I want to share an approach by Ken McKay, a professor of management sciences at the University of Waterloo, in Canada. McKay had responded to my recent story, “Professors Ask: Are We Just Grading Robots?”
What stood out to me in his email is that McKay, who is also his department’s teaching and undergraduate-student liaison officer, has a clear guiding philosophy and a detailed and transparent teaching strategy. He also started adjusting his teaching in response to technological advances long before generative AI appeared on the scene. For one, all of his assignments and assessments are open book and open note, since he figured students were going to use tech no matter what.
“I started embracing how students were studying and doing their work with tech in 2015, recognizing the impact of the web. That is when I went ‘open everything’ and implemented methods for figuring out the students’ own thinking and knowledge, not what they could find from other sources. This is what instructors are now trying to deal with, with the impact of gen AI.”
“I often get comments from students: ‘My head hurts in your class,’” he continues. “Gen AI is going to force instructors to go into this zone. To separate what the students can do with the tech versus what they can do themselves, learn how to think for themselves and not just use the tech to do the thinking for them.”
Here’s McKay’s multistep process, which he has used in various courses, including one called “Management Engineering Concepts.” Management engineering, he notes, focuses on problem solving, and this first-year course helps students build the skills needed to define a problem, know what questions to ask, and what to do next. In that sense, McKay says, his methods could be adapted to almost any discipline in which the main objective is to develop critical-thinking skills.
- He has students write during the first class so he has a baseline understanding of their writing and thinking styles.
- He talks to students about how generative AI tools work, including when they hallucinate, make other errors, and show bias. Then he has them create prompts and discuss the results in a think-pair-share format.
- His teaching assistant completes the weekly pre-class assessment with different generative AI tools. Not only do students know he’s doing this, but McKay shares the TA’s various prompts and responses. The TA then works with students to help design better prompts.
- He asks students to incorporate his lecture material and class discussions into their assessments. Often students are asked to include elements of their weekly reflections or prior submissions as well. McKay also uses case studies in his teaching, which he only presents in class so they do not become part of any AI-training set.
- He avoids multiple-choice, brief response, and fill-in-the-blank tests. Rather, students’ answers are expected to be analytical and discussion-based. If students do use a lot of AI, they are asked to provide the prompts they use.
So far, McKay writes, this approach has been successful. But, he notes, it takes work. The instructor can’t use questions and prompts supplied from a textbook or repeat the same questions year after year. Avoiding formulaic assessment methods is key, he says. “The assessments do not need to be big or take a lot of work. It is easy to craft a paragraph and simply ask the students ‘So?’ or ‘Discuss’ — without specific leading questions. If you give rubrics and leading questions in advance, you will get the robotic responses (with or without gen AI).”
He notes, too, that students have to spend time rewriting and restructuring prompts to get the best possible outcomes using AI. That’s all part of the process of developing critical-thinking skills.
Finally, he argues that colleges need to provide “full courses” to instructors on AI, not just discussions and workshops. “I think until people (and institutions) invest in the instructors’ skill sets, most instructors will come up with ideas like, ‘avoid it,’ ‘outlaw it,’ ‘add AI detectors’ — these are all symptoms; they are not the problem.”
Could an approach like this work in the courses you are teaching? Or, if you’ve come up with a way to navigate AI usage in your classrooms that you’d like to share, write to me at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com and your example may appear in a future newsletter
Research on collaborative teaching
A recent study sheds light on student perceptions on three different forms of teaching: solo teaching, in which just one faculty member runs a course; coordinated teaching, in which two faculty members run separate sections of the same course but work closely together to include common lesson plans; and sequential teaching, in which one faculty member teaches a portion of a course and then hands responsibilities to another faculty member halfway in.
After reviewing course evaluations, the authors concluded that students have a clear preference “for consistent instructor presence,” meaning that they prefer the first two options over the third, writes Abbas Attarwala, one of the authors and an associate professor of computer science at California State University at Chico, in an email. Specifically, students’ marks were lower on grading fairness and encouragement of class participation when it came to sequential teaching. “These results could provide valuable insights for educators deliberating the most effective teaching strategies in their courses.”
The study was conducted within a third-year programming-language course at Boston University. I asked Attarwala how instructors might apply the lessons from the study to their own courses, especially if they are required to teach sequentially. He suggested that close collaboration before the handoff, to include observing each other’s teaching, could help mitigate any potential dissatisfaction among students.
Have you collaborated on teaching a course? If so, what has worked well — and what hasn’t — for you, your co-instructor, and your students when it comes to maintaining consistency in teaching, assessment, and course expectations? Write to me at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.
ICYMI
- In Beckie’s latest story, she writes about why a caring professor walked away from his dream job.
- Want to support your students’ mental health without burning out? In this Chronicle Advice piece Katie Rose Guest Pryal offers some ideas.
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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