Following a hiatus during summer 2024, I’m happy to release the 8th annual summer reading list of some of the CITL staff’s favorite teaching and learning focused books they’ve read over the past academic year. This year we are sharing five great titles on documenting teaching, generative AI, and relationship rich teaching. If this is the first list you’ve seen, please go back and view our previous reading lists, too.
Critical Teaching Behaviors: Defining, Documenting, and Discussing Good Teaching (Barbeau & Cornejo Happel, 2023)
Authors Lauren Barbeau and Claudia Cornejo Happel provide readers an evidence based framework for representing ‘good teaching’ they refer to as critical teaching behaviors. This book introduces readers to the framework and provides support for implementing the framework to both your teaching practice and documentation of your teaching. This is a great read for anyone preparing for an upcoming review or promotion. (available as ebook from IU Libraries) – Recommended by Shannon Sipes
Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning (Bowen & Watson, 2024)
Bowen and Watson’s book can help you think through how to integrate AI into your teaching practices. Structured into three parts—“Thinking with AI,” “Teaching with AI,” and “Learning with AI”—this book goes beyond theoretical discussions and addresses topics such as developing AI literacy, rethinking academic integrity, and streamlining administrative tasks. Creatively reimagining possibilities for our classrooms, it also offers practical strategies, including sample prompts and policies, to help instructors get started using—and be more transparent about their use of—generative AI. While acknowledging its challenges, Bowen and Watson will encourage you to view AI as an opportunity to rethink your pedagogy and improve your learning outcomes. (available as ebook from IU Libraries) – Recommended by Eric Brinkman
More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI (Warner, 2025)
Generative AI is better than humans at some things, like quickly synthesizing information, and writing educator John Warner writes about using it for that purpose himself. However, Warner wants us all to consider the humane purposes of writing that bots can’t perform—for example, carefully thinking through ideas and evoking emotions. Warner asks us to center these loftier endeavors in the work we ask students to do, giving examples from his own extensive experience with teaching composition to undergraduates. If you enjoy philosophizing about the purpose of education and perusing prose that mixes memoir with argumentation, you’ll get a kick out of this one. Warner’s book pairs well with Teaching with AI, another summer recommendation, which offers a more industry-aligned, pragmatic guide to AI in higher ed. (available as ebook from IU Libraries) – Recommended by Layli Miron
A Pedagogy of Kindness (Denial, 2024)
In an increasingly fraught world and with often difficult classroom dynamics, this text offers practical tips for reshaping syllabi, assessing student performance, and creating trust and belonging in the classroom. Denial suggests that, to move from “niceness” to “kindness”, as instructors, we must create spaces rooted in compassion, in which all parties engaged in teaching and learning have the chance to grow and express themselves in meaningful ways. (available as ebook from IU Libraries) – Recommended by Mary Helen Truglia
Mind over Monsters: Supporting Youth Mental Health with Compassionate Challenge (Cavanagh, 2024)
In this monograph, Sarah Rose Cavanagh examines the role student mental health plays in the higher education classroom. Drawing from fields of pedagogy, psychology, neuroscience, and sociology, she outlines how students often have trouble separating their diagnoses from their abilities (I have Y, which means I can’t do X) and contends that students need both compassion and challenge to learn and grow. (available as ebook from IU Libraries) – Recommended by Sarah Pedzinski
If you enjoy these reading lists, stay tuned for more information about our upcoming fall semester SoTL reading group, open to IUB instructors of all ranks. We will be reading Grading for Growth (Clark & Talbert, 2023). Participants will receive a complimentary copy of the book and meet with one of the authors. Learn more about the book in this interview with Robert Talbert and Bonnie Stachowiak.
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