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© 2025 Derek Bruff Consulting
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Intentional Teaching is a podcast aimed at educators to help them develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas in teaching. Hosted by educator and author Derek Bruff, the podcast features interviews with educators throughout higher ed.
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
64 Episodes
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Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. Christopher McVey is a master lecturer in the writing program at Boston University. Neeza Singh is a senior at BU majoring in data science. Last year, the two were partnered through the BU writing program's AI Affiliate Fellowship program, giving Neeza a role in Christopher's class supporting both Christopher and his students in responsible and effective use of generative AI in writing. On this episode, I talk with Chris and Ne...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. Kristine Johnson and Michael Rifenburg are the authors of the new book A Long View of Undergraduate Research: Alumni Perspectives on Inquiry, Belonging, and Vocation. They tracked down alumni who had participated in undergraduate research years earlier. They wanted to know what kinds of impacts these experiences had on students over the long term. What they heard from these alumni was fascinating. Kristine Johnson is an as...
1Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. We’re back with another Take It or Leave It panel. I invited three colleagues whose work and thinking I admire very much to come on the show and to compress their complex and nuanced thoughts on teaching and learning into artificial binaries! The panelists for this edition of Take It or Leave It are… Liz Norell, associate director of instructional support at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the Univer...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. Greg Loring-Albright is the designer of Keep the Faith, a storytelling game about a religion in transition and about how religious institutions change over time. Greg is also an assistant professor of game, media, and culture at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, where he teaches game design and game studies. Greg is also the co-designer of Bloc by Bloc: Uprising, a game about revolutionaries trying to liber...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. Back in August, I had the opportunity to hear a short presentation from Heidi Nobles, assistant professor in writing and rhetoric and director of Writing Across the Curriculum at the University of Virginia. The presentation was part of a two-day institute on teaching and generative AI, and Heidi leveraged her background as an editor to provide a different way of thinking about working with generative AI. Heidi pointed out that ...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. How can generative AI help students develop creative and critical thinking skills? Doing means treating AI as more than a super Google search. Ryan Wetzel is manager of creative learning initiatives for Teaching and Learning with Technology at Penn State. He and his team have developed a number of structured experiences for students (and their instructors) to increase their generative AI knowhow and to use AI to help them pur...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. Doctoral education in the United States works really well... when it works. Many doctoral students experience a significant mismatch between their career goals and the goals of their graduate programs, which is one reason completion rates for doctoral programs are so low. Why is doctoral education this broken? And what can higher education do about it? Today on the podcast, we hear some answers to those questions from Leonard...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. Today on the podcast, I’m excited to share an interview with Jane Southworth, professor and chair of geography at the University of Florida and co-chair of the committee that designed UF's "AI Across the Curriculum" program. That program was designed in 2021, two full years before the launch of ChatGPT! Jane shares about the role of artificial intelligence, particularly machine learning, in her landscape change research, and h...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. In my new job at the University of Virginia, I recently met Jingjing Li, Andersen Alumni associate professor of commerce. Jingjing teaches business intelligence at both the undergraduate and Master’s levels, and her research interests include artificial intelligence and data analytics. She has conducted some very thoughtful experiments in her courses in using generative artificial intelligence to teach about machine learning in...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. In 1986, Vanderbilt University established a new Center for Teaching, a unit that would help thousands of faculty and other instructors at Vanderbilt and across higher education develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas in teaching and learning. I’m Derek Bruff, and I worked at the CFT, as we called it, from 2005 to 2022, serving as its director for over a decade. When I left Vanderbilt, I wanted to find ...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, there are approximately 36.8 million adults in the United States under the age of 65 who have completed some college but left before obtaining a degree. How can universities meet the needs of these potential students, especially when the traditional approach to college didn’t work for them? Josh Steele is working to answer that question. Josh is the associate vi...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. I see a lot of scholarly work on active learning in the STEM fields, but much less about active learning in the humanities. So when I read an article about active learning in a large-enrollment Greek myths course at Cornell University, I wanted to learn more. In this episode, I talk with the authors of that paper: Todd Clary, senior lecturer in classics at Cornell University; Stephen Sansom, assistant professor of classics at ...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. This episode features a conversation with another faculty colleague from my time at the University of Mississippi. Becky Marchiel is an associate professor of history there, and she teaches a very interesting history survey course. In our conversation, Becky shares how she goes about teaching the habits of mind of historians, as well as her use of labor-based grading, unessays, and classroom response systems. Episode Res...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. Listeners in the United States might have noticed that there’s a presidential election coming up, and we know that can make for a challenging teaching environment. Fortunately, I have an interview to share that addresses just this moment. Bethany Morrison is a political scientist and an assistant director at the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching at the University of Michigan, and she has been working with colleagues ...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. This is a story about institutional change. The product of that change—a new framework for assessing teaching quality now in use at Appalachian State University—is important, but the process that led to that change is just as important because it's by analyzing change processes that academic leaders can affect change on their campuses. In this episode, I talk with Lindsay Masland, interim executive director at the teachi...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. Today on the podcast I talk with Mariel Pfeifer, assistant professor of biology. Mariel started at Ole Miss just about a year ago as part of a cluster hire of three STEM faculty who are on the tenure track at UM doing disciplinary based education research. I was excited to hear Mariel was coming to the university because I was already familiar with her work. Back in the spring of 2023, I lead a faculty learning community on the...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. Emily Affolter teaches in the PhD program in sustainability education at Prescott College in Arizona. Her students come from all different professions, some even already have PhDs. They’re in the program to pursue what Emily describes as “social and environmental justice as enacted in teaching, learning, and leading.” How do Emily and her colleagues meet these diverse students where they are and help them achieve their goals? T...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. Back in February 2024, as part of a slow read of my book Intentional Tech, I reached out to Paul Hanstedt, author of Creating Wicked Students: Designing Courses for a Complex World, to talk about the "rhetorical triangle" as a way for thinking intentionally about writing assignments and other types of assignments. We had a fantastic conversation that I shared on Patreon at the time, and I’m now very glad to share the interview ...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. During these late summer episodes of the podcast, I’m sharing some interviews I conducted in much cooler times. Back in February as part of a slow read of my book Intentional Tech, I talked with Justin Shaffer, teaching professor in chemical and biological engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. Chapter three of the book deals with using technology to make visible “thin slices” of student learning. I reached out to Justin,...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. A few episodes ago, I talked with Marc Watkins of the University of Mississippi about the many ways that generative AI is beginning to intersect with student learning. Marc noted that the newest versions of ChatGPT and similar tools are no longer just text generators, but multimodal in nature. That is, they can work with text and images and audio and in some cases video, too. To help us better understand what roles these ...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. This episode is all about games as learning experiences, with not one but two interviews about the 2023 cooperative board game Daybreak, a game about climate action. Daybreak puts players in the roles of world powers building the technologies and societies needed for a warming planet. The goal of the game is to cut carbon emissions before it gets too hot or too many communities are put into crisis. You’ll hear from Kerry ...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. This spring Holly Tilbrook presented as part of a panel titled “Neurodivergent Learners (and Earners!) in Postsecondary Education” at the UPCEA annual conference. Holly is a deputy director of the Academic Centres at the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Continuing Education. That institute offers a variety of postsecondary learning opportunities for students of all ages, from onsite weekend courses to online certificate p...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. Inspired by a recent episode of the American Birding Podcast, this episode of Intentional Teaching features a "Take It or Leave It" Panel. I spent some quality time with recent essays published online looking for arguments about teaching and learning in higher education that would be open to debate. For each of these hot takes, I asked our three panelists to take it (that is, agree with the hot take) or leave it (disagree), for...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. Worried about your students asking ChatGPT to write their essays for them? That's so 2023. Generative AI technology is changing fast, and now these tools have the potential to disrupt many different aspects of learning, from reading to notetaking to feedback. To help us explore those changes, this episode features a conversation with Marc Watkins, lecturer in writing and rhetoric and academic innovation fellow at the Uni...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. Jennifer M. Harrison and Vickey Rey Williams are the authors of the book A Guide to Curriculum Mapping: Creating a Collaborative, Transformative, and Learner-Centered Curriculum, published by Routledge in late 2023. Jennifer is the associate director for assessment at the Faculty Development Center at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (or UMBC), and Vickie is a senior lecturer in education at UMBC. In their book and ...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. With the advent of easy-to-use generative AI like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, many instructors have been looking into alternatives to traditional written essays, which are often easy to write with AI assistance. Last fall, I led a webinar on authentic assignments for GoReact, an educational technology company that provides video feedback tool that can be really useful for certain authentic assignments, particularly ones that...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. In a Learning Assistants program, students who did well in a course in the past are invited to come back to attend class and help current students learn the course material. I knew these programs could be effective from my time at Vanderbilt University. Last fall when I was at the POD Network conference, I just happened to sit at a table during a session next to Katie Johnson, associate professor of mathematics at Florida Gulf ...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a framework for improving learning for all learners based on the science of how humans learn. It involves providing learners with multiple means of engagement, representation, action, and expression. We’ve mentioned the framework on the show from time to time, and I thought it was time to dig in a little deeper. Naturally, I thought of inviting Thomas J. Tobin on the podcast. Tom hel...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. I talked recently with Pary Fassihi, senior lecturer in the College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program at Boston University, about her use of generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Adobe Firefly in her writing and research courses. I’ve known Pary a long time… She’s in my first book, Teaching with Classroom Response Systems, about using clickers in the language instruction courses she was teaching back around 2007. These days, ...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. We know that having students go to the free version of ChatGPT and ask it questions about course content can lead to some… inaccurate answers. But what if we could send students to an AI chatbot that was actually trained on our course content? Might that be a useful tool for learning? These are no longer hypothetical questions. Top Hat has rolled out a new AI tool called Ace, an AI chatbot that reads your own course materials a...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. David Hinson is the R. Hugh Daniel professor of architecture at Auburn University. David teaches a course in professional practice, a course that covers such things as running a business, marketing and communication, and professional ethics. When he realized that his lecture course needed an overhaul, he reached out to Auburn’s center for teaching and learning, the Biggio Center, for an instructional design consultation. Shawn...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. Students as Partners programs have been on my radar for years now. These are programs that pair faculty with thoughtful students who provide input and feedback into the faculty member’s teaching and course design. The programs seem to have incredible benefits to the student partners, to the faculty partners, and to the faculty partner’s students, but I never figured out a way to get one started while I was at Vanderbilt. Than...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. The Inclusive STEM Teaching Project is a free, online, six-week course “designed to advance the awareness, self-efficacy, and ability of faculty, postdocs, and doctoral students to cultivate inclusive STEM learning environments for all their students and to develop themselves as reflective, inclusive practitioners.” On the podcast today, I talk with two of the project team members. Tershia Pinder-Grover is director of the Cente...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. Tracie Addy, Derek Dube, and Khadijah Mitchell are authors of a new book called Enhancing Inclusive Instruction: Student Perspectives and Practical Approaches for Advancing Equity in Higher Education. It’s a sequel to their 2021 book, What Inclusive Instructors Do: Principles and Practices for Excellence in College Teaching, both from Routledge. In this episode, the three co-authors talk about the origins of the book seri...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. CourseSource is an open-access journal now entering its tenth year that has a variety of peer-reviewed teaching resources for biology, primarily detailed lesson plans tagged by course and topic for easy searching. I found out about CourseSource years ago, and I was amazed at the catalog of high-quality lesson plans and other teaching resources there. I keep running into biology faculty who don’t know about this great reso...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. Isis Artze-Vega is college provost and vice president for academic affairs at Valencia College, a public college in Florida with over 40,000 students. Isis is also the co-author of a book on relationship-rich education, which was the topic of her closing plenary session at the 2024 POD Network conference in November. That plenary was fantastic and before it was even over, I made plans to invite Isis on the podcast to talk about...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. In today’s episode, we dig into an important question for higher ed: How can we improve the evaluation of teaching? Researcher Corbin Campbell was quoted in a Chronicle article recently, saying, “Folks will say quality teaching is hard to measure. Quality research is hard to measure, but we do it.” I’m excited to bring a conversation with two academics who are contributing to efforts on their campuses to assess and evaluate tea...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. One of the themes I’ve been exploring here on the podcast is how teaching and learning in higher education has changed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Months of emergency remote teaching followed by more planned online and blended teaching has resulted in an acceleration of the role of online teaching in higher education. Safary Wa-Mbaleka is associate professor of leadership in higher education at Bethel University...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. On this episode, I talk with Greg Edwards, head of learning at Rize Education. Rize is a for-profit company that works with a consortium of over 135 colleges and universities to help them quickly launch new, career-oriented majors and other programs. The institutions partner with Rize, which can provide half a dozen core online courses for these majors, sourced from the consortium, that layer on existing courses at the home ins...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. In this episode, I talk with Anne Reed, director of micro-credentials at the University of Buffalo. Her office oversees over one hundred different micro-credentials that can be earned by University of Buffalo students. Micro-credentials at Buffalo are learning experiences that are larger than a course but smaller than a minor that students can use to differentiate themselves on the job market by making clear the workforce relev...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. Traditionally, college students who don’t have ACT or math placement exam scores high enough to place into college algebra are placed into intermediate algebra, a developmental math course that serves as a perquisite to college algebra for those students. However, this prerequisite approach has chronically low student success rates at many institutions. Enter the corequisite approach, in which these students take college algebr...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. I recently saw that Brielle Harbin received the 2023 Distinguished Teaching Award from the American Political Science Association. Brielle was a graduate teaching fellow at the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching from 2014 to 2016, which is how I know her. She was actively involved in our learning communities on the theme of teaching, difference, and power, work which resulted in two co-authored publications, including the award-win...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about “assignment makeovers” in this new age of AI, and a key part of rethinking assignments is exploring what we and our students can do with AI technologies in our fields. To help in those explorations, I reached out to Garret Westlake. He is the associate vice provost for innovation and executive director of the da Vinci Center for Innovation at Virginia Commonwealth University. I know Garre...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. On today’s episode, I talk with Eden Tanner about her experiment with mastery assessment. Eden is an assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Mississippi. Eden had been changing up her grading practices for a few semesters, and this spring she leaned into mastery assessment. The students in her 170-seat general chemistry course could retake a new version of each of the four exams in her course ba...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. In March 2023, educators Kelly A. Hogan and Viji Sathy wrote a piece for the Chronicle titled “How Can ‘Inclusion’ Be a Bad Word?” At the time, they both worked at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and they had been asked by North Carolina state lawmakers to provide data about DEI programming at their institution. In their op-ed, they wrote: “How does it feel to have your work in this kind of political spotlight?...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. Earlier this year, I had the good fortune to speak at a teaching conference hosted by Hofstra University in Long Island, New York. My favorite presenter at that conference was a sociology professor named Rosemary McGunnigle-Gonzales. Not only did she go on a beautiful rant about the deficiencies of our traditional classroom spaces, she also shared a fantastic story about taking her students outside to draw chalk timelines on th...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. In the summer of 2020, the Oregon State University Ecampus launched a research seminar that gathered educational researchers from around the world who were curious about the role of synchronous instructor presence in online courses. After all, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, most online education was asynchronous. How important were all those Zoom meetings for student learning, really? Today on the podcast, I welco...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. If you’ve taught in higher education for any length of time, you’ve probably had one or more students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, better known as ADHD, in your courses. You might not have known it, however, since some students with ADHD haven’t been diagnosed yet and some choose not to disclose it to their instructors. This type of neurodivergence can be a little invisible to instructors, which is why it’s im...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. Robert Talbert and David Clark are both mathematics faculty members at Grand Valley State University and authors of the forthcoming book Grading for Growth. They are both incredibly thoughtful and effective teachers who share their experiences, insights, and advice widely. Their new book based on dozens of case studies from instructors across the disciplines who are questioning some of the assumptions baked into higher educatio...
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage. Correspondence courses. Night classes. Extension schools. Distance education. Continuing education. Professional education. There’s always been a lot happening in higher education for working adults outside the traditional residential undergraduate experience. And for the last couple of decades, those areas of higher education have increasingly moved online. Three years ago, the COVID-19 pandemic greatly accelerated the growth ...
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