Beth and I hope that getting Teaching in your inbox every week gives you good ideas and eases some of that isolation. But we’ve long wanted to expand on the newsletter to offer readers a greater sense of community.
So I am excited to tell you about Talking About Teaching, our new series of interactive virtual events, which Beth mentioned briefly before our holiday break.
Who: The events will bring together a round table of three teaching experts: Isis Artze-Vega, vice president for academic affairs at Valencia College, in Florida; Regan A.R. Gurung, associate vice provost and executive director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Oregon State University; and Viji Sathy, associate dean of evaluation and assessment in the office of undergraduate education in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s College of Arts and Sciences. They’ll be joined by Beth McMurtrie and me, Beckie Supiano, the Chronicle reporters who write this newsletter.
What: A four-part series of interactive virtual events for instructors and the administrators who support them. We plan to cover the changing student/professor dynamic, how to foster motivation and engagement, and the future of grading and assessment, respectively, in our first three sessions. While all of the sessions will be interactive, the last one will be built entirely around questions from our audience.
When: The final Fridays of January to April at 2 p.m., Eastern time. That’s January 28, February 25, March 25, and April 29.
Where: Discussions will be on Zoom; sign up here. And we plan to keep the conversation going in the newsletter, too.
Why: To help professors think through common challenges, like expanding student engagement and fine-tuning grading and assessment, and to provide a sense of community along the way.
Sign up here!
We hope you’ll join us — and invite your colleagues, too. As always, we welcome your feedback. Reach out, at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com and/or beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com, with any questions or comments.
‘Empathetic, Inclusive Course Design’
“This semester may be even harder for everyone than last semester b/c pandemic stress & trauma is cumulative,” wrote Josh Eyler in the first tweet of a thread that made the rounds over winter break. Eyler, director of faculty development at the University of Mississippi, went on to share resources for what he called “empathetic, inclusive course design,” which, he said, can make another challenging semester “both easier and more effective for both us and our students.”
ICYMI
- What happens when a professor offends her students — and then the remarks she acknowledges were a mistake go viral on social media? Our colleague Emma Pettit explores the issues in this close examination of an incident at Buffalo State College.
- What was it like to start college during the pandemic? Inside Higher Ed has the story behind a new book comprising students’ reflections: There Is No College in Covid: Selections From the Oregon State University–Cascades Student Journaling Project.
- Robert Talbert walks through his Stop/Start/Continue plans for 2022 in a recent essay for EdSurge.
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us, at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com or beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.
—Beckie
Learn more about our Teaching newsletter, including how to contact us, at the Teaching newsletter archive page.
