Potential topics

• Hot moments and how to handle them (e.g., offensive remarks, charged discussions you didn’t expect)
• Culturally responsive teaching strategies suitable to a wide range of courses
• Classroom conditions that promote learning and how to create these
• Ways to create a supportive and inclusive learning environment in the face of challenges to inclusion efforts
• Teacher power and authority—knowing how to wield it, the different ways students respond to it, etc.
• Generative AI and classroom climate

April 2026: Critical thinking

Potential topics

• Defining critical thinking—What do we mean when we talk about it?
• Activities and assignments that promote critical thinking
• How to evaluate critical thinking
• Critical thinking and generative AI (e.g., its potential as both a supplement to and a substitute for thinking)
• The purposes of critical thinking—to what ends are we cultivating it, and to what ends should we be doing so?

See also the questions in this discussion guide for other topic ideas.

May 2026: Ending a course

Potential topics

• Last-day-of-class activities
• Planning/designing the home stretch of a course
• Managing end-of-term stress, fatigue, etc. (your own and students’)
• Strategies for keeping students engaged and interested as summer (or graduation) approaches
• Bringing closure to an unsuccessful course

June 2026: Professional growth (deadline April 30)

Potential topics

• Teaching failures and how to grow from them
• The challenge of unlearning ineffective teaching practices
• Overcoming the expert blind spot
• How to approach student evaluations of teaching
• Your own learning experiences (in school or otherwise) and how these inform your understanding of your students’ learning

July 2026: Grading and feedback (deadline May 29)

Potential topics

• Strategies for managing large volumes of grading
• What recent scholarship has to say about the effectiveness of different grading and feedback practices
• Getting students to focus on feedback rather than the grade
• Providing thoughtful, individualized feedback in large courses
• What to do when you just don’t know what to say about student work

August 2026: Preparing to teach (deadline June 30)

Potential topics

• Crafting an effective syllabus
• Redesigning assignments, assessments, and other components of a course you’ve previously taught
• Building relationships/rapport early in the term
• First-day-of-class activities that set the tone for learning
• Preparing to teach a course that’s new, that’s not your favorite, or that’s outside your comfort zone