Framed as pauses in our usual practice-focused pace, these reflections offer space to consider not just how we teach, but why—and with whom. They also connect our work to the long-term goals of our programs, showing how individual practices and collaborative efforts contribute to broader outcomes.

For 12 years now our weekly teaching tips have been a commitment to provide accessible, responsive, informed, and practical considerations to sustain our students and ourselves in the meaningful work of education and the challenges that come our way. We believe in the power of offering small steps, knowing they must always be pointed toward our larger goals.

Before offering any “tips” this year, we pause to recognize the roots that anchor our guidance on preparing for the semester. While those roots draw from many sources—research, reflection, and practice—they grow strongest through the people we work alongside. Behind any good thing that emerges from our Center are those who dedicate themselves to teaching and learning, who take to heart that the classroom is the core of every student’s experience and success here (Tinto, 2012), whether that classroom meets on campus or brings students together through online spaces.  

We’re starting our blog this year looking down at where our feet are planted, how we got here, and how our mission is showing up at this moment, put to the tune of a few mantras. 

“The Community Is the Curriculum” in the AI Learning Circle

Dave Cormier’s mantra reminds us that learning is ultimately a product of the people learning together and, therefore, must center and adapt with those people. Our most recent community-centered program was the AI Learning Circle, where we went through a teaching with AI online course together, debriefing and sharing ideas with OU colleagues through discussion forums and live conversations. 

Faculty put a lot of effort into the course activities, developing teaching statements to guide their AI-responsive approaches, using AI tools and critically evaluating their results, tinkering with assignments, and connecting with students, colleagues, and leaders to build community around our intentional approaches to AI. Yet it was the conversations that affirmed diverse perspectives and reminded us that we were in this together. One instructor expressed “feel[ing] less on a deserted island” on how to address the challenges of teaching. For all the possibility afforded by AI tools, good and bad, the Learning Circle enforced a commitment to learning- and person-first teaching before diving into any new educational technology.

“Nothing About Us Without Us” in Pedagogical Partnerships

Coming from the disability community, the saying “nothing about us without us” calls anyone building programs or movements for a group of people to do so with these people. Any student success initiative must include students. Any teaching and learning effort should include the learners as well as the teachers. Therefore, students as partners has been a growing focus of ours. After planting many seeds over the years through student panels and student feedback forums, we mark the inaugural year of Pedagogical Partnerships, which develops intentional, generative dialogue and feedback between faculty and students about teaching and learning at Oakland University. 

The program took root through key people willing to make something new with full minds and hearts: Dr. Cynthia Miree, CETL Faculty Fellow who was the architect for this program, and its emerging student leaders Payton Bucki, Red Douglas, Dominique Hormillosa, Lance Markowitz, and Ariel Williams. These students worked with 13 faculty members on a dialogic teaching observation process they researched and developed, identified strategic ways to promote student partnership including key university events, and submitted an article manuscript to the National Teaching and Learning Forum. Dominique Hormillosa described why student partnerships are key at this moment:

“I think my generation marks a turning point in the value proposition of pursuing higher education. The Pedagogical Partnership helps bridge the gap between instructors and students. If we can combine students’ feedback and instructors’ expertise to improve everyone’s experience, then OU can deliver on its promise of quality education and re-affirm the importance of obtaining a college degree. I’d like to be a teacher myself someday, so it has truly been an honor to work with faculty who have been at this for years.” 

Together we are working to plot a sustainable path forward to ensure Pedagogical Partners can flourish in key areas of teaching-related student success.

“They Need Us to Be Well” in Academic Well-Being

Like many universities, OU has emphasized student well-being and mental health, and we have sketched out our role as teachers in supporting student mental health in kind. Yet as psychologist and educational leader Sarah Rose Cavanagh (2023) develops in detail, “in order for them [our students] to be well, they need us to be well.”  Some universities have expressed a similar sentiment as “Faculty Success Is Student Success,” but the mantra “They Need Us to Be Well” gets at our deeper human needs: connection, joy, enthusiasm, purpose, autonomy, and ever-elusive rest. We may not be accustomed to thinking of these human priorities as a part of the curriculum or course design, and yet, as Cavanagh explains, we are increasingly finding these as key indicators of student engagement and, ultimately, success.  

With expert on employee stress and well-being Caitlin Demsky as a CETL Faculty Fellow this year, we will be able to make significant progress on how to teach to sustain the whole person. Adapting to teaching challenges is always more than a “hack” away: Dr. Demsky’s work will inform how we move through whatever comes our way, even when we don’t have easy answers. She will set the tone with two workshops on Academic Well-Being--Creating a Culture of Care in the Classroom and Caring for the Whole Self: Managing Our Well-Being--and she is available for individual and group consultations on these and related topics as well. You’ll hear from her more through this blog in the coming weeks.

This year, as ever, we’ll keep offering what’s useful and doable, but always tethered to the deeper questions and shared values that make the work matter. We’ll periodically shift from quick tips to longer-view reflections—pausing to consider the broader purpose, patterns, and people behind effective teaching. Because in teaching, as in growing, what lasts is what’s rooted.

References and Resources

Cavanagh, S. R. (2023, May 2). They need us to be well. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/they-need-us-to-be-well

Cormier, D. (2024). Learning in a Time of Abundance: The Community Is the Curriculum. Johns Hopkins University Press. The OU community has free access to this book online, or can be checked out of our print library.

Tinto, V. (2012). Completing College: Rethinking Institutional Action. University of Chicago Press. Completing College is available in our print library.

View all CETL Weekly Teaching Tips.