Teaching
CategoryWriting Together: A Teaching Experiment (guest post)
“I’m very fond of the take-home essay, as there’s something irreplaceable about the experience of articulating a theory over the course of multiple weeks—doing background research, letting the ideas marinate in one’s subconsciousness, and chiseling away at the draft until every word is perfectly placed.” (more…)
A New Tool for Curbing AI Cheating (guest post)
“The aim is not to keep everything exactly as it was before gen AI took off. That would be both impossible and undesirable. The aim is to preserve the parts of philosophical education that are still worth preserving while changing the surrounding infrastructure enough to make that possible.” (more…)
Light and Shade in The Classroom (guest post)
“I’m teaching care for their own particular point of view, a disdain for all things ‘vibes’ that aren’t carefully thought out, and a deep understanding of the courage it takes to withdraw from other people for a while, to have braved a thought all on your own.” (more…)
Does Your Department Have an AI Policy? Here’s Edinburgh’s
Has your department instituted an AI policy? If so, whom does it govern, and what does it say? What should such a policy say? (more…)
How To Write A Philosophy Paper: Online Guides
Some philosophy professors, realizing that many of their students are unfamiliar with writing philosophy papers, provide them with “how-to” guides to the task.
Grieving What AI Has Taken from Learning
“I wonder if these people have ever seen a student’s face when they finally understand something for the first time.” (more…)
The Philosophy Curricula in Mid-20th Century UK Universities
Who and what was covered in philosophy courses at UK universities in the 1950s and 1960s? (more…)
All Happy Classrooms (guest post)
Are all happy classrooms alike? Probably not. But perhaps there’s some qualities common to many of them. (more…)
Grammarly Is a Cheating Machine
Grammarly is sometimes thought by instructors to be a relatively benign writing tool app, akin to a sophisticated spelling and grammar checker. (more…)
Crafting a Critical Thinking Course that Sticks with Students (guest post)
A forthcoming study shows that a critical thinking course focused on a few good, relatively easy to learn, and useful reasoning strategies can impart lessons that remain effective long after the course has ended. (more…)
How Much Reading Do You Assign? Poll Results
Last week, I asked philosophy instructors to let us know how much reading they assign in their undergraduate courses. (more…)
How Much Reading Do You Assign?
At the end of this post is a poll about how much reading you assign. Please take part in it if you teach philosophy courses. Thanks. (more…)
Fighting AI with AI
Is there a German word for a feeling that combines admiration, weariness, and a touch of disgust? That word would be handy as we continue to catalog attempts to teach in a world of artificial intelligence, such as this one from professor of technology and business Panos Ipeirotis (NYU). (more…)
Adamson’s “Rules” for Writing Philosophy
“The first question is: what is the question?” (more…)
When You and Your Students Write the Book of Your Course (guest post)
Some people have the ability to look at a mess and see the makings of something beautiful. (more…)
The Dangers of Data on Teaching in Higher Education
“The dirtiest secret in higher education is that there is no good data on the quality of teaching and teachers on college campuses.” (more…)
How “Originality” and “Interdisciplinarity” Can Mislead Philosophy Students (guest post)
Clarifying these expectations is not a minor pedagogical matter. It is essential to helping students succeed, avoid wasted effort, and stay motivated.
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The Counterfeiting of the Humanities
In 2023, I attended an annual conference on the humanities. In a conversation over lunch, a program manager for a state humanities council, whose job is to review grant applications for humanities projects in their state, asked me what I did. After I replied that I was a philosophy professor, she responded, “Oh, I didn’t know that philosophy was a humanities .” (mor..
Teachable and State of the Art
A philosophy professor has a question about teaching that I think will resonate with many readers. (more…)
Grading Prompts to Measure Student Learning (guest post)
In this era of AI, “can we still rely on take-home writing assignments to assess student learning? And, should we allow students to use ChatGPT in order to complete such assignments? My answer to both questions is ‘yes’.” (more…)
You Don’t Need an AI Policy — You Need Two (guest post)
What will tell your students about whether and how they may use AI for work you assign? (more…)
Intent Amplified: Teaching Students How to Learn with Artificial Intelligence
“You can choose to use AI to learn, or you can choose to use AI to avoid learning.” (more…)
How to Justify an AI Ban in Your Classroom (Guest Post)
“I don’t want to be a cop in the classroom. So, it’s… important for students to come to the same conclusion themselves and understand the rationale for this policy.” (more…)
Philosophers and Embedded Ethics (guest post)
“Over the last decade, interest in ethical issues related to computing, especially concerning artificial intelligence (AI) and big data, has skyrocketed.” (more…)
Opportunity to Volunteer to Teach Online Courses for Ukrainian Universities
A pair of philosophers have created a program through which people can volunteer to team-teach online courses at Ukrainian universities. (more…)
If You Want Your Students Completing Their Coursework Without Help from AI…
…how do you make that happen? (more…)
Teaching Under Hostile Conditions
“The many sources of harm and hostility we collectively face—as philosophers, as educators, and as humans—seem too numerous to name, let alone to seriously contemplate or effectively cope with.” (more…)
Should Humanities Faculty Aim to Ban AI from Their Classrooms?
“Because of the ubiquity of AI technology, students will likely be using it persistently outside the classroom in their personal lives. The humanities classroom must be a place where these tools for offloading the task of genuine expression are forbidden—stronger, where their use is shunned, seen as a faux pas of the deeply different norms of a deeply different spac..