate school, in particular, there’s not always a lot of innovative teaching or very student-centered teaching approaches, at least in many disciplines. So it’s really nice that there’s this opportunity for students to see this before they go on to grad school, and it sounds like it provides a wonderful experience, which could be used as a basis for them getting started later.

Russell: So I like to say the first error of teaching is “I learned it this way, that’s the way I’m going to teach it.” And I think we all have to recognize as instructors that we were typically exceptional learners, and our students won’t always be exceptional learners. So how do we reach our students in the most effective ways possible? And that requires thinking in ways that we were not trained. And of course, in philosophy, I’m sure this is true in other disciplines as well, there’s very little incentive in graduate school and in the early stages of one’s career to be creative and innovative about our teaching, especially coming out of R1s. Most of us come out of R1s at graduate school by definition, and then our student body isn’t the ones that we’ve been trained to teach. So we have to look in other ways. Let me say this more about the structure of the program. For every class we hire not just an instructor, but a teaching assistant or a resident assistant. These we call tutors, and they play both a role in the classroom and outside of the classroom. All of the tutors are graduate students in philosophy. Some of them are alums of the program. Some of them are alums of Hamilton College. We try to use that tutor position as a way of helping continue with our network of folks. They get a lot out of the program. Part of it is just working with more experienced instructors in the classroom. Part of it is just being around people who care about teaching, which is not necessarily what they’re getting in graduate school. And part of it is just being in that context. Two years ago, we had an instructor pull out of the program at what was pretty close to the last minute. Maybe we had a month to go, and it was a personal problem, a family issue, and it was perfectly understandable, but it left us sort of struggling, “what are we going to do with this third class?” And the tutors said, “Why don’t we teach the class! And we’ll reconfigure the class in a way that’ll be useful for all the tutors,” and they were all so eager to take that on. I have, as a research interest of my own, team-based learning. I’ve been working a lot on team-based learning in philosophy, and so we decided to run a team-based learning class in philosophy. I kind of structured the class, and then the tutors took it over and taught the class, and they learned how to design team-based learning activities. In team-based learning, there are specific ways in which activities are constructed, and so I taught them all about how to do TBL activities, and they just took it and ran with it, and that turned out to be one of the most successful classes we’ve ever had. The students loved it. In part, I think the instructors were a little younger, a little closer to their age. They’re very excited about philosophy, they’re in graduate school. So the students were looking at these folks who are like in these positions that they were imagining themselves going to be in soon. They were hoping to go to graduate school, just like these folks. And then everybody was in there being a little vulnerable, learning together, and it was a great context and one of the most successful classes we’ve had.

Rebecca: I’m glad you picked up on talking about the tutors, because you had mentioned them earlier, and I was finding that really interesting and it seems like that’s actually an integral piece to the project, because it’s a conduit between the instructors, graduate school, and undergrads who are looking toward graduate school. So they’re kind of right in the middle [LAUGHTER] like a linchpin to the whole thing.

Russell: Exactly. And as I said, they have roles in the classroom, and different instructors use the tutors in different ways, sometimes their role in the classroom isn’t as robust as it is in others. It depends on the class and each of these classes is different. It’s the brainchild of an instructor, and they may not have thought about this in terms of how to use a tutor. And these are 20- person classes, so it’s not like we need TAs to be managing the classroom. So they have classroom roles, but they also have community roles, let’s say, outside the classroom, in helping the students to prepare for classes, to manage some questions the students might have about the readings or how to prepare, or what’s expected. But also, this year it was very hot, and this year the tutors wanted to do a water balloon… they called it a water balloon fight, I said, “I’m not going to endorse a fight, we’ll do a water balloon festival.” So this is a running joke this year, that they were having a festival. So I got a hose and a bunch of water balloons, and they were out there just trying to beat the heat on campus, and the tutors played a big role in that. So there’s some community building and some classroom work. And also, one other thing we do with the tutors is, on the middle weekend, we have the tutors run a session on philosophy after college and what it’s like to apply to graduate school, and how you might find philosophy in your lives other than graduate school, and we don’t have any instructors or leadership go to that, that’s just the tutors and the students. They have some open conversation and some hard conversations about how difficult graduate school can be and how difficult it can be to find an academic career. And sometimes students come away a little dispirited, but I think they’ve gotten an honest view from some people who are in the middle of it.

John: In a program like this, there are some costs for the support, for feeding the students, for providing housing, for providing air conditioning when it works, or water balloons when it doesn’t. How is this program funded?

Russell: So the Truax Fund for Philosophy. It was created in the 1950s by some Hamilton alums. It was an Hamilton alum from class, I think, of 1907 in honor of his father, who had been class of 1875 and there’s an endowed fund. And we are very grateful for the largesse of our forebears to have given us this money. It’s not easy to spend money in philosophy, [LAUGHTER] and the fund is quite robust, and so this is where the program started. We were just very lucky to have this money that we can support people. So let me say, not only is it feeding them and buying water balloons, but we also pay for all travel for all participants, and every participant gets a stipend, which we call a fellowship scholarship for the student participants, because we want to make sure that the program is open to anybody, no matter their financial situation. We pay for all transportation from anywhere in the world and back, and we pay everybody a fellowship scholarship for being here. So it’s quite an attractive thing for students if they have i nterest in philosophy, and they are very grateful, especially some of the international students. That money, which is not a lot of money, the students get $750 for the two weeks of participation here. We see that money as salary replacement for the time that they’re here. But for some of the students, that’s quite a lot of money for them and we heard from one student that it really funded his studies for the next two years. So that was so exciting for us, that he could be here and be such a great participant and also benefit, not just intellectually and pedagogically, but also financially from the program. I wish there were a better recipe for other people to do it, because it is quite expensive, and finding the money to run a program like this would be a little bit of a challenge, I know, for others. But I will say I think we could run a great program without all the money. I mean, we need to feed them still, obviously, but we’re glad that we are able to be as inclusive and diverse as that money allows us to be.

Rebecca: It’s nice when you have the kind of funding that will let all that stress to go away and you can focus really on the subject matter of the program. I really love all the layers of mentorship that you’ve described in the program, the mentorship from the pedagogy expert, the mentorship from the faculty, the mentorship from the tutors [LAUGHTER] right to the students. There’s so many layers there. Can you talk a little bit about some of the reactions students have had from the opportunity to interact with so many folks in the discipline?

Russell: I also hope that I have some mentorship role as well. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Yeah, I didn’t mean to not include you. [LAUGHTER]

Russell: No, it’s very funny, because I really do, and sometimes the program, it feels like I’m just working behind the scenes and I don’t have an active role. But last year, not this past summer, the summer before this, I got COVID in the middle of the program, and I had to work remotely for the second half of the program. And I think I have some role in trying to foster a kind of supportive atmosphere that I think that’s very helpful. But yeah, okay, this wasn’t about me, this question. This was about students and how they find their mentorship. Look, one of the tutors said to me this year, this was his second year in the program, and he said he learned more in his two weeks with the program… the first time he was with it… about teaching, then he had his whole life all put together. And that was such a rewarding comment for me to hear how useful we’ve been. But Hamilton College, we typically send about three quarters of a student to graduate school every year, in other words, less than one a year. And this past year, we had four students who were thinking about doing graduate school and are looking at it. We’ve never had those kinds of numbers. And what happened was at the HCSPiP, they started seeing how exciting philosophy could be, especially when taught creatively and thoughtfully, and it just really was inspiring for them. So I see that in the increased interest in their classes when they come out of the HCSPiP and they come back. We had a rising sophomore a few years ago who was interested in philosophy, but kind of not going anywhere. He wasn’t the greatest student, he had, the interest in philosophy, but not quite the skills. And we saw coming out of the HCSPiP, how motivated he became and how sophisticated he became, especially being around some of the older students, not even the tutors and the faculty, but just some of the older students. And that’s one way in which we sell to our administration that we should use this money for this summer program is because it really does benefit the Hamilton students who participate. We can see the academic sophistication just grow by leaps and bounds in some of these students after they come back after the HCSPiP. We also had six students from last year’s program in the fall, they did their senior theses, and then they presented them at the APA at the eastern divisional meeting of the American Philosophical Association in January. And we’ve never had that kind of interest in professional philosophy and real academic scholarship. So we see it with the Hamilton students. For other students who come from wherever they’re coming from, this year, we had two students from Poland, we had a student from China, and we’ve had students from Indonesia recently, Colombia. We certainly hear from them that this was an amazing experience. We do some assessment. We have a robust survey at the end of the program, and we ask some questions. We’re looking at these results longitudinally and thinking about the program and how to improve it. But often we see them briefly, and off they go, and we hope to hear from them later, I will say, at the APA this past January where we had all the Hamilton students there, I noticed that there were like a dozen, maybe 14, HCSPiP alums who were on the program at the eastern divisional meeting of the APA, and so I found money to take them all out to lunch, and we had a little HCSPiP reunion there. And we started hearing from people. where they were going and how they were using it and how they were carrying in the hearts, the ideas about innovative, student-centered pedagogies.

John: Now you’ve talked about a number of specific methods, team-based learning, improv and so forth. What are some of the other interesting strategies that faculty have tried exploring in this program?

Russell: We’ve had some great classes. Not every class is super successful, but we learn from every class. A couple of years ago, we had a class on Hobbes and Minecraft. So this is Hobbes’s political theory. All the students got Minecraft accounts, and the class days basically took place on the Minecraft platform, and the instructor, Rebeccah Lieby, was asking the students to test out Hobbes’s claims about the state of nature. I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase that “life in a state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” So she was like, “well, let’s see what happens in the Minecraft environment, and test Hobbes’ claims about that.” And so that was super fun. And really, the students really rose to the nasty, brutish, and short aspect of Hobbesian political theory. So I think there was some confirmation there. Last year we had an instructor, Sara Uckelman, from Durham in the UK. She was testing fiction writing as a philosophical method. They read a little philosophy, but what they were really doing in the class was writing fiction as a way of exploring philosophical themes, so that was pretty cool. It’s not a standard pedagogical tool to have students writing fiction in philosophy classes. One of our early very successful classes had students doing a lot of metacognition, so they were reading some really difficult work. They were reading George Yancy’s Backlash book, I don’t know if you know George’s “Dear White America” letter, that he ended up getting a lot of backlash, and he came to the program and visited with us and participated, and also Susan Brison’s account of her rape and assault. So they’re really, really heavy, difficult material. And when you’re reading that kind of heavy, difficult material on racism and sexual violence, you have to be careful about what you say in class, and students have to be careful. So the instructor was Ann Cahill from Elon University in North Carolina, she had developed these both hand signals and little note cards that allowed students to signal what kind of conversational move they were about to make before they made it, and just helped students to process what they were saying and to help other people see, are you presenting an illustration of what someone else said? Are you presenting more supporting arguments? Are you presenting a counter argument? Are you raising a question? There are all these different kinds of moves that can be made in a philosophical conversation, and sometimes it takes a while for students to understand what someone else is saying, because they don’t understand what kind of conversational move they’re going to make. So they had signals for what kind of conversational move that was going to be. That was really an exciting class, one of our most successful, not that I’m playing favorites or comparing, I’ll say one more. The first year we had someone who was a philosopher as well as an artist. Her name is Juli Thorson, she’s emeritus at Ball State University, now she is, and she had drawing activities that were related to questions about personal identity. So they were reading philosophy of personal identity and then doing these drawing activities for students to use the other side of their brain in processing these kinds of questions about themselves. I can tell you about more, but those are pretty good examples of really exciting stuff that is not your typical philosophy lecture.

Rebecca: One of the things that was mentioned in The Chronicle article was that a professor who had been participating in the program noted that in her regular classes, she was struggling with students submitting AI-generated work, as we all are.

Russell: Yeah.

Rebecca: Do you have any ideas of some strategies that philosophy faculty have been using to discourage the use of AI as a substitute of learning? With all this experimentation going around you, we’re eager for ideas.

Russell: Look, I wish I had a secret key that would fix things, but here’s the way I’m thinking about it, and I think this is what I bring to my own classes, and that I’m trying to do at the HCSPiP: learning is change, it’s changing the way you’re thinking, and change is hard, and so we have to start by acknowledging that real learning, real honest learning, done with real integrity, is not easy. I mean, some things are easy, but philosophy, not so much,[LAUGHTER] because we’re asking students to really dig into their core beliefs and examine them, and that can be scary for people. On the other hand, philosophy, when done well, is a lot of fun. It’s a social activity, it’s communicative. We have this image of philosophy as like the lone, great man speaking words of wisdom, but that’s not really how philosophy is done. Philosophy is done in community, in dialog, hearing various perspectives and listening to them and allowing your own preconceptions to be challenged. And if it’s done in a threatening way, or one in which there’s not trust in the community, then students will shut down, and then they’re going to go on and they’re just going to do whatever they can to get their grades. And of course, they’re going to turn to whatever resources are rational, like these AIs. In some ways. I understand why students do this. They’re overworked and anxious, and it seems like a rational thing to do, but what we’re trying to do is make philosophy classes more interesting, more engaging, more student centered, and more fun. And if we do that, we’re hoping that students are going to respond by saying, “Oh, yeah, this is fun stuff to do, and if I trust my community, I could really like grow” and look, students are skeptical about received wisdom. I mean, we see this all over. They’re skeptical about being told what to do. And so if they’re empowered to really think for themselves, maybe they’re really gonna actually try to think for themselves. So that’s what we’re trying to do in this program, is to change the way people think about philosophy and humanities more generally, from like, learning the received wisdom and regurgitating it to like, “Oh, here’s a chance for me to really think about these questions and to think about what people are telling me, and to develop my own views about it.” And that’s what student-centered pedagogy is all about. So it’s not a way of policing against the AIs, it’s a way of undermining the motivation that students have for turning to the AIs. We are very lucky at Hamilton College to have an open curriculum, and what that means is that students do not have to take any classes they don’t want to take. We don’t have a gen ed program. We don’t have required classes. So on the first day of class, almost all students there are a few exceptions, but almost all students are in classes they want to be in, and so that’s an opportunity for us to say, “Okay, you want to learn about this stuff, let’s do it in a way that is going to be useful and productive for you, so that when we give you assignments, these are assignments about things that you want to learn, that you’ve committed to trying to learn about, and they’re going to help you, rather than just be assessments of did you file away enough information and regurgitate it back to me.” It’s about assignment design. Can you make assignments in such a way that students see that they are for this student’s benefits, rather than just ways of policing and testing them.

John: That’s a challenge we’re all working with, we’re all facing, and that’s in general, the sort of approach we encourage people to use, giving students more autonomy and being transparent about the benefits they get by engaging in this themselves, rather than just outsourcing their assignments to some external tool.

Russell: Yeah, yeah.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking, what’s next?

Russell: So this year, we broadened our program by having early arrival and orientation for our international participants, and that was really productive. And every year we’re thinking about ways in which we can improve the program with trying not to extend ourselves financially or too much personally. There are some sustainability questions, both the money and my own ability [LAUGHTER] to work over the summer on this project. It’s a lot of work, so we’re moving to an every other year approach for sustainability reasons, but mostly the big project that we’re going to work on this year, while we’re taking a year off, is to develop more courses led by graduate student tutors, with help from the experienced faculty because I think that was the place where we realized that, and you caught this, which was great, that that kind of mentorship of the graduate students was something that we’ve done quite effectively, I think. And so we’re going to be writing some grants and thinking about, how do we expand the program in such a way that we can give a little more space for graduate students to be developing their work? But I think the core of the program is really very good. We had a great year again this year, and we’re just going to gather our strength and do it again. I wish we could expand it to more people. And it’s not even the money that is the big barrier, It’s just It would be so much more work and not sustainable.

John: It would be really nice if more disciplines had this. I’d love to see something like this in economics.

Russell: I would love to talk to people, if they’re thinking about developing these kinds of classes. I have a lot of resources. I’ve developed this stuff ground up and anybody who wants to try something like this out, I’ll say this, several of our alums, that is, people who were students in the program have gone on to graduate school and started summer programs in philosophy for high school students, and what a wonderful testament that is to our success. They’ve taken from what we’ve done here, and they’ve sort of applied it in different contexts. So I think the way in which we create a context for learning that’s not tied to grades and credits and just for the love of learning, that’s been a real joy.

Rebecca: Well, thanks for sharing your program with us. It’s always nice to hear about these opportunities for learners to be excited about their discipline.

Russell: I really appreciate you inviting me on, and I’m always happy to talk about the HCSPiP, so thanks for the time.

John: Well, thank you. We really enjoyed this conversation, and we look forward to talking to you at some point in the future as well.

Russell: Great. I’d be happy to come back and talk about team-based learning or something. I’m writing a book on team-based learning this fall as I’m on leave, and that’s my plan.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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409. Vibe Coding

Posted in edtech, educational technology, higher education, learning, teaching
September 3, 2025

Imagine having the ability to create personalized web applications that address your individualized needs. In this episode, Dave Ghidiu joins us to describe how you and your students can create such tools using a vibe coding process using free generative AI platforms.

Transcript

John: Imagine having the ability to create personalized web applications that address your individualized needs. In this episode, we explore how you and students can create such tools using a vibe coding process with free generative AI platforms.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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John: Our guest today is Dave Ghidiu. Dave is an Associate Professor of Computing Sciences at Finger Lakes Community College. Prior to his time at FLCC, he spent a few years as a Senior Instructional Designer at Open SUNY, where he was a lead designer for the OSCAR rubric software. Welcome back, Dave.

Dave: Thank you so much. It’s so great to be back.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are… Dave, are you drinking tea today?

Dave: I am drinking tea. As you know, I get my tea from Saratoga Tea and Honey, and I’m drinking the Broadway Berry today.

Rebecca: It’s got a nice name.

Dave: It is. It’s the first time I’ve ever had it.

John: They have some wonderful teas there. I haven’t been back there in about a year and a half or so.

Dave: Oh, it’s worth a trip.

John: I’ll be heading back there soon. So, I’ll be picking up some new ones.

Dave: Excellent.

John: And I have a wild blueberry black tea from the Republic of Tea. I don’t have any teas from Saratoga Tea and Honey this time.

Rebecca: It’s disappointing. I just have a Lady Grey today.

John: So, we’ve invited you here today to discuss how you’ve used generative AI to teach vibe coding. To set the stage for this discussion, can you first define what vibe coding is?

Dave: Yes. So earlier this year, there’s a famous computer scientist, Andre Karpathy, and he was one of the founders of OpenAI. He was the director of AI at Tesla, and he just made this offhanded tweet about vibe coding, and it’s essentially using natural language to make software applications. And he’s using it in a much grander way than I am and then I’m advocating for. And I actually don’t even like the word vibe coding. His whole tweet goes into like feeling the vibe of the software and the programming, and getting all involved. I think it’s really more of a dialogical coding experience. And I stole that term from Curt, whom I work with. He’s in the humanities department, and it’s really just having a conversation with AI to create software. And so you can imagine, if you want to create a simple ToDo app, instead of writing the code yourself, you just describe the app to an AI like Claude or ChatGPT and it would generate the code for you. Then you could refine the app by having a dialog with the AI and asking it to add features, change the design. And I think we should do some level setting here, because I just want to make it clear that this is entry level. This is for everybody. If you can’t code, that’s kind of the vibe that I’m going for. I want to help you take your ideas and turn it into code. We’re not making enterprise software, we’re just making small web apps. And you can think of it as like H5P which some of you might be familiar with, or Quizlet, where you can get these little interactives that go into your course in your learning management system. And I’m not using Python or Java, we’re just using HTML and other tools of web design.

John: So what you’re saying then is that really no knowledge of programming in pretty much any language is needed to engage in a vibe coding project?

Dave: Absolutely and again, at the high end, yes, there are people out there who are paying lots of money to have the really expensive tools: Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code, but that’s not what we’re talking about. You can do what we’ll be talking about with the free tier of any of these AI services.

Rebecca: Is vibe coding a process that students and faculty should consider, and in what context?

Dave: I think the process can and should be abstracted. So at a high altitude, vibe coding is really just prompt engineering. It’s AI literacy, and we’re SUNY schools, so you know that AI literacy is part of our general education now. And it’s really just learning how to vibe code is not much different than using AI to generate an image or a video or help you with any text that you’re writing. The challenge is you have to imagine it in your head, and then you wrangle the AI to make it come out. So you can imagine that you have content in your learning management system, and we use Brightspace here at SUNY, wouldn’t it be neat to embed some slick interactives in the middle of the reading to check for understanding? So maybe the learners are scrolling through reading it, and they see a little Wordle that is confined to only the vocabulary from the current unit. Or maybe there’s a deck of cards, not like playing cards, but just cards with words on them, like facts, and they can swipe left or right to kind of test their knowledge to see if it’s true or false. And actually, I was listening to your podcast, the recent one, where you had the student who was presenting their honors paper, and I got to think, I was like, “Oh, that would be really cool. So if a learners doing research, and let’s say it’s on water quality in a conservation class, and we have big conservation program here at FLCC, maybe they could, instead of presenting at a conference and having charts and graphs from Excel, what if they could have a fully interactive data model, and you can pinch and zoom and you spread out all this data and really interact with it?” And that’s possible now. And in fact, a few years ago at FLCC, there was a learner that I was working with. She was in the creative writing program, and she came to me, she’s like, “Dave, I have this idea. I want to make a campus-wide Mad Libs, and I need to have a website.” And she was going to crowdsource all these different things. And so the users would go to the website and it would have a prompt, and they’d type it in, and then she aggregated all and made like this website out of it, and it was like, this creative story, that kind of captured the vibe of FLCC. And she designed it, and we worked with it, but I did most of the coding. It really wasn’t effective for me to sit down and teach her how to code for this thing. But now if someone came to me today, and was like, “Hey, Dave, I have this idea,” I’d be like, “Okay, give me 30 minutes of your time. I’ll get you started, and then you can come back to me if you get stuck.” But that’s the reality now.

John: It’s an interesting project where someone is capturing the vibes of the institution using vibe coding. So we’ve got that meta level going on there. [LAUGHTER]

Dave: It’s very meta.

John: So basically what you’re saying is just using one of the generative AI systems, students can generate the code and then have it created in the form of JavaScripts that could then be inserted into a website.

Dave: Yeah, so I may have lied a little bit earlier when I said you don’t need to have any experience, but it’s very little. You don’t have to understand HTML or JavaScript or CSS, and for those of you listening who care, HTML is the content, the words, CSS is the design of it, the colors, the size of the font, and JavaScript is the interactivity. So there’s usually, like, three different components to a website, and the AI systems, they manage all that. The challenge is, once you design it, and it’s in your AI system, where you can download to your computer, you might say, yourself, “Self, well, how do I get this into my learning management system.” So I suggest, there’s your tech stack… if you want to sound super cool and super nerdy… the tech stack is, I use AI to create it, and I store the code in GitHub Pages. GitHub Pages is like GitHub, except it can render the pages, so you can actually store websites up there. And then in Brightspace, or in the LMS, I embed the code that lives in GitHub. And I know that sounds complicated, and I hope your listeners aren’t tuning out right now, because I do want to just say the very first time you do it, it might be a little hard, it might be a little confusing, but it is super easy, and once you get started, you’re golden, and you will have so much fun vibe coding, making like all these different apps.

John: And you can do that as a free account on GitHub, or do you have to pay for an account?

Dave: Free account. In this whole endeavor, I want it to cost $0, to have minimal knowledge of technology and so this tech stack is that. It celebrates you don’t need to know anything, you don’t need to pay for an account. Now, I do pay for an account at Claude, and I think Claude is the absolute best for code generation, I find Gemini 2.5 is the second best. And up until [LAUGHTER] today, I would have said ChatGPT is the third best, but ChatGPT 5 dropped, and it hasn’t dropped into my account yet, so I can’t test it, but ChatGPT 5 is supposed to have some pretty slick coding in there as well.

Rebecca: Has vibe coding been something that you’ve been able to use with students to demystify programming?

Dave: It has. So it certainly has the potential, and I haven’t applied it into my classes yet, but this is something I intend to do in the fall. So we’re at this inflection point in computer science and in programming courses and even how we teach it. And I can imagine a JavaScript class that I teach where on the very first day, we start coding a web app, and we do it using Claude, or pick your favorite AI, and then we put it on the projector and like, “Okay,” and for this conversation, let’s say it’s a to do list. So we come up with the features, and we come up with this prompt, and we put it up there, and it generates the prompt and, recognize that at this point, some of the learners might know some HTML and maybe have heard of JavaScript before, but that might be the extent of it. But that’s fine, because now you can look at the code, and you can look at it side by side, because all these AI platforms now have that canvas on the side, and then you can start making features. So I’d say, “Hey, what feature do you want to use?” and a learner might say, “Oh, I’d like to change the colors of the check mark”, or have the user change the check mark to an X or a smiley face, or whatever in this to-do list. And so then we put that into the prompt, and then you can see when the code changes. It’s eerie. It like backspaces all the code. It doesn’t just wipe it out, it backspaces it character by character. So you can actually see it and use it as a learning experience. And you can go a little bit further than that too. So if I were in this aspirational example, I might have the learners say, “Oh, well, I didn’t understand what happened.” And so we put that into the prompt and we say, “Well, can you explain what you just did?” and then it can give you a natural language response to it. So it’s like having a software developer that is at your beck and call all day, every day.

Rebecca: And who’s willing to speak English.

Dave: Yes, [LAUGHTER] or whatever language you want.

Rebecca: True! [LAUGHTER]

John: Taking that just a little step further, do you think this might be something that might get more people interested in learning coding, once they have this additional tool to help them get started with this? Because a lot of students may be intimidated taking courses in computer science, because it’s like a foreign language to them.

Dave: Yeah, and I’m gonna get a lot of hate mail for this, but if we think about the current state of computer science, and even in this conversation, we talked about the breakneck pace of AI like ChatGPT5 dropped today. Claude dropped yesterday. OpenAI just gave every employee a $1.5 million raise. All that happened this week. Google just dropped the study mode, Google just dropped the children’s book. All these things happened in the past week. So there’s no avoiding it. You can’t escape the velocity of AI. And let’s talk about non-majors for a second. A lot of non-majors are taking Word, Excel, and PowerPoint as their computer science course. So imagine the institution next door, and they don’t have that as a computer science course. That’s like the table stakes. Instead, you come into this vibe coordinating class, maybe it’s a 15-week course, even if you know nothing about coding, by the end of it, you’re going to be weaponized and making web apps, and you might understand the lingo a little bit more, and it doesn’t matter if you do or not, but you can make these things to help you. And I gave the example of the conservation learner earlier, but imagine there’s someone who’s going into some type of program like mindfulness. You can make the breathing apps that have a little needle that says, inhale, exhale. So all of a sudden, these learners are start thinking in this like fourth dimension, where it’s tangential to their domain, and it’s no different than creating artwork with AI or creating text or video.

Rebecca: What about things like accessibility when we’re thinking about developing these web apps?

Dave: I knew you were gonna ask that, Rebecca. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I appreciate that you knew I was gonna ask you. [LAUGHTER]

Dave: Yeah, and you’re the accessibility guru. So I have a generic prompt that I give, and this is the secret sauce. So everyone out there take notes. There’s a few different things that are kind of what I call non-negotiables when you’re making a prompt for the software. So my secret prompt, my secret sauce, whenever I start prompting, there’s three or four things that need to get in there, and the first is to curb the default behavior of these AI systems. Most of them try and use React, which is a nerdy framework that us computer nerds use. So I always say “I’d like to make a web app. I’d like it to use vanilla JavaScript, I’d like it to be responsive, and I’d like it to be accessible. So that’s how I start the prompt, just with those four parameters and 95 out of 100 times what comes out is exactly that. One of the things that I think is important, Rebecca too, is like, you need to test this and this is true for all AI everywhere. You are the supervisor, like you co-create, you don’t abdicate. So it’s important to test that accessibility and you kind of have to know what you’re looking for. And in general, when we’re talking about web apps, you want to make sure if you have images, there’s alt tags. You want to make sure that there’s the textual hierarchy with Heading1, Heading2, and all those things are almost always present anyhow. And then you also have to test it for responsiveness. So test it on a mobile device, because you never know how many of your learners are out there on mobile devices.

Rebecca: I would add in probably check it with a keyboard too.

Dave: I’m glad we’re having this dialog because we’re vibe podcasting right now because that’s exactly what you should be doing, is let’s say that you generate this software and for this case, let’s just say it’s a interactive data thing. You might want to say, “Hey, let me test this with a keyboard,” and if it doesn’t work, then you say to your AI of choice, “Oh, this doesn’t work with a keyboard. Here’s the functionality I’d like to see.” So I think that’s really important. In fact, one of the best skills I’ve acquired, and I’ve been programming for many, many years now, is debugging, because all the load of coding is done by the AI. I could spend way more time testing it and testing those edge cases and thinking about how it’s gonna be used.

John: We saw a presentation that you put together at the SUNY Conference on Instruction and Technology earlier in the summer, and you talked about developing a course on vibe coding. How has that process been going?

Dave: It is going great. Thank you for asking. One thing that I’m excited about is at Finger Lakes Community College, we’ve had some phenomenal support in the AI realm from the President and the board, so they’ve given us carte blanche, top down support. And so what we’re seeing is pockets emerging from the grassroots, like how we’re going to be using AI. And one of the things that I’m most proud of is we’ve launched the FLX AI hub. We launched that on June 11th, and one of our charters is to support educators in implementing AI. So we are dropping one course every month, and you can think of this as one-hour course to maybe three-hour but on average, about two hours a course that’s going to drop, and it’s going to be relevant for educators. And we have at least one vibe coding course dropping this academic year, possibly two, because there is this whole second level where you can use Google Sheets as a database for some of your apps. And I have some examples of that if you want to see them. I just want to mention you can sign up for these courses, or at least get information on them at flcc.edu/ai.

Rebecca: Well, that one should be easy to remember.

Dave: [LAUGHTER] I hope so.

John: And we will include a link for that in the show notes as well.

Dave: Thank you.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how you see the vibe approach preparing students for a future where AI coding is ubiquitous, if we are saying that it’s not already. [LAUGHTER]

Dave: I think it almost is ubiquitous. I think that vibe coding, if you abstract it, it’s no different than prompt engineering, than AI integration specialist, like that you are wrangling AI. One of the ways it frees learners is by giving them the space to think about program design and computational thinking. And again, I’m gonna get a lot of hate mail for this too, Software engineering isn’t learning where to put the semicolons or learning the difference between Python and your indents or JavaScript. It’s great if you know those languages, but really it’s about understanding what the problem you’re trying to solve is and designing a flow for that. So already, there’s been conversation in this field for probably the last decade about low-code environments, and we have environments where they have like blocks that you can plug in and make the software go, but this is on a whole ‘nother level. It’s just so freeing. I was born in the 70s, survived the 80s, but I grew up on an Apple IIe and for a long time we were limited by the technology, even if we had grand ideas. And then there was this era that ended probably just four or five years ago, where we were limited by our imagination, so the hardware was no longer an issue, but we couldn’t think of what to do. But I think we’re at this inflection point where now we’re not limited by imagination or by hardware, because when you’re using AI, and you know this with regular conversations too, that aren’t vibe coding, when you’re done with a conversation, it might say, “Oh, did you think about doing A, B or C?” Like, “Would you like to potentiate your work a little bit more?” So I really love where this is going, and I think that if it’s not ubiquitous, it will be six months, a year from now, at least at this level. And I’m not saying that we don’t need Python programmers and Java programmers, because we do. But what I am saying is the entry level is a lot lower now, and maybe someone starts vibe coding and they absolutely love it, and they’re like, “Oh, I do want to go into software engineering. I want to get into the nitty gritty.”

John: Now, in terms of teaching computer science classes, how will you be able to assess students’ knowledge of basic programming skills when they have all these AI tools available?

Dave: When AI first came out in November ‘22 I said to my learners, “absolutely no AI”. And then over winter break, I was talking to one of my buddies, and he programs Python for a living, and there’s a Python class I was teaching, and he does a lot of work with some big firms up here in Rochester. And Malcolm was like, “Oh, I don’t care how people get their software done, as long as it works.” I was like, “Okay.” So that semester, I was like, “Hey, folks, all bets are off. Use AI as much as you want.” And I think that was a good experiment for me and there was one lab that was unintentionally designed to be AI proof, and it was like two thirds of the way through the semester, and I got so many emails and people were lost, and I was like, “Oh, you just have to do a loop.” And they’re like, “What’s a loop?” And I realized what had derailed from this process. So now, for using AI for the first two weeks, not allowed to use AI in a capacity. Then for the next two or three weeks, depending on where we are, they can use it as a study guide. And actually, I took your chatbot course at CIT this past summer, so I will be rolling that out so I can kind of confine the knowledge in there, and then after that, once we get through the fundamentals, once learners understand input, output, variables, if statements, and loops, then they can start potentiating with AI. And one of the things that I think is important in this contractual agreement with the learners is, “Hey, if AI spits something out and you don’t get it, just ask, ask it. It will totally explain it to you.” So I’m hoping that this can be like a Khan Academy type tutor bot type experience, self governed by the learner.

Rebecca: Do you have students in your classes that are building software explain how they built it as a way of assessing that, or is it really just the final product?

Dave: So to be clear, I haven’t rolled out this AI vibe coding mentality 100% yet, this is a work in progress, but one of the things that’s really important in software engineering, and you can ask anyone who works at any company who programs is commenting, and comments are lines of code that can be in plain English that the computer doesn’t process. And it’s very good for if you have a to-do list like, “Oh, don’t forget, I have to do this, this and this feature,” or if you have code that you don’t want to execute, you can comment it out. So the comments are kind of like the user’s guide. And I’m leaning more and more towards saying, “Hey, you really need to do great comments in here.” Part of the challenge is AI does comments. In fact, that’s one of the ways you can tell if a learner’s using AI and just copy and pasting, because if the code has comments, you’re like, “Hmm, that might have been generated by AI,” but I want to go to that next level, those really deep, rich comments that explain what’s going on. And I was working with some faculty at a K-12 school up here, and they said, “Well, what about essays?” and his is an English teacher, and the teacher’s like, “What if, for their submission, they can do AI generated, but I wanna see the 20 or 30 or 40 prompts they use.” Like, “I wanna see the thought process.” He’s like, “Would that be okay?” And I was like, “You’re the teacher, but yeah, that sounds like a great way to get people to learn to use AI, and you can see the thinking and the interrogation of what’s going on” and I don’t know that I hate that idea for programming either.

John: That’s the topic that’s come up in a lot of past discussions of AI on the podcast, where people are shifting from evaluating the final product, which could very often be easily created by AI, to an analysis of the process that students use, which would include all the prompts they use, and a description of in what ways they used AI and so forth. We need to prepare students for a world in which they’re going to be using AI tools in some form, and it’s hard to imagine what those forms will look like in the distant future, say, next month, but at least if we focus on getting them to use the tools effectively that might help prepare them for their future careers more effectively than assuming that they’re not going to be using the tools that are out there that make their work easier and perhaps more efficient.

Rebecca: Or enjoyable.

Dave: Yeah, I was just gonna say, like the self-determination theory, you want that autonomy, and you want that relevance and the competency, and you can have all of that with vibe coding. So just as an example of after that CIT conference, I was talking to Bridget and Nicole, who were two librarians at Brockport. They had actually presented on this software they made. They were vibe coding. They didn’t even really know it. They didn’t know anything about programming, but they were like, “We want to make this interactive version of Bloom’s taxonomy.” And they did and they presented on it. And then Ed Beck emailed me a week later and he’s like, “Listen, I made this interactive website. So you go there, and as an educator, you can click on: I want this assignment to have no AI, some AI, and then you pick your poison for your recipe, the guardrails for each assignment, and then it generates, like an image that you can stick into your document. And I did recommend to him that the image also have the alt tag with it, or you can make it in HTML so it’s embedded. So he made kind of like an assignment picker, and he did that using AI. And I can imagine a world… like right now my Python learners, their final projects are usually relatively all the same. Like, you have a certain amount of skills that you can use, and so you’re a little bit limited by that. But I love the idea of saying, “Hey, the sky’s the limit.” Like, “Don’t think small. Don’t do a to do list, because that checks off the box of arrays or lists and for loops. Think something big, make a game, make something that’s relevant to what you want to do.” And so I think you get that relevance and that excitement and that energy, and it’s no harder than it would be to do in a regular project but now they’re engaged in the process.

Rebecca: Circling back to what you were mentioning before about sharing the prompts and the reprompts and the reprompts and the dialog that’s happening, [LAUGHTER] I think encouraging students to submit those sorts of things or to document those sorts of things, really helps them recognize this is how they’re using the tool, and they’re disclosing that they’ve used a particular tool, and really enforces the idea of maybe some ethical behavior.

Dave: I hadn’t even really thought about that, but there’s that, like, metacognitive aspect of it, but also there is a bit of an awakening, because the way you just described that to me, I hadn’t even thought about that, but you can look at it and you can see the evolution of their confidence, like what threads they pulled, so you really get a more in depth understanding of their process. Oh, that’s great. You should teach vibe coding.

Rebecca: Well, I do teach coding, so…

Dave: All right, well you’re 90% there. [LAUGHTER]

John: Is this something perhaps that many faculty could introduce into their own use as well as their own instruction. I could imagine, for example, people who are teaching courses in statistics, econometrics, and other areas, using vibe coding to do some work in terms of working with databases, in terms of extracting data, reformatting data, and getting it in a form ready for use with statistical packages, in ways that may be much more efficient than the ways in which students are doing that manually right now.

Dave: Yeah, it really is the great potentiator. It doesn’t really matter what your discipline is, what domain you’re doing. We all know that data is creeping into every single domain, and it’s not a secret that technology is too, so why not just latch onto that and really just celebrate it? So you’re right. There’s all sorts of database work you can do and insights you can get from databases, but there’s nothing cooler than being some college learner who all of a sudden is making web apps that help them, or making software, it doesn’t have to be a web app, that helps them really internalize and they can share it and be proud of it. The sky is the limit. One other thing that is really interesting is there’s been an awful lot of talk about fear of failure, and failure to launch because of the fear of failure, and I really think that this is an opportunity to teach iteration, because it’s so private, there’s like, this micro failure, you do a prompt and it falls flat, it doesn’t do what you want. There’s no one looking at you. You just do it again and again and again, and then all of a sudden you get energized, like, “Oh, I can do this.” And then you customize it. So I think this is a really good on-ramp towards some type of iterative thinking process that might hopefully build confidence in other venues as well.

John: I know one of the problems that a lot of computer science professors have mentioned in the past is that they have students coming into their intro courses with a pretty wide variety of backgrounds. Some have never done any programming. Others have already built their own games and such things. And I would think that aspect that you just described, in terms of being able to work on things independently and experiment, might reduce that sort of psychological barrier where those people who come in with a little less background might feel much more comfortable interacting with the computer on their own time, without having to go to an instructor and admitting that they don’t know some things, where they see other students already able to do those things. So I think it may break down some of those barriers and equalize the starting point a bit for students.

Dave: Yeah, that’s a really astute observation and MIT created the language Scratch specifically for that purpose, because they were getting people from all different levels, and they’re like, “No, we’re all on the same playing field right now.” And, again like, maybe you should teach vibe coding. I didn’t even really consider that, but it really does level the playing field.

Rebecca: So let’s say folks are super stoked about vibe coding. [LAUGHTER] What are some examples of how to maybe get started?

Dave: I think if you want just that real easy entrance way into it and start to understand the environment that you can have it make a QR code generator, and usually it can do that in one prompt. That’s not a hard problem to solve. But then you might say, “Oh, can you give me a color picker so I can change the color of the QR code,” and you can make it download as a PNG instead of a JPEG or whatever, or you could do….and this is actually a problem that is a very pervasive problem in online teaching… in discussion forums in the beginning of the semester, I’m always like, “Take a picture of your work area, post it in this discussion forum, and let’s talk about what you like about it, what you don’t like.” And more than half the learners now have iPhones. And guess what? That takes pictures in HEIC, which is not web accessible. So one thing you might want to try is create an HEIC converter to PNG. That’s an easy win, it’s low-hanging fruit, and you can actually use that in your course. You can embed that and then use it.

John: Which is awfully convenient when students send you files in a format that is not a web standard or is not an accessible standard. So having that handy would be very useful.

Dave: Sure.

Rebecca: I just like your approach and using it to solve your own problems, starting with things like, “Oh, this is a barrier I face. Can I build something to remove that barrier for myself?”

Dave: Yeah, andI just started lifting at a gym, and I was like, “Oh, I need an app that does like, 60 seconds on 20 seconds off,” but then sometimes I want to be 60 seconds on 30, whatever it is. And so I just made an app that did that. I probably could have found one in the play store, but I’d have to download something. And now it’s customizable. And as I started growing this app, I was like, I want it preset. So on Mondays, it does this. So now I’ve built it, and no one else cares about that app, but I do, so I can control it exactly how I want it.

Rebecca: For a long time, we’ve talked a lot about user experiences that are personalized and individualized, and what you’re describing is completely individualized, because now you’re creating your own tools that are completely for whatever it is that you personally need or want.

Dave: And can you imagine the budget you would have needed, like, 10 years ago, or even 5 years ago if you hired someone to make an app for you that did, like a breathing time or something. It would be thousands of dollars. Now you can do it in 10 minutes for free.

John: This is not in any way related to the topic, but you did mention that workshop that Judie Littlejohn, and I gave at the CIT conference where we had people build chatbots. Could you tell us a little bit about the chatbot that you built while you were there during that session?

Dave: I would say, if you’re looking for an easy win for making your first chatbot, I believe the one I did was a Gen Alpha translator. So you could copy and paste paragraphs from your, say syllabus, and then it would spit it out in Gen Alpha speak. It was fun. It was maybe useful, we’ll find out, but it was just a big win. So it was nice to do that, it was my first chatbot.

John: And it was one of the most interesting ones that we saw there. We always end with the question, “what’s next?” which, in anything dealing with AI, is a question we’re always asking.

Dave: So, there are two things that we’re really proud of at the college. The first is this FLX AI hub, and the four pillars are AI across the institutions. That’s how we’re supporting educators and learners and the business side of things. The second pillar is supporting business and government for implementing AI into their organizations. The third is AI for the community. So we’re doing some courses for the community education about how to use AI, but the one I’m really excited about is the AI for educators, and that’s going to have the courses that drop every month. And you can go to flcc.edu/ai, for that. But the other thing, and again, because I’m such a fan boy of this podcast, I was listening to one two or three weeks ago, and Rebecca, you’d remind us about the 10-day accessibility challenge. We built a 10 day AI-challenge. And you can see it aichallenges.org and this is free for any institution to roll out. It starts very simple. We identified an appetite for AI, but sometimes people are embarrassed and they don’t wanna sign up for an account. So you can sign up, or you can just go along, every day, we’ll release a new one, or you’ll release one for your institution. So the way it worked at FLCC is we picked these challenges and we emailed them out once a week, and it was very simple, and there was a sharing component, and the sharing component, you could go to this forum and type in like, say you were doing images this week, you could type in your prompt and upload the image, and then you could share it with everyone else at the institution. So we have about 15 different challenges, and we’ve been working with other organizations. If they want to roll it out, we’ll give them their own private in quotation marks “sandbox,” where each organization can have their own and they can roll out whichever challenges they want, they can replace the YouTube videos with my ugly mug with their own, if they so choose. And it’s really just an attempt to get everyone, just to have them open their eyes to what AI can do and how it’s so wide and so personalized.

Rebecca: Sounds like a great resource.

Dave: Love to roll it out to Oswego, if you want it.

John: We’ll certainly share a link to it to everyone. [LAUGHTER]

Dave: And they’re at that flcc.edu/ai site, you’ll be able to see there’ll be a checkbox for “Hey, I want information on the AI challenge. I wanna roll it out in my institution.”

John: Great. Well, thank you. It’s always great talking to you, and we look forward to future conversations.

Dave: Yeah, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much for giving vibe coding the space that it so deserves. And I love the ideas. I’m so glad I came today because I learned two or three things that I’m totally going to put in my courses now, after talking to you.

Rebecca: That’s why we like doing interviews too.

Dave: That’s awesome. Thank you. Thanks for joining us.

Rebecca: Thanks for joining us. [LAUGHTER]

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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