Takeaways from CETLI Faculty Discussions of Teaching

• There are types of thinking that our students have to do and be able to do in order to turn generative AI into an effective tool. 
• We can train students to use prompts to get what they want. Not as an end point, but as a learning process. AI can be used as a thought partner.  
• We have ongoing questions for our teaching:  
  • Now that AI does some of these tasks, how do we articulate to students what they have to do?  
  • How do we help students understand the value of their thinking and analyze what comes out of generative AI?  
  • What is thinking and knowing now that we have a machine that does a lot of the tasks we associate with thinking and knowing?   

While we ultimately have to find the solutions that work best for our courses and our students, there are important questions we can all be thinking through:  

• In what ways are we neutral, in what ways are we not?  
• How do we ally with and support students whose voices have been marginalized? 
• How do we acknowledge our power in the classroom?  
• How do we frame the stakes of these conversations for our students? 
• What is a controversial topic for our course? How do we manage emotions that come up?  

• Find ways to make students do the work every day. Keeping them on track sometimes means providing deadlines to keep them on track.
•  Help students feel comfortable to come talk to the professor  – both when things go badly and when things go well.
• Transparency is important: here’s what I want you to do, what I want you to learn and why, and where you will apply it (if not on the exam, then elsewhere).