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Faculty-to-Faculty Conversations: Highlights from Fall 2025 

Houston Hall at the University of Pennsylvania, a historic stone building with arched wooden doors framed by "welcome new students" banners, and leafy greenery under a blue sky.

22Jan’26

CETLI News

January 22, 2025

CETLI has organized a dynamic series of faculty-to-faculty discissions for the spring 2026 semester.  

As the new semester begins, we reflect on what faculty have already explored this year.  In nine sessions over the fall semester, faculty gathered around the table in CETLI 134 to discuss their teaching —what was working, what wasn’t, and learn from one another.  

The attendees included instructors new to the university and those who have been here since their own undergrad years. They brought a range of perspectives from different schools, departments, and ranks, and the solutions they discussed crossed disciplines and experience levels.  

Here are considerations, questions to consider, and resources from a select sample of those conversations.

Engaging with your students around purposeful AI use 

  • When we are thinking about how students might engage with AI in our courses, we might also ask: What do students need to know to use it well? What types of thinking or practice problem solving do they need to do without AI assistance? What can they offload and still be able to learn? 

How to bring your commitment to democracy into the classroom 

  • Questions to continue exploring: What does it mean to model democratic values for our students? What is our voice and role? What role does our expertise play and when should we take political stands? 
    • It’s valuable for us to break the ice on political questions, and valuable to communicate with our students out of respect for them and in a respectful manner talk about our values. 
  • How can we think about the classroom as a supportive community for students of all political stripes, both within our school and at Penn? 
    • How do we show students they have a role in the conversation (a role is not the same thing as feeling “safe”). 
    • Modeling the importance of political topics is key because students want to see what the stakes are for what they are learning. 
  • How do we show our students the values of being an educated person in a time when expertise can be devalued? 

Motivating students to do the reading 

  • Three key questions for instructors to consider:  
    • How do we make the reading meaningful? Communicate this meaning to students directly; don’t make these things implicit.  
    • What does doing the reading mean? Why did you pick the readings you picked? How do they connect with other elements of the course, but also our students’ lives?  
    • How do students make the work of reading visible to us?  
  • It’s important to recognize that students need an opportunity to show us what they’ve done and how they engage with the reading. 
    • How do we encourage and grade them? 
  • Supporting students as they learn to read with attention and care means giving them ways to engage with the text. Perusall is a useful online tool. CETLI can consult with you and help you get started on integrating Perusall into your Canvas course. 

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