Teaching in Higher Ed

Anna Mills shares Peer and AI Review and Reflection, plus a layered approach to writing feedback on episode 630 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Quotes from the episode

My sense of the value of feedback has not changed. It’s more important than ever, more meaningful than ever, when we do have that connection through words.

-Anna Mills

I think overall I’ve advocated for more sort of technical support for transparency about what is AI and what is not.

-Anna Mills

Students preferred both the peer and the AI feedback. They did not want one or the other.

-Anna Mills

AI companies should be designing so that their agents don’t go in and say, “I’m a student taking a quiz.”

-Anna Mills

Resources

Poll Everywhere

AXL 2026 Keynote with Alex Vasquez

Statement on Educational Technologies and AI Agents, Modern Language Association

Peer & AI Review + Reflection (PAIRR), UC Davis Writing Program

Contradictory Feedback Chatbot on PlayLab

Anna Mills on Amazon vs. Perplexity and Distinguishing Agentic AI Bots from Humans (LinkedIn)

Anna Mills on Judge Orders Perplexity to Stop AI Agents (LinkedIn)

More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI by John Warner

Jellyboard

Bad Ideas about AI and Writing: Generative Practices for Teaching, Learning, and Communication

MyEssayFeedback.ai

AI and College Writing: An Orientation

Luke Green uses the Santa Claus story to rethink what grades measure and the case for ungrading on episode 629 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Quotes from the episode

Each student at some point throughout their academic career is going to receive a grade, receive some sort of an assessment that is going to fundamentally alter how they feel about the classroom.

-Luke Green

The narrative that we sell to our kids is that these gifts are earned. The metric is, those who are good children or better children, you receive more.

-Luke Green

What are grades, and what purpose do we want them to serve?

-Luke Green

Usually, it’s a proxy of understanding a student’s overall experience. And GPA is even worse, because you’re putting all of your course grades into a meat grinder and spitting out one number.

-Luke Green

Resources

Luke Green, St. Cloud Technical & Community College

Luke Green Recognized at MinnState Board Awards

Grading for Growth, by David Clark and Robert Talbert

Unmaking the Grade, by Emily Pitts Donahoe

Learning About Grades from an Emerging Failure, with Emily Pitts Donahoe and Hannah Stachowiak

Campbell’s Law

Hood Politics with Prop

There Really Is a Santa Claus, by Glenn P. Crone

Remi Kalir shares the Fair Feedback Project for addressing bias in student evaluations on episode 628 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Quotes from the episode

If you actually have students write about affirming values as a kind of open free write before they complete an evaluation of teaching, it actually has been shown to mitigate bias.

-Remi Kalir

There are many people who are experiencing the effects of these structural patterns of bias who don’t look like me. So what can I do? How can I show up as an individual in this?

-Remi Kalir

I did not want people coming to the Fair Feedback project and then having long-winded, tangential, potentially problematic conversations with Claude as a chatbot.

-Remi Kalir

You can call it my complicity, you can call it my complexity, whatever you might call it, but I am very much entangled in this AI moment, trying to understand how I am navigating all of this.

-Remi Kalir

Resources

The Fair Feedback Project

Remi Kalir at the Duke Center for Teaching and Learning

Remi Kalir — remi(x)learning

Claude’s Remi Record

The Research on Course Evaluations, with Betsy Barre (Teaching in Higher Ed)

The Potential Impact of Stereotype Threat, with Robin Paige (Teaching in Higher Ed Episode 79)

How Better Teaching Can Make College More Equitable, with David Gooblar (Teaching in Higher Ed Episode 599)

Claude M. Steele, Stanford Department of Psychology

Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do, by Claude M. Steele

Ludmila Praslova, PhD — Vanguard University

The Canary Code: A Guide to Neurodiversity, Dignity, and Intersectional Belonging at Work, by Ludmila N. Praslova

Teaching: Is There a Fix to the Teaching-Evaluation Problem? by Beth McMurtrie (The Chronicle of Higher Education)

A Practical Guide to Modern Teaching Evaluation, by Michael McCreary (Engaged Learning Collective)

Transforming College Teaching Evaluation: A Framework for Advancing Instructional Excellence, by Ann E. Austin, Noah D. Finkelstein, Andrea Follmer Greenhoot, Doug Ward, and Gabriela Cornejo Weaver

Rebecca Fordon — AI Law Librarians

Aria Chernik, JD, PhD — Duke Learning Innovation & Lifetime Education

Claude Code

Cowork by Claude

Bartz v. Anthropic — Anthropic Copyright Settlement

Anthropic Settles With Authors in First-of-Its-Kind AI Copyright Lawsuit (NPR)

My Tech Disclaimer, by Doug Belshaw

My 2026 Tech Stack, by Bonni Stachowiak (Teaching in Higher Ed)

The Data Fix with Dr. Mél Hogan (podcast)

Poll Everywhere

Janice McCabe shares her research on campus loneliness and college friendship networks on episode 627 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Quotes from the episode

The previous surgeon general, among others, have declared a loneliness crisis facing the United States, and, in fact, the highest rates are among young adults.

-Janice McCabe

Many people that I interviewed told me how they felt like everyone else either had more friends than them, had better friends than them, was having more fun than them, along those lines.

-Janice McCabe

Something I hear from students a lot is just this appreciation for taking friendship seriously in students’ lives. And so that’s something that professors, teachers, college administrators can do.

-Janice McCabe

Students often say they don’t really like group projects, but then, that was a place that many of the friendships that formed in classes that I saw formed.

-Janice McCabe

Resources

Making, Keeping, and Losing Friends: How Campuses Shape College Students’ Networks by Janice McCabe

Connecting in College: How Friendship Networks Matter for Academic and Social Success by Janice McCabe

Janice McCabe at Dartmouth

What Friendship Network Type Are You? (PDF)

I Study Friendship. Here’s How You Make Lasting Friends by Janice McCabe, The New York Times

The Friendship Advice Experts Swear By by Catherine Pearson, The New York Times

Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community

Community of Inquiry framework

Propinquity (Wikipedia)

Homophily (Wikipedia)

Peter Felten

Network Weaving as an Antidote to Imposter Syndrome

Dear Nina: Conversations About Friendship podcast

Jeanie Tietjen unpacks trauma-informed practices in higher ed and why naming itself is a form of teaching on episode 626 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Quotes from the episode

Naming goes so far back in, even just in literary terms, the importance of naming.

-Jeanie Tietjen

There is still a very nascent and as yet relatively unarticulated understanding of how profoundly trauma, adversity, and violence adversely affect teaching and learning.

-Jeanie Tietjen

Many students have experienced traumas that are situated in educational settings, bullying experiences that are identity-based, that profoundly shape how they feel about the educational setting as a place.

-Jeanie Tietjen

Learning is very vulnerable. It involves being wrong, failing, failing in front of other people.

-Jeanie Tietjen

Resources

Naming the Urgency: The Importance of Trauma-Informed Practices in Community Colleges, by Jeanie Tietjen (chapter)

Trauma Informed Pedagogies: A Guide for Responding to Crisis and Inequality in Higher Education, edited by Phyllis Thompson and Janice Carello

The Institute for Trauma, Adversity, and Resilience in Higher Education

Supporting the Whole Student: Mental Health, Substance Use, and Wellbeing in Higher Education (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine)

What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing, by Bruce D. Perry and Oprah Winfrey

SAMHSA’s 6 Guiding Principles to a Trauma-Informed Approach (infographic)

Mays Imad

Janice Carello

Bryan Dewsbury

Tracie Addy and PAITE (Personal Assessment of Inclusive Teaching for Effectiveness)

Education Northwest — research on trauma and attendance (Shannon Davidson)

Teaching Solidarity: Critical Race Reading, by Malini Johar Schueller

The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks

Episode 357: Sandie Morgan and Warren Doody on Elizabeth Leonard’s interdisciplinary legacy

Bread and War: A Ukrainian Story of Food, Bravery and Hope, by Felicity Spector

Flour Power (Felicity Spector’s Substack)

The Gap (Ira Glass), video by Daniel Sax on Vimeo

The Gap — PKM in Action, by Bonni Stachowiak

Poll Everywhere