The Center for Teaching Excellence at Midlands Technical College, in South Carolina, is working to normalize failure through its “Instructional Ecology” podcast. This season is all about “making failure visible in lives that are also full of success” in order to “fracture unhelpful myths about uncontested success,” as Claire Houle, an instructional designer who produces and hosts the podcast, put it in a recent episode. Sharing stories of failure, the thinking goes, can help students put their own in perspective.
Houle reached out to me after a recent newsletter issue that described normalizing struggle as one way professors could help students persist in the face of challenges. She was excited to share that one episode in the podcast series features the college’s president, Ronald Rhames, an alumnus who previously served as chief financial officer and has announced plans to retire this summer.
In the episode, Rhames describes a moment early in his college career when the instructor of his required writing class returned an essay he’d written “all marked up.” The instructor, Rhames recalls, expressed concern about his writing ability and “essentially said, You’re not a college-level student.”
That probably wasn’t the best way to say that Rhames’s writing needed some work — as the instructor later admitted to him. Rhames considered dropping the course, or even dropping out of college altogether. But he didn’t. Instead, he went at the next essay differently. He chose a topic he was passionate about. He gave himself more time to work on it. He passed.
Asked by Rhames what students might learn from his story, he said: “Don’t give up.” One grade rarely makes or breaks a student’s options. Failure will come; the trick is to persist.
I imagine that hearing Rhames’s story might shift how students respond to getting a bad grade — and perhaps how instructors communicate about one, too. It reminded me of times I’ve seen faculty members share their paper rejections on social media, or even compile a “CV of failures.” That conversation is, among other things, a way to connect with peers, or maybe junior colleagues, over a common experience. Rhames’s example takes it a step further, by identifying with undergraduates who are struggling.
Have you shared a failure story with students? Would you consider doing so? Share your thoughts with me at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com, and I may include them in a future newsletter.
You may also want to check out this guide to sharing such stories with students, from the Midlands teaching center.
Do discussion boards still work?
In the past, Deborah Beck, a professor of classics at the University of Texas at Austin, has used discussion boards to foster engagement in large classes. But lately Beck isn’t so sure that the move still makes sense, given the availability of generative artificial-intelligence tools. She wondered what our readers thought.
“Discussion boards used to be a fruitful way for students to think and interact with each other outside of class, and it seems like AI has made some or all of that, at a minimum, less straightforward and more unlikely to occur,” Beck wrote.
If you use discussion boards, have you adapted them, knowing that students might write posts with the help of AI tools? Have you found that discussion boards continue to yield the kind of engagement you want to encourage? If not, what are you doing instead? Share your experiences and ideas with Beth at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com, and she may include them in a future issue of the newsletter.
AI in the field
Recently, I shared a reader’s question about how instructors are teaching students about how AI is being used by professionals in their fields.
Kristina Medvedeva, a visiting assistant professor of marketing at Eckerd College, in Florida, shared that she talks about the ethics of using AI in each of her courses, and explains her policies for its use in assignments. Generative AI is widely used by marketers, Medvedeva says, citing a survey that shows 85 percent said it had changed the way they create content. “Specifically, AI helps marketers create content more efficiently and improve its quality as well as create significantly more content,” she wrote. “In addition to that, marketers use AI to generate new ideas, create images, and repurpose existing content by adapting it to either a different format or a different audience.”
With that in mind, she wrote, “my students create marketing content and visuals in class using generative AI like any other marketer would do. I do not teach them HOW to use generative AI. Instead, they learn HOW to use generative AI IN ORDER TO create marketing content.”
Leah Parker, an instructor of psychology at Hawkeye Community College, in Iowa, wrote in to share that in her field “it seems actual-use cases aren’t as plentiful as potential uses (the realm of speculation).”
For instance, Parker wrote, “I just listened to an episode of the ‘Speaking of Psychology’ podcast (produced by the American Psychological Association) about the ethical use of AI. The conversation between the host and Nathanael Fast contained a variety of themes, but the most relevant one to your question was nestled in the middle of the episode, where they talk about the potential utility of AI’s integration into clinical/therapeutic spaces (e.g., chatbots helping to triage the mental-health crisis).
“The podcast typically covers the same topics as the APA Monitor magazine that month,” Parker continued. “For January, the Monitor’s issue covered 12 emerging trends in 2024, including the ‘unstoppable momentum of generative AI.’”
Those responses are a good reminder that the adoption of generative AI varies a good deal from one professional setting to another.
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com or beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.
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— Beckie
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