Sally Laurent-Muehleisen, an emeritus professor of physics at the Illinois Institute of Technology, pushed herself out of her comfort zone to try dancing, because her daughter was “extremely involved in (noncompetitive) dance,” she wrote.
She decided to take an adult summer class at her daughter’s academy. “I enlisted my other dance Mom friends,” she continued. “So we find ourselves — in all places! — a tap class! And we loved it. It was good exercise and we were all beginners and the instructor was great. One of the fellow moms was a HS English teacher and we both immediately saw the other value of it being good for us to experience what it was like to be a novice in something ... to be learning something completely out of our field and experiencing being a student again. So the next time summer rolled around we tried a different style of dance. After that, I was looking for something different and found a stained-glass art class. Not only was it great, but I actually finally found an art form I wasn’t half bad at!”
Laurent-Muehleisen began telling her students about “my experiences intentionally doing something totally new and out of my comfort zone every summer so that I could remind myself of what it was like to be a student and also thinking I ‘wasn’t very good’ at something. And sometimes, I was right. I wasn’t very good, but with effort, I did always get better. And sometimes — to my surprise — I found out I WAS good at something even though I didn’t think I was ... and that was, I hope, a lesson they could learn too.
“As a side note, some students who did come to my office hours were happy to see the small piece of stained-glass art I made in that first class: a quasar with an accretion disk and jets! I started telling students I specialized in a very niche market: nerd stained-glass art!”
Sara E. Lampert, an associate professor of history at the University of South Dakota, described returning to ballet as an adult. For Lampert, ballet has taught the lesson of living with frustration instead of freezing.
“I grew up in an environment that was very high pressure, where I felt that any challenge I faced was a reflection of my innate ability,” Lampert wrote. “I have had to work hard to redirect this feeling away from my sense of self worth and to a recognition that all things are hard, we have good and bad days, and sometimes you just push through at the bare minimum and accept that this assignment, this topic, this combination is not for you at this time. (I also recognize that dance encourages a lot of performance anxiety and internalized pressure, but doing it recreationally is a counterpoint to the way I experience most internalized pressure, in my academic life.)
“I think students are very hard on themselves. Faculty complain a lot about perceptions that students aren’t working hard enough, but I also see students who are spread so thin across many responsibilities in their lives and have expectations for themselves that are unrealistic. Those unrelenting standards can cause them to freeze, to plagiarize, to lose interest in education. Sometimes we need to adjust our standards for ourselves to get things done and accept that the learning is in the doing, not in the excelling. This ethos is in specifications grading as well as ungrading. These are teaching techniques I am interested in exploring further.
“I have definitely become more transparent with students about managing feelings of frustration and unrelenting standards. When students come to me with struggles I try to communicate acceptance and encourage them to be where they are. I know this sounds so basic, but sometimes you can see that no one has said that to them before. It’s OK if you didn’t like this topic. It’s OK if you didn’t get the reading. It’s OK if you hate this paper assignment. There will be other topics, other readings, other papers. We can talk about strategies for working through these challenges, but also IT IS OK. I think our students are not told that enough.”
Instructors aren’t sure about AI
Professors have been playing around with generative AI, but many remain undecided about whether and how these tools can be used effectively in their teaching. That’s according to a new survey on AI in college teaching conducted by Ithaka S+R, which yielded 2,654 responses, making it the largest such survey the research and consulting shop is aware of.
Among the findings:
- Professors are aware of AI: Two-thirds of respondents indicated they were at least somewhat familiar with the technology.
- But that doesn’t mean they know how to incorporate it: Just 18 percent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that they understand teaching applications of these tools, while 14 percent agreed or strongly agreed they were confident in their ability to use it in their teaching.
- Or are sure they should: Asked if AI would be good or bad for teaching in their fields, most professors weren’t sure. Nineteen percent agreed or strongly agreed that using AI would benefit teaching in their fields, while 25 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed.
- When professors have students use AI, it’s usually in their writing: Despite worries that AI fosters cheating on written assignments, the most commonly allowed or encouraged uses of the technology in classrooms was for writing tasks. The report notes this might simply be a result of how common writing is as an assignment format.
- Skepticism runs high in the humanities: Professors in these disciplines expressed the highest levels of doubt in AI’s potential benefits, and more than half of them didn’t permit its use in their courses.
In short, the firm’s report on its results says, the survey adds to the sense that the professoriate has “high levels of uncertainty and deep pockets of pessimism” about what AI will mean for learning.
The full report is available here.
For more on what professors are thinking about generative AI, read Beth’s recent story.
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.
—Beckie
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