Teaching Strategies

This semester began with civic unrest, requiring many instructors and students to pivot quickly to HyFlex teaching and learning environments. HyFlex—also referred to as “hybrid,” and the rather elaborate “synchronous learning in distributed environments (SLIDE)”—is when onsite and remote modes of participation occur simultaneously in a class.

Recently, many of us have seen Gemini integrations pop up on University Google platforms. Tech companies rolling out consequential changes to GenAI tools, access, and capabilities seem to pay little attention to the semester calendar or our existing assignments, assessments, and course policies. These integrations vastly reduce the friction of using GenAI tools, making it easier and more automatic for writers to use GenAIs.

Students are often eager for feedback on their writing. While faculty comments on assignments are crucial, with limited time, faculty can’t always give as much support as students might like, particularly before assignment deadlines. Students can also find it nerve-wracking to approach faculty for help.

The window between fall and spring semesters is an ideal time to reflect on our work and brainstorm new teaching strategies. After finalizing fall grades and taking time to rest and recharge, we have just a few short weeks to prepare for spring. In this month’s blog post, we recommend strategies for productive reflection and revision that will make your midwinter less bleak.

At the beginning of the semester, instructors often notice that when they introduce major assignments, students note the due date in their planners and add the appropriate length and format for their documents. Students understand that instructors and graders appreciate well-formatted, correctly scoped documents and value the concrete expectations that such guidelines provide. The differences between a two-page white paper and a 23-page research report are dramatic, after all.

If your writing has been subjected to academic peer review, you’ve likely experienced the scourge that is “Reviewer 2”: a reviewer who is uncharitable and nitpicky, cluttering one’s paper with irrelevant, unhelpful, or sanctimonious nastygrams concerned more with asserting their own expertise than helping strengthen your writing.

Semester to semester, many of us copy-paste ever-growing lists of policies and resource recommendations for our syllabi. When we’re down to the wire the Friday before classes start, it can be tempting to recycle old materials after a quick skim, rather than closely rereading and analyzing our choices. But of course, syllabi set the stage in important ways for the work your students will do in your course. Crafting a syllabus is an excellent time to assess the scaffolding and support you provide to students in your course.

The Provost’s Office and the Senate Committee on Educational Policy at the University of Minnesota provided strong early guidance for instructors on student use of ChatGPT and other GenAI technologies in classrooms (Embrace, allow, and prohibit). Since the publication of those original policies, the landscape of GenAI tools and the quality of GenAI outputs has changed dramatically.

Welcome to the last two weeks of the semester! Amid the rush of completing and assessing final projects and navigating end-of-term challenges, we invite students and instructors to pause and reflect on positive writing experiences—perhaps even milestones—from this semester. Doing so can provide a much-needed dose of motivation and gratitude during these final days of shortened light, dropping temperatures, and fervid intellectual labor. Looking back can also inspire us as we begin to look ahead to the Spring semester: “Blue skies, nothing but blue skies from now on….”

Our first blog posts of the semester have suggested how we can effectively engage students by providing multiple pathways and trailheads to writing in course documents and how different