Teaching and Learning

How Instructors Create Breathing Room in Their Courses (Beckie Supiano, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 25, 2025): Provides examples from a number of faculty as to how they build some extra space into their courses to better weather unexpected issues and provide students, and themselves, a break.

Course Correction (Nicolaus Mills, Inside Higher Ed, September 24, 2025): Asking students to interview faculty before they sign up for classes is a practice more colleges should try.

Going Old-School: Professors Use Print Books to Teach AI (Ashley Mowreader, Inside Higher Ed, September 24, 2025): Faculty members help students practice close reading and analysis with a physical book, building life skills and social connection.

AI Is Making the College Experience Lonelier (Khafiz Kerimov and Nicholas Bellinson, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 22, 2025): Does ChatGPT’s ‘study mode’ mean students will spend less time talking with their peers?

How One Professor Demystifies Writing (Beckie Supiano, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 19, 2025): It helps to express interest in hearing what students have to say.

Is It Time to Overhaul Your Course? (Beth McMurtrie, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 18, 2025): Because students are skimming or skipping the reading, or not doing assigned problem sets, professors find they can’t advance to the next level of the course as quickly as they normally would. So what are some options?

The Study Habits of Tomorrow’s Freshmen (Scott Carlson, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 18, 2025): Carlson reviews Jenny Ander and Rebecca Winthrop’s The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better (Penguin Random House).

Learning about Grades from an Emerging Failure (Bonni Stachowiak, Teaching in Higher Ed, September 18, 2025): 48-minute podcast with Emily Pitts Donahoe considering alternative grading systems.

How to Improve Student Comprehension of Difficult Texts (John Orlando, The Teaching Professor, August 18, 2025): Concrete steps to take to help your students navigate complex readings.

Extra Credit Reading

The Richness of Podcasting in Higher Education (Bonni Stachowiak, Teaching in Higher Ed, September 25, 2025): 48-minute podcast on using podcasting in higher ed.

Sometimes We Resist AI for Good Reasons (Kevin Gannon, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 24, 2025): Why higher ed needs to listen to the contrarians in setting policies on using tools like ChatGPT in faculty work.

How to Think, Not What to Think (Sian Leah Beilock, The Atlantic, September 19, 2025): College is not just about transmitting knowledge—it’s also about learning and practicing the skills that connect us to one another.

How the Education Dept. Wants to Advance ‘Patriotic Education’ (Kathryn Palmer, Inside Higher Ed, September 19, 2025): Professional historians say the department’s plan is part of the Trump administration’s broader attempt to create an Orwellian “truth ministry” and omit the more troubling aspects of the nation’s past.

American Higher Ed Never Figured Out Its Purpose (Jake Lundberg, The Atlantic, September 18, 2025): The centuries-long debate over who and what college is for has yet to be resolved.

Americans Tend to View International Students Positively, Though Some Support Limitations (William Miner, Sneha Gubbala, and Laura Silver, Pew Research, September 17, 2025): Nearly 80 percent of respondents in a Pew Research Center survey agreed that it’s good for colleges to admit foreign students, a view that cuts across party lines.

Is College Worth It? (Art & Science Group, September 2025): A new survey finds, among other things, that 8 in 10 of those students who didn’t plan to enroll but seriously considered it thought college was worth it, and 94 percent of those who planned to attend thought college would be worthwhile.

On the Bookshelf

Carlo Rotella, What Can I Get Out of This? Teaching and Learning in a Classroom Full of Skeptics (University of California). Rotella provides an account of teaching a required core-literature course at Boston College in the spring of 2020. In One Course’s Small Victories (Chronicle of Higher Education, September 25, 2025), Scott Carlson discusses the book in an interview with the author.

CTL Events

Are your students reading…or just turning the pages?  Could a few small changes shift how students approach reading? 

Reading requires students to integrate what they are reading with prior knowledge. One of the biggest problems that students face is that they don’t often bring the right strategies to a reading situation. Rather, they attempt to read a text the same way they read a novel.  We hope you will join us for a workshop: Getting Students to Read with Dr. Chris Hakala, (Springfield College), September 29, 2025 at Noon.

In this workshop, we will talk about what it takes to learn from text:  what reading strategies might be helpful to ensure that students have a better understanding, and better motivation, to learn from text.  Some strategies include pre-reading, pre-lecturing, goal-oriented reading, etc.

Dr. Chris Hakala is the Director for the Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship at Springfield College, where he is also Professor of Psychology. His academic work in psychology has focused on psycholinguistics, and specifically, reading comprehension.

In the workshop, Chris will:

·       Introduce the concept of reading from the cognitive science perspective

·       Show the differences in processing that is required to learn from text versus narrative

·       Do a demonstration to show what it’s like for students to try to read without prior knowledge

·       Give examples, and demonstrations, of how to improve the ability to read this kind of text

Register HERE for this virtual event on Monday, September 29th at Noon EDT (confirm time zone here).  A link will be sent the day before.  The session will be recorded.

Did someone forward this email to you?  Subscribe here

Have a short article or some news related to teaching and learning at your institution that you’d like to share with colleagues? Send your contribution along to us.GLCA/GLAA Consortium for Teaching and Learning
Co-Directors:

   Lew Ludwig ([email protected])
Colleen Monahan Smith ([email protected])