The quarter has ended and I’ve had a chance to reflect on what happened since I last reported on teaching AI in my classroom. It got weird at the end of the quarter. Some teachers would be alarmed. I’m actually encouraged and comforted. As I reported before, I taught lessons in which my students explicitlyContinue reading “Teaching and Assignment Design In The Age of ChatGPT Part 3: Coda”
Tag Archives: teaching
Framing Matters: Teaching and Assignment Design In The Age of ChatGPT Part 2
In my last post, I talked about how I explored what ChatGPT could and could not do with the assignments I give my students. Now I want to talk about another little “experiment” I did with my students themselves that showed so much about how we receive AI and what we perceive as good writing.Continue reading “Framing Matters: Teaching and Assignment Design In The Age of ChatGPT Part 2”
Limits on AI: Teaching and Assignment Design In The Age of ChatGPT Part 1
I recently did a sort of impromptu experiment with my three sections of English 101 that revealed quite a bit about how framing—not to mention knowing authorship—affects how our students perceive a text. It may, in fact, illustrate why it matters if AI-generated text is labeled as AI-generated. In any case, it was a reallyContinue reading “Limits on AI: Teaching and Assignment Design In The Age of ChatGPT Part 1”
One Lesson Plan, Two Results
Stay tuned for the end-of-term life update below the main content! Conflicting Lesson Results One of the most frustrating things about teaching is just how unpredictable a lesson plan can be. If you’ve been teaching the same content to different groups of students for any length of time, you’ve probably had this experience: You carefullyContinue reading “One Lesson Plan, Two Results”
Reading for Saturation
When we teach college writing, we’re generally asking students to write in genres that they may have never read. Why, then, do we expect them to be able to write these successfully? Genres are, as I have often observed, slippery things and can’t really be completely understood through explicit instruction. Sure, scholars can and oftenContinue reading “Reading for Saturation”
Hinges and Stitches: Thinking About Transitions in Writing
I was winging it in the classroom the other day, analyzing some paragraphs in a response to a very important landmark physics paper and how they transition, and I hit on an image that I think is going to be useful for a long time: hinges and stitches. My class uses Graff and Birkenstein’s excellentContinue reading “Hinges and Stitches: Thinking About Transitions in Writing”
Report On Self-Assessment Grading
If you’ll recall, this semester for my New Semester’s Resolution, I was trying a more collaborative approach to grading that requires students to set goals by modifying my provided rubric and then evaluate their own work according to that rubric, so that they self-grade their assignments. At this point, students have submitted their first self-evaluationContinue reading “Report On Self-Assessment Grading”
Perceiving Academic Journals
I started college in 2005, just at the cusp of learning management systems; things like Blackboard were in use, but most courses still had physical syllabi passed out on day one, and most assignments were still printed out on paper and handed in physically. In the same way, online journals were increasingly popular at theContinue reading “Perceiving Academic Journals”
Flexible Deadlines Are Awesome
Since I started experimenting with penalty-free flexible deadlines, which was shortly before the pandemic (good timing on that one!), the regular question I’ve gotten was how to avoid the work piling up when students inevitably turn in lots of late work. The answer is actually that the flexible deadlines prevent grading from piling up ratherContinue reading “Flexible Deadlines Are Awesome”
Rethinking How We Teach Paraphrasing
When you teach a course on writing research, of course you do a lot of work with source handling. I suspect that most of us were taught summary, paraphrase, and quotation as a set, and many of us were given exercises that drilled us to do each of these things with a source on command.Continue reading “Rethinking How We Teach Paraphrasing”
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