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 (deadline February 27)

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 (deadline March 27)

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