“I’m teaching care for their own particular point of view, a disdain for all things ‘vibes’ that aren’t carefully thought out, and a deep understanding of the courage it takes to withdraw from other people for a while, to have braved a thought all on your own.” That’s Robert Wallace, associate professor of philosophy at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly). In the…

In this webinAAR, you will hear from three faculty who have incorporated Wikipedia editing into their pedagogy. During this roundtable session, faculty discuss why they decided to adopt the Wikipedia assignment and how it has affected their teaching. The panelists explore what Wikipedia can offer students and how students can help shape public understanding of...

Has your department instituted an AI policy? If so, whom does it govern, and what does it say? What should such a policy say? Has your department considered an AI policy but held off on writing or implementing it? If so, what issues, disputes, or questions have contributed to the delay? Does your department even have the institutional authority to have such a policy? Would it be better to not…

I desire to connect with people. I long for the days where I was vulnerable and shared my struggles with engineers who charitably stepped up to support me. I miss taking what I learned from those struggles and sharing them back out as a blog post or presentation, encouraging the next person to overcome the same challenge.

It will take me a while to get back into these habits that have been…

As a teacher, she would talk about literature with other people’s children. Finally I got the same chance.

Some philosophy professors, realizing that many of their students are unfamiliar with writing philosophy papers, provide them with “how-to” guides to the task. [Originally posted on January 15, 2019. Reposted by reader request.] I thought it might be useful to collect examples of these. If you know of any already online, please mention them in the comments and include links. If you have a PDF of…

“I wonder if these people have ever seen a student’s face when they finally understand something for the first time.” Jane Sloan Peters, a professor of religious studies and historical theologian at the University of Mount Saint Vincent, was talking with her students about changes she has made to her teaching so as to safeguard student learning from artificial intelligence when “a wave of sadness…

A decade can offer a lookback period, giving us a historical perspective of events which were mere possibilities when it first happened. In the words of Mr. Clark: “This is how we tried to alert people in 2016…Carl Fischer was to alert the dealers that the names were changing to mine. The Letter asked music...

Tom Burick has always considered himself a builder. Over the years he’s designed robots, constructed a vintage teardrop trailer, and most recently, led a group of students in building a full-scale replica of a pivotal 1940s computer.

Burick is a technology instructor at PS Academy in Gilbert, Ariz., a middle and high school for students with autism and other specialized learning needs. At…

Who and what was covered in philosophy courses at UK universities in the 1950s and 1960s? . That question comes from Brice Ezell, an independent scholar working on a book “about Tom Stoppard’s dramatizations of core questions in analytic philosophy.” He says: I’m currently writing a chapter on a radio drama of Stoppard’s called Albert’s Bridge, whose principal character is a young man fresh out…

Are all happy classrooms alike? Probably not. But perhaps there’s some qualities common to many of them. In the following guest post, Daniel Story, assistant professor of philosophy at California Polytechnic State University, suggests that among those qualities are care and connection. His experiences teaching this semester push against the dominant pessimistic narrative about today’s college…

Helping students to turn negativity into a positive force.

Completing a teaching practicum is a rite of passage for every education student at Bishop’s University. You learn a lot of theory in your classes, but applying it in a real classroom is a whole different experience. Looking back, here are ten things I wish I had known before I started. 1. Understanding the Curriculum Is Non-Negotiable Before my […]

The post 10 Things I Wish I Knew Before My…

Grammarly is sometimes thought by instructors to be a relatively benign writing tool app, akin to a sophisticated spelling and grammar checker. That may have once been true, but as Kieran Barker, an educational associate for academic AI initiatives at Carleton College, shows in a new video, it is now an AI-powered cheating multitool. As he says, “You can very quickly go from no text at all to…

A forthcoming study shows that a critical thinking course focused on a few good, relatively easy to learn, and useful reasoning strategies can impart lessons that remain effective long after the course has ended. The study, authored by Michael Bishop (Florida State), Adam Feltz (Oklahoma), and Paul Conway (Southampton), will be coming out in The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. In the…

Last week, I asked philosophy instructors to let us know how much reading they assign in their undergraduate courses. As of yesterday afternoon, there were around 700 responses for the “lower level” philosophy course poll and a little less than that for the “upper level” philosophy course poll. For lower-level philosophy courses, a little over 36% of respondents said they assigned around 20 pages…

Technically speaking, Duke University professor Aaron Dinin _teaches_ entrepreneurship. But more accurately, he teaches _young people_ to have a _healthier relationship_ with __failure __, and he does this through various oddball challenges—everything fromsolving a 1000-piece puzzle in six minutes to trying to _beat a nine-year-old at selling cookies_.

In one recent video, Dinin's students…

Feedback from classes is an important part of quality teaching for many students. The results of the student survey conducted during the 2022/23 winter semester show that course evaluation (LVE) […]

At the end of this post is a poll about how much reading you assign. Please take part in it if you teach philosophy courses. Thanks. “Stop Meeting Students Where They Are” is the title of a recent piece at The Atlantic by Walt Hunter, professor of English at Case Western Reserve University. In it, he shares what are now familiar observations about the state of college student literacy (see this…