Dead Ideas in Teaching and Learning

Chris Hakala, director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship (CETLS) at Springfield College, joins us this week to dismantle a persistent myth about centers for teaching and learning. With over 30 years in faculty development, assessment, and the study of student learning, Hakala challenges the dead idea that a CTL’s job is to simply hand faculty a fixed set of best practices about student learning. Instead, Hakala argues that fixed practices don’t always meet facu

Dr. Tommy Lee, a behavioral neuroscientist in Barnard College at Columbia University’s Department of Neuroscience and Behavior, joins Dead Ideas in Teaching and Learning to challenge one of higher ed’s most persistent assumptions: that memorization is a low-level task standing in the way of real learning. Dr. Lee’s research considers how the brain forms episodic memory, including our memories of experiences and spaces. In this episode, we tackle the dead idea that remembering and thinking are o

Thomas Tobin, one of the foremost voices on Universal Design for Learning (UDL), joins us to preview his forthcoming book, UDL at Scale: Whole-Campus Universal Design for Learning. Where his earlier work made UDL manageable for individual instructors, Tobin's new publication asks what happens when an entire campus — including administrators — advocates for and values universal design. Tobin first joined the Dead Ideas in Teaching and Learning podcast to discuss inclusive teaching in 2022 (listen

Thomas Tobin, one of the foremost voices on Universal Design for Learning (UDL), joins us to preview his forthcoming book, UDL at Scale: Whole-Campus Universal Design for Learning. Where his earlier work made UDL manageable for individual instructors, Tobin's new publication asks what happens when an entire campus — including administrators — advocates for and values universal design. Tobin first joined the Dead Ideas in Teaching and Learning podcast to discuss inclusive teaching in 2022 (listen

For five years, Chris Gallagher, Kristi Girdharry, and Kevin Smith sat down each semester with the same set of twenty Northeastern University students. What began as an analysis of these students’ writing skills evolved into a book on how students often understand the learning process more clearly than faculty recognize. Gallagher, Girdharry, and Smith's new book, Getting Learning Right: The Promise of Higher Education, takes aim at some of the myths that circulate in public discourse about col

In this special bonus episode, we step away from our typical one-on-one interview format to share excerpts from a student panel that our host Amanda Irvin moderated at the recent "Reimagining Teaching and Learning in the Age of AI" Forum. This event was a joint effort coordinated by the Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning, the Data Science Institute, Columbia Alliance, the School of Engineering, and Teachers College. Four Columbia students, representing a range of disciplines, backgrounds