My wife and I took a proper vacation last week--kid-free, for the first time in three years! Between that and the Juneteenth holiday, this newsletter didn't go out last week. But I did drop a new podcast episode last Tuesday, so here's a special Monday edition of the newsletter to get the word out about that new episode.

Study Hall Is Back!

Last year I tried a new podcast episode format in which I invite three guests on the show to discuss recent studies on teaching and learning in higher ed. I called the format, which was inspired by a similar format on the American Birding Podcast, "Study Hall," and the 2025 Study Hall was great fun. I had been wanting to do another, and now I have!

The new Study Hall features three faculty development powerhouses:

• Flower Darby is incoming director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Estrella Mountain Community College and author (most recently) of The Joyful Online Teacher: Finding Our Fizz in Asynchronous Classes.
• Josh Eyler is senior director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and assistant professor of teacher education at the University of Mississippi, and author of (most recently) Failing Our Future: How Grades Harm Students and What We Can Do About It.
• Regan Gurung is professor of psychology at Oregon State University and author of (most recently) Teach Like a Champ: The Psychology-Based Guide to Effective and Efficient Teaching, with Elizabeth Yost Hammer.

And like the earlier Study Hall, we tackled recent studies exploring the impact of generative AI on teaching and learning:

STUDY #1: Kestin, G., Miller, K., Klales, A., Milbourne, T., & Ponti, G. (2025). AI tutoring outperforms in-class active learning: An RCT introducing a novel research-based design in an authentic educational setting. Nature Scientific Reports, 15, 17458. This study from Harvard physics faculty pitted a well-designed AI-guided learning activity against in-class active learning as a way to introduce new material to students. Spoiler: Both learning gains and student satisfaction were higher in the AI condition. My reaction: Uh-oh.

STUDY #2: Lodge, J. M., and Loble, L., (2026). Artificial intelligence, cognitive offloading and implications for education, University of Technology Sydney. If you're worried about the ways that student use of generative AI can undermine student learning, this new lit review is a must read. It's incredibly readable and practical, and it makes clear that students' default use of AI in learning is problematic. (You can read more of my thoughts on this study in my recent blog post.)

STUDY #3: Wadinambiarachchi, S., Kelly, R., Pareek, S., Zhou, Q., & Velloso, E. (2024.) The effects of generative AI on design fixation and divergent thinking. In Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 380, 1–18. This study found that students who had access to an AI image generator for a graphic design activity tended to be less creative, by a few well-defined metrics. But not every student! As with the Lodge and Loble, it's student default uses of AI that are problematic, not their best uses.

Flower, Josh, Regan, and I had lots to say about all three of these studies. You can listen to the entire Study Hall episode here, or search "Intentional Teaching" in your favorite podcast app.

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 to pre-order! The ebook is expected to be available July 1st, and print copies are expected to start shipping on September 24th. See my website for pre-ordering options.