Tip: New Semester, New Tricks...
Three things I'm doing to kick off the semester.
Welcome, spring 2025! I’m getting to teach this semester after a bit of a break, and I’m excited to be back in the classroom. I wanted to share a couple things that I’m implementing this semester.
First, schedules.
Life is hectic - for me at least, and I assume for my students, most of whom work full-time and have family they care for, while taking multiple courses. It’s also challenging to integrate the more regular semester rhythm of teaching and grading into the irregular rhythm of our other service and scholarly work. I have the added wrinkle of a couple multi-time zone collaborations (including joining the Teaching & Learning Inquiry editorial team as an associate editor) to make scheduling especially tricky. So, I went back to my weekly schedule planner to evaluate how my weekly commitments were tracking.
I find it helpful to do this bit of re-setting every so often. Frequently, this exercise helps me recognize when I’m letting the urgent crowd out the important. For me, what always gets squeezed out are going to the gym, setting aside blocks of writing time, and saving time for longer-term planning of projects. The emails, “quick questions,” and grading/class prep so easily fill the hours! At least with a re-set of my expectations, I feel I’m starting the semester with good habits in place.
Second, a new(ish) grading philosophy.
Although I've written a fair amount here about exploring alternative grading (and have a co-authored article coming out any day now about a research study on Labor-Based Grading1), I've been hesitant to implement what I saw as some of the more “radical” alternative practices. For several years I’ve done a version of specifications grading, marking student submissions as complete/incomplete while focusing on feedback and offering students multiple attempts to complete the assignment. This semester is the first time I'm actually implementing a blended specifications grading and an ungrading approach. It's an experiment! I'm not sure how it will work, but what better audience for an experiment than a class of graduate students all studying higher education? I'm really interested to see how students understand the grading scheme and how they feel about it at the end of the semester.
Third, the (computer-generated) elephant in the room.
Artificial intelligence and GenAI tools are clearly at the forefront of many conversations in higher end. The last time I taught this course, we were just dipping our toes into the possibilities of GenAI, but I'm pretty certain that the students were all at that sort of beginning investigation level. Now? It is a whole new ball game. Not only have the tools themselves exploded in number and variety, but I'm confident that the students I have this semester are much more well-versed in what's available to them - and probably have a really good sense of how to use a variety of tools. In fact, I'm sure that they will have a lot to teach me about the types of tools and ways they are using them. So this semester, I'm putting my thoughts and expectations in a more formalized AI policy, and I want to use it as a starting point for conversations about the challenges and the ethical considerations posed, not only for our course or for their broader program of studies, but for their future career. If we want to have leaders who can think carefully and critically about these tools and their place in higher ed, there's no better place to start than with students!
What are you doing differently this semester? Please share in the comments!
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© 2025 Tips for Teaching Professors
Breana Bayraktar and Indigo Erikensen, “Reducing Stress through Agency and Autonomy: Community College Student Perspectives on Labor-Based Contract Grading,” in Teaching English in the Two-Year College (Feb. 2025)