The Norton Learning Blog has recently featured several posts that offer suggestions for generating greater classroom success by integrating ChatGPT and similar machine-learning-applications. (I find the latter a more accurate—and less anthropomorphizing—term than AI.) However, this particular post goes out to all who—for pedagogical, or numerous other reasons—search for the grail of LLM-free spaces.
Category: In the Classroom
Storying the Classroom: Why ELA Is the Perfect Place for Ethnic Studies
Since the fall of 2021, I’ve taught a class called English 12 Ethnic Cultures, a course designed specifically to incorporate Ethnic Studies principles into English Language Arts. After doing this work for some time, I am convinced that the Language Arts classroom is a perfect place for this kind of work. English teachers are natural storytellers, and our classrooms can be the place where students’ own stories emerge.
My First Year Teaching with a Global Approach: A Few Practical Tips
In Fall 2024, I moved to a new city, started a new job, and began to teach a new set of introductory art history courses. I had to become familiar with a large amount of content fairly quickly, and figure out how much to include and what to cut out. I used Thames & Hudson’s The History of Art: A Global View textbook and found many of its features to be helpful time savers in transitioning to teaching with a global approach.
The Best of Both Worlds: Using Print and Digital Tools in your AP® Literature Course
As an older Millennial teacher, I find that I am stuck between two worlds: the one I was born in and the one in which I grew up. The one I was born in was analog: paper, pencils and highlighters, and books. The one I grew up in—although it was ever-evolving—was decidedly not analog. It was keyboards, screens, and software updates. Like me, students are caught between these two worlds.
Making More Space for Student Attitudes about AI
Generative AI is everywhere, even in places we’d least expect it to be. Read how English professor, Traynor Hansen, served himself a taste of his own medicine to better teach his students new strategies of academic inquiry against a backdrop of AI.
Bringing a Gift to the AI Party: Teaching Ethical AI Use in First-Year Composition
What role can AI play in your classroom? Instructor and author Max Everhart emphasizes the importance of bringing meaningful work to the table when working with AI. Learn how to AI can support your students while honoring their own voice and critical thinking.
Using Courseware to Gain Meaningful Insight and Inform Teaching and Learning
I have long observed in my teaching practice that the most memorable learning tends to occur after students are able to pinpoint gaps in their own knowledge or understanding of course material. Put another way: failure is an effective teacher. However, many college-level courses are delivered in a mode of instruction traditional to higher education: lectures followed by summative assessments, such as term papers or exams. The feedback students receive is delivered and received not as an opportunity for reflection or further inquiry but as a final, definitive grade.
Engaging with Technology: My Experience as a Blind Graduate Instructor
Kendal Lyssy is a doctoral candidate studying communication at the University of Missouri. Her research program explores family difference through the telling of narratives. She studies how parents tell their children narratives about such topics as disability, adoption, and religion.
What It Takes to Make Scientific Discoveries Happen
Dr. Elisabeth Adkins Marnik, PhD, is the Science Education & Outreach Director at MDI Biological Laboratory and the Chief Scientific Officer of Those Nerdy Girls.
The Importance of Failing Forward in Science and Beyond
When I asked a group of college instructors how their students responded to setbacks in their courses, the responses were familiar: increasing disengagement and absence, avoidance of assignments, cheating, and even anger. In all these cases, students are seeing mistakes/errors as off-ramps taking them away from the successful completion of a course of study. One of the most meaningful things an instructor can do is to flip that narrative, helping students see their mistakes/errors as on-ramps to more powerful and lasting learning.