Dead Ideas in Teaching and Learning – Details, episodes & analysis

Welcome to Season 9 of Dead Ideas in Teaching and Learning! In this season, with our new host Columbia CTL Executive Director Amanda Irvin, we are exploring the dead idea that the world “outside” of the classroom doesn’t or shouldn’t influence the world “inside” the classroom—that students are exclusively intellectual beings when they step across the threshold (physical or virtual) of the classroom space. 

In our first episode we speak with guest Cate Denial, the Bright Distinguished Professor of American History and Director of the Bright Institute at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, and author of the book A Pedagogy of Kindness (2024). Cate’s new book argues for the strength and capacity instructors and students gain when they meet each other as whole human beings. Dr. Denial discusses her book and shares suggestions for instructors everywhere on how to implement a pedagogy of kindness in their own classrooms. 

Resource: A Pedagogy of Kindness (2024) by Cate Denial  

In today’s episode, we say a bittersweet goodbye to our wonderful podcast host, Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) Executive Director Catherine Ross, as she will be retiring from Columbia in June. Catherine sits down with Amanda Irvin, Senior Director of Faculty Programs and Services here at the Columbia CTL, who will be taking the helm as our next podcast host, starting in the fall 2024 season. Catherine and Amanda reflect on their “favorite” dead ideas and episodes, as well as dead ideas that have yet to be discussed, and how this podcast has impacted our Center’s work internally. 

We’d like to thank Catherine for her passion and leadership as our podcast host over the past four years, and for her unfailing dedication to changing higher education teaching!

This will be the last episode of Season 8 of Dead Ideas in Teaching and Learning. We will be back in fall 2024 with Season 9. Thank you for listening! 

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, a question was posed by journalist Beth McMurtrie as to whether or not institutions of higher education truly value teaching, and she offered a list of “red flags” that signal the undervaluing of teaching. In response, Michelle Miller, Professor of Psychological Sciences and President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University, wrote a post in her “R3 Newsletter,” adding to McMurtrie’s list of red flags and offering her own. In this podcast episode, Dr. Miller discusses her list, which can be reverse engineered to serve as a helpful starting point for those who want to change the institutional culture around teaching at their university. 

Resources

• “Teaching: Does higher education value good teaching?” (July 6, 2023) by Beth McMurtrie in The Chronicle of Higher Education 
• “Bonus post: Is your IHE truly teaching-focused?” (July 11, 2023) by Michelle Miller in R3 Newsletter
• Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology (2014) by Michelle Miller
• Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World (2022) by Michelle Miller

Over the past few months, Cynthia Alby, Professor of Teacher Education at Georgia College, has been focused on developing practical solutions in teaching and learning in response to the sudden emergence of generative AI. Through this work, she has realized that AI has, in one fell swoop, rendered an entire constellation of dead ideas in teaching and learning officially obsolete. The ideas that she has advocated for throughout her career, and in the book she co-authored, Learning That Matters: A Field Guide to Course Design for Transformative Education (2020), are becoming increasingly essential, and she believes that change is imminent. In this episode, Dr. Alby discusses why she believes AI will be the catalyst for the extinction of four big dead ideas in teaching and learning and how that will happen. 

Resources

•  Learning That Matters: A Field Guide to Course Design for Transformative Education (2020) by Cynthia Alby, Karynne Kleine, Julia Metzker, and Caralyn Zehnder
• Teaching and Learning in the Age of AI: Considerations, Resources, and Opportunities from the Columbia CTL

Have Centers for Teaching and Learning (CTLs) actually created change in higher education teaching? Have they been able to demonstrate this change? How have their strategies evolved and how are they connecting with institutional priorities for larger scale changes? Today we speak with Mary Wright, Associate Provost for Teaching and Learning at Brown University and author of the newly released book, Centers for Teaching and Learning: The New Landscape of Higher Education (2023), for which she surveyed over 1,200 CTLs in universities across the U.S. In this episode, Dr. Wright helps answer these questions and dispels other dead ideas about CTLs. 

Resource

• Centers for Teaching and Learning: The New Landscape of Higher Education (2023) by Mary Wright, published through JHUPress. Use promo code HCTL23 in the check-out for a discount (active through 7/7/24). 

In our final episode of Season 6, we speak with two undergraduate Columbia University students, Emily Glover and Kyle Gordon, who serve as Teaching and Learning Consultants as part of our Center’s Students as Pedagogical Partners initiative. Through the initiative, Emily and Kyle have immersed themselves in the research on teaching and learning, broadening their understanding of how learning works, and of the many pervasive dead ideas in higher education. In this episode, they reflect on how this knowledge has changed them as learners, including how they think about student engagement, assessment, learning styles, and the benefits of being “uncomfortable” while learning.  

How can instructors use research on teaching and learning to create change and tackle challenges in their courses? What can learning analytics tell us about student engagement and motivation in our courses? In this episode, we ask Samantha Garbers, Associate Professor in the Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, with guest host Adam Brown, Program Director of Columbia’s Science of Learning Research Initiative (SOLER). Professor Garber received a Provost's SOLER Seed Grant to work with Dr. Brown to explore how students are engaging (or not!) with course materials and resources.

Tara Harvey, Founder of True North Intercultural, defines Intercultural Competence as “the capacity to communicate and act appropriately, effectively, and authentically across cultural differences, both locally and globally.” In this episode, Dr. Harvey discusses how the research behind intercultural learning is unknown by many. She explains why intercultural development is so important in higher education, especially nowadays, for both faculty and students, and how it can be taught. 

Resources

• True North Intercultural Resources
• The Intercultural Development Continuum
• Education in a VUCA-driven World: Salient Features of an Entrepreneurial Pedagogy (2022) by Varghese Panthalookaran

How should we educate students on the science of learning? Does this require systemic change? And do faculty have a moral obligation to teach students the processes necessary to succeed in college, in addition to the content in our fields? In this episode, we discuss these questions with Todd Zakrajsek, Associate Professor at The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Director of the International Teaching Learning Cooperative, and author of The New Science of Learning, 3rd Edition (2022), a book for students on the science of learning. 

Resources

• The New Science of Learning: How to Learn in Harmony With Your Brain, 3rd Edition (2022) by Todd D. Zakrajsek
• Teaching At Its Best: A Research-Based Resource for College Instructors, 5th Edition (2023) by Todd D. Zakrajsek and Linda B. Nilson

What does engagement require of your students behaviorally, emotionally, and cognitively? Why is it essential to get to know your students, and how can you do this in large classes? Hear advice from Alfredo Spagna, a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at Columbia whose research focuses on the psychological and neural mechanisms of attention, perception, and mental imagery. Dr. Spagna shares how he engages students in his courses, and what he has learned from them over the years.  

Dr. Spagna is a Lecturer in the Discipline of Psychology and teaches both introductory and advanced seminars in Neuroscience. He also serves as the Director of the Neuroscience and Behavior Major.

Resource

• “The Power of Relationships in Undergraduate Education” (January 2, 2023) by Steven Mintz, “Higher Ed Gamma” column in Inside Higher Ed