In the News

CETL in the News – November Round-up

· Dec 1, 2023 ·

Want to listen to CETL staff talk about teaching and learning topics they’re passionate about? This November, our Josh Eyler and Liz Norell were guests on four different higher education podcasts!

Liz Norell, associate director of instructional support, appeared on the long-running Tea for Teaching podcast, hosted by John Kane and Rebecca Mushtare, in episode 313, “Supporting Neurodiverse Students and Faculty.” You may recall Liz facilitated two workshops on teaching neurodivergent students this fall at CETL, and the resources she shared from those workshops have gotten some attention. After guesting on Tea for Teaching, Liz appeared on the Student Success Podcast hosted by Al Solano in an episode titled “Supporting Neurodivergent College Students.” We’re glad to have Liz’s expertise on this topic at CETL, and we’re glad she’s sharing her expertise with the wider teaching community!

Meanwhile, CETL’s director Josh Eyler made the podcast rounds, too, in advance of his forthcoming book on grades and grading called Scarlet Letters. First he appeared on the Centering Centers podcast from the POD Network, our professional association, in an episode titled “Scarlet Letters & Storytelling” where he talked with host Lindsay Doukopoulos about grades, grading, and his writing process. Then he was a guest on the Dead Ideas on Teaching and Learning podcast hosted by Catherine Ross in the episode with the lively title “Ready to Find Out What Research Tells Us about Grading and Grade Inflation? Buckle Up!” Josh has a lot of very strong (and research-backed) opinions about the notion of grade inflation!

In the land of the written word, Liz authored a guest post for John Warner’s Inside Higher Ed blog in which she reflected about the role that writing plays in how the CETL team functions. In her post titled “Writing as a Tool for Teamwork,” she conjectures that the kind of writing our staff members do, that is, reflective writing about our work, helps to foster a kind of psychological safety among the CETL staff. In contrast to the general academic culture that leans toward critique, Liz writes that at CETL, “We take risks, we cook up unconventional ideas, and we trust one another to give honest and supportive feedback.”

One outlet for CETL staff writing is Emily Donahoe’s Substack newsletter Unmaking the Grade. Emily is CETL’s other associate director of instructional support, and she describes her newsletter this way: “A blog and reflective journal chronicling one educator’s experiences with ungrading and other progressive teaching practices.” That description was cited by James Lang in his Chronicle of Higher Education piece titled “Adventures in Substack,” where he offers advice for academics interested in starting their own newsletters. Emily’s newsletter made quite a splash this summer when she launched it, and it continues to be an example of the reflective writing that Liz praises in her guest post.

CETL in the News – October 2023 Roundup

· Nov 1, 2023 ·

CETL’s fearless director Josh Eyler shared the news last week that his talk has been selected for the SXSW EDU Conference in Austin, Texas, in March 2024. SXSW (“South by Southwest”) EDU is part of the SXSW family of conferences, and it hosts thousands of stakeholders from all parts of education for a series of talks and workshops aimed at innovation and positive change in education. Josh’s talk, “Scarlet Letters: Fixing the Problem of Grades,” is based on his forthcoming book from Johns Hopkins University Press. Here’s his abstract:

Getting a good grade is supposed to be a sign of excellence, but research shows that grades often have very negative consequences. Grades interfere with motivation and perpetuate the idea that school is a place for competition rather than discovery. Even worse, grades are affecting our children’s wellbeing. Specifically, the stress, anxiety, and pressure felt by students about grades are directly linked to the widely reported mental health crisis among children, teens, and young adults. In this session, we will zero in on the problem of grades and discuss ways that we might yet fix it.

We are super excited for Josh and this giant platform for his work on grades and grading!

Hanna Lee is CETL’s operations coordinator. Hanna is also a librarian, having worked in libraries and educational institutions from Mississippi to Maryland to Mozambique. Hanna shared with the CETL team recently that with her librarian hat on, she is chairing the 2025 award selection committee for the Caldecott Medal. Yes, that Caldecott Medal! You’ve probably seen the gold Caldecott seal on a picture book or two. The Caldecott Medal is given by the American Library Association to the artist of the most distinguished American picture book for children. Hanna will soon have stacks of picture books in her office as she and the committee review books published in 2024 for the 2025 award. Congrats to Hanna for this distinctive service to her field!

Earlier this month, Marc Watkins, academic innovation fellow with AIG and lecturer in writing and rhetoric, was interviewed on the fantastic Tea for Teaching podcast. Marc appears on Episode 311, “Upskilling in AI,” where he talks about the importance of higher education faculty learning about generative AI and its intersections with teaching and learning. Marc also discusses the rapidly changing landscape of generative AI, which includes far more than just ChatGPT. You can listen to Marc’s interview here, or search “Tea for Teaching” in your podcast app. And for more from Marc, please note that he’s speaking at an AIG workshop, “Beyond ChatGPT: New Tools to Augment Your Research,” on November 8th at 11am on Zoom. See our events page for details and registration.

Closer to home, both Bob Cummings, executive director of academic innovation, and Derek Bruff, CETL visiting associate director, were interviewed by the Daily Mississippian about artificial intelligence. Bob was interviewed by student Anna Grace Likes for a piece called “UM’s AI task force adapts alongside constant technological advances,” while Derek was interviewed by student Jordan Isbell for “Professors reckon with artificial intelligence.” Marc Watkins is quoted in that article about the AI task force, too. CETL staff continue to be at the forefront of higher education’s response to generative AI.

CETL in the News – September 2023 Roundup

· Oct 1, 2023 ·

In a recent Inside Higher Ed blog post, John Warner writes that teaching is a wicked problem, that is, a situation where the nature of the problem and the tools for solving it are constantly changing. (This is “wicked” in the sense of tricky, not evil!) Warner argues that tackling this wicked problem requires a different kind of educational research than what is typically valued in higher ed: qualitative research. “In short,” Warner writes, “we gotta go qualitative over quantitative in a big way. As a wicked problem, creating valid quantitative studies related to instruction often requires either ignoring or sanding away many of the complexities that inevitably exist in teaching.”

As an example of the kind of qualitative research he’s calling for, John Warner cites Unmaking the Grade, the newsletter written by Emily Donahoe, CETL associate director of instructional support. Emily has been using this platform to chronicle her experiments with ungrading in her courses. Warner appreciates the nuance Emily brings to her newsletter: “Read entry to entry, the experiment takes on a narrative form, which not only makes for more compelling reading but also provides a lens for Donahoe to reflect on what’s happening in her class. We see the layers of complexity at play in the teaching experiment.”

If you haven’t been reading Emily’s newsletter, you can read all of her posts at Unmaking the Grade.

Meanwhile, CETL visiting associate director Derek Bruff continues to make the rounds on podcasts talking about generative AI and its impact on teaching and learning this fall. His latest appearance is on the Limed: Teaching with a Twist podcast from Elon University’s Center for Engaged Learning. Host Matt Wittstein interviewed Elon strategic communications professor Jessica Gisclair about her goals for teaching with and about AI this fall, then talked with a panel of students and faculty, including Derek, about possible approaches for meeting those goals. You can listen to the entire conversation here, or search for “Limed: Teaching with a Twist” in your favorite podcast app.

CETL in the News – August 2023 Roundup

· Sep 1, 2023 ·

Generative AI technologies like ChatGPT and Midjourney are posing new challenges (and maybe opportunities) for higher education this fall. The University of Mississippi is ahead of that curve thanks to pre-ChatGPT explorations of AI technologies by faculty in Writing & Rhetoric and elsewhere. As a result, CETL staff have useful things to say about teaching with and without AI, and that’s the focus of this month’s CETL news roundup.

Just this week, Robert Cummings, executive director of academic innovation, was interviewed by Biloxi, Mississippi, television station WLOX about AI’s impact on higher education this fall. You can watch his four-minute interview here.

Back in July, CETL visiting associate director Derek Bruff was interviewed about teaching and AI, as well. Derek was featured in Jeff Young’s EdSurge piece “Instructors Rush to Do ‘Assignment Makeovers’ to Respond to ChatGPT” about ways faculty are updating assignments for the current AI landscape. Derek was also interviewed by Lauren Coffee for her Inside Higher Ed report “Professors Craft Courses on ChatGPT with ChatGPT,” which looked at new courses on the books about generative AI this fall.

More recently, Derek appeared on the popular Teaching in Higher Ed podcast hosted by Bonni Stachowiak in Episode 481, “Assignment Makeovers in the AI Age.” Bonni has been producing her podcast weekly for almost ten years, and it’s a fantastic resource for the higher education community. If you’d like to listen to it with colleagues, you might try CETL’s new Podcasts & Puzzles get-togethers!

CETL’s Donahoe featured in the Chronicle’s Teaching newsletter

· Jul 26, 2023 ·

by Liz Norell, associate director of instructional support

In late June, the Chronicle of Higher Education’s newsletter on teaching featured Emily Donahoe, associate director of instructional support at CETL, and her experiments with alternative assessment.

In her spring first-year writing course, taught in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric, Emily kept a weekly journal to reflect on her ungrading experiments. She writes that she was inspired to do so by Robert Talbert’s December 2022 blog post challenging other faculty members exploring ungrading methods to do just this.

Talbert argued that so much of the work of retooling assessment practices happens in the dark, which prevents the larger faculty community from benefitting from the quotidian details that the work of teaching and assessing requires. “You have more than enough material for a weekly update. Keep it short, unpolished, relatively unfiltered, and real. That’s what the rest of the world is all waiting for,” Talbert wrote.

To this challenge, Emily said, “I’m in!”

Each week this spring, Emily wrote a journal entry about her course and how she and her students were experiencing her ungrading practices. Emily shared with her students that she would be blogging about the course. To allay any concerns they might have around real-time blog posts about their class meetings, though, she thought it was important to embargo her thoughts until the class ended.

That means the rest of us are watching a semester-long course unfold four months delayed on Emily’s Substack, Unmaking the Grade. By no means, though, does this diminish the gripping nature of Emily’s students’ experiences.

What’s perhaps most refreshing—and most unusual in academia—is Emily’s willingness to be transparent about her own odyssey of reactions and emotions throughout the process. For example, in week four the students co-created assessment rubrics for the two options she’d given them for their first writing assignment. The iterative class dialogue yielded two rubrics that Emily distilled from class discussions. Emily confesses: “I’m going to be totally, completely honest with y’all right out here on Al Gore’s internet: I hate these things.” She explains that it’s not the idea of a rubric that bothers her:

So, really, we’re back to the tension that gives rise to my ambivalence about rubrics: how can we create clear, specific, and measurable assessment criteria without hampering student creativity, independence, and learning? Still haven’t hit on an approach to this problem that satisfies me.

As I write this, Emily’s series is hitting its midterm stride. Her July 14 post reflects on her experiences so far while her students enjoy their spring breaks. Many of us who have experimented with alternative assessment will find her poignant reflection resonant:

The first is simply a realization about how ungrading is benefiting my students beyond their actual learning. I was thinking about the kinds of grading policies I used in previous writing courses and how my current students would have fared in those courses. It struck me that several of my students, who I know to be capable of doing good work, would have already flunked out of the courses I taught pre-pandemic—some because of absences or late work and some due to the fact that they didn’t fully understand the major assignment guidelines on their first attempt.

…

The notion that struggling students now have a better chance of passing my class is, in many ways, heartening. But it also really bums me out to think about all the students who have lost points, letter grades, or entire semesters of their lives to absences, late work, and a failure to understand assignment requirements. Students who are, in many cases, average or even strong writers! Who can do the work! But who missed an opportunity because of a failure to comply with one course policy or another.

Emily’s reflections are gaining traction in the ungrading community—thanks, in part, to the Chronicle’s newsletter. For instance, her blog got an enthusiastic recommendation from a colleague at the College of DuPage on the Ungrading Hub, a Discord community of alternative assessment-curious faculty hosted by David Buck, professor of English at Howard Community College in Maryland.

Emily credits the strong and supportive teaching culture in the Writing & Rhetoric department for the work she did during the spring semester. Several instructors in the department have used different assessment methods beyond traditional grading systems. The department’s openness to innovation is what Emily says gave her the runway to experiment with, and publicly speak about, alternative grading practices in her own classroom.

For those interested in exploring alternative assessments or other innovations in their UM classes, we invite you to reach out to us to discover how CETL can support your work.