You may have noticed this edition of the newsletter is coming out on a Monday instead of its usual Thursday or Friday. That's because, well, it's August!

August is the busiest month of the year for those of us in educational development as we work to help our colleagues get ready for upcoming semester. I was running point on seven instructor-facing workshops last week, including a webinar for my publisher, W.W. Norton, on AI syllabus statements as invitations for conversations with students. (You can request a recording of it from Norton.) Over 750 people attended that webinar!

Most of my sessions last week were for folks at the University of Virginia, where I led workshops on talking with students about AI, AI-aware assignment design, AI in writing courses, and more. Friday was an all-day institute co-led with my fantastic colleagues Jess Taggart and Andrew Kennedy for our new Faculty AI Guides, who were very engaged! I'm excited to see what they do to help colleagues in their spheres of influence adapt to AI this year.

I'll try to find time to share some reflections on last week's events in a future newsletter. For now, here's a bit of catch-up from last week:

AI and Student Agency with Jason Gulya

Thanks to an unexpected amount of air travel getting to UVA last week, I was able to edit and post the latest episode of the Intentional Teaching podcast. It hit the feed on Thursday instead of Tuesday last week, but it's a great interview and I was glad to get it out.

You may recall that I've interviewed a few of the faculty whose teaching moves we highlight in The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching, and this latest episode features another one of those interviews. Jason Gulya is a professor of English and media communications at Berkeley College, where he teaches a variety of online and onsite courses in the humanities. I started following Jason on LinkedIn a few years ago, giving me a glimpse into all the many ways he has adapted his teaching to respond to the challenges and opportunities posed by generative AI. He’s a thought leader in this area, and I was very excited to get him on the line for an interview.

In our conversation, he talks about the risks of transactional education and how he pushes back against that model of education through some pretty radical approaches to student agency in their learning. Jason says that we need to shift students' attention away from the products of learning (papers, presentations, projects, and such) and to the process of learning. This is an argument I've heard a lot since ChatGPT hit the scene in 2022, mainly because those products can be spoofed fairly easily with generative AI. Jason goes further, however, and argues (citing writer Donald Murray) that if we want to teach process, then students need to choose the product.

In Jason's courses, students choose the product, design the process by which they'll get to that product, and often shape the evaluation criteria by which their product will be judged. That's a level of student agency I certainly haven't tried in my teaching! I had lots of questions for Jason about how this works out and how it helps students make better use of generative AI in their learning.

​You can listen to my conversation with Jason Gulya here, or search "Intentional Teaching" in your podcast app.

Intentional Teaching's 100th Episode

Episode 100 of the Intentional Teaching podcast is coming up, and I would love your help making it a special one.

There are interviews I've aired on the podcast that I find myself referencing all the time in my work with faculty. All my guests are fantastic, of course, but some managed to share some piece of insight that has stuck with me, changing how I think about teaching and learning. And I bet, if you're a listener, you have similar insights from past episodes that keep informing your work as an educator.

Here’s my ask: What’s one idea or example or question or quote from an Intentional Teaching episode that you keep thinking about? Let me know via email—or record a short voice memo on your phone and send that to me. I’m planning to make the 100th episode a kind of clip show, where I share excerpts from past episodes featuring powerful insights—and your comments about why those insights have stuck with you.

Your deadline for this assignment is September 15th, which will be here before you know it!

The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching

My new book, The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching, co-authored with Annette Vee and Marc Watkins, is now available as an ebook! It's available through major online retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. It's also free for faculty who have adopted a W.W. Norton textbook, so if that's you, ask your Norton rep. If you want to wait for the paperback, it will be available in September 2026, and you can preorder it now.