Anna Mills shares Peer and AI Review and Reflection, plus a layered approach to writing feedback on episode 630 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Quotes from the episode

My sense of the value of feedback has not changed. It’s more important than ever, more meaningful than ever, when we do have that connection through words.
-Anna Mills

I think overall I’ve advocated for more sort of technical support for transparency about what is AI and what is not.
-Anna Mills

Students preferred both the peer and the AI feedback. They did not want one or the other.
-Anna Mills

AI companies should be designing so that their agents don’t go in and say, “I’m a student taking a quiz.”
-Anna Mills

Luke Green uses the Santa Claus story to rethink what grades measure and the case for ungrading on episode 629 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Quotes from the episode

Each student at some point throughout their academic career is going to receive a grade, receive some sort of an assessment that is going to fundamentally alter how they feel about the classroom.
-Luke Green

The narrative that we sell to our kids is that these gifts are earned. The metric is, those who are good children or better children, you receive more.
-Luke Green

What are grades, and what purpose do we want them to serve?
-Luke Green

Usually, it’s a proxy of understanding a student’s overall experience. And GPA is even worse, because you’re putting all of your course grades into a meat grinder and spitting out one number.
-Luke Green

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

Quotes from the episode

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

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

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

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

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

Quotes from the episode

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

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

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

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

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

Quotes from the episode

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

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

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

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

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

Quotes from the episode

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

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

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

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

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

Quotes from the episode

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

When we design with accessibility in mind, we support everyone, all students.
-Denise Maduli-Williams

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

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

Quotes from the episode

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

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

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

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

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

Quotes from the episode

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

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

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

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

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

Quotes from the episode

Teaching is the most important form of public engagement that any of us do.
-David Perry

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

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

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

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

Quotes from the episode

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

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

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

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