Summer 2025 Series on Crafting a Critically Reflective Practice
Align your teaching with your core values—one week at a time.
If you’re new(ish) here—welcome! I’m truly glad you’ve chosen to subscribe to Tips for Teaching Professors. When I launched this newsletter over five years ago, I had no idea it would grow into a community of nearly 5,000 thoughtful educators. If you’ve joined in the past year, you might have missed one of my favorite rhythms: the summer series. Each summer, I spend several weeks focusing on one topic—offering a deeper dive and some space to reflect. In previous summers, I’ve shared ideas on course design and facilitation, explored how to conduct classroom-based research, and offered top 10 essentials for new instructors.
As I started planning for this summer, I considered focusing on generative AI. It’s one of the most frequently requested topics these days—a workshop I co-facilitated earlier this month on communicating with students about ethical AI use drew over 450 registrants! But the more I reflected, the more I felt that what many of us might need this summer is not another conversation about AI. Instead, we might need something slower. Something grounding. A kind of academic “pleasure reading.”
Starting next week, the summer series on crafting a critically reflective practice will offer short, weekly posts grounded in the work of Stephen Brookfield and other scholars who frame reflection as essential to personal growth, student learning, and meaningful teaching.
What does “critical reflection” mean to you at this moment in your teaching journey—and what are you hoping it might help you uncover this summer?
Each week’s post will center on a theme—from surfacing hidden assumptions to navigating resistance, from multiple perspectives to modeling reflection for your students. You'll find guiding questions, a short reflection or writing activity, and for those of you in educational development roles, a prompt designed just for faculty developers.
Whether you’re new to reflective teaching or looking to reinvigorate your practice, this series is a chance to pause, recalibrate, and build the habit of weekly reflection. It’s not about perfect teaching—it’s about becoming a more thoughtful, honest, and connected educator. Coming off of a particularly busy semester, I am looking forward to slowing down and thinking about my teaching in a more deliberate way. I hope you’ll follow along. Each post is designed to take about 15–20 minutes of your week—and hopefully leave you with insights that last much longer.
If this sounds interesting, no need to do anything - you’ll start receiving posts next week. If you’d like to receive a weekly podcast version of the posts in addition to the text newsletters (or just want to support the work of Tips in providing free faculty development opportunities) please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
Thanks, as always, for reading!
critical reflection means deeply examining my practice and craft. looking for the spots where I can make my instruction better, clearer, and more impactful. professor, 35 years ago said there is no perfect teaching. there's always a way to improve every single class. I've embraced that throughout my career and I adjust from class to class. I make improvements to materials immediately after a class where I see the need.