Faculty Reading Groups
Open to all faculty, semester-long reading groups build community and conversation around a selected title from the scholarship of teaching and learning. Join with your colleagues to discover new insights and innovations for classroom instruction.
All reading groups are led by a UMassD faculty member. The OFD provides a copy of the selected title to all reading group participants.
Spring 2025 OFD Reading Groups
Teaching with AI
(Advances in Teaching)When: 12:30 PM-1:30 PM on alternate Tuesdays: 1/28; 2/11; 2/25; 3/25; 4/8; 4/22
Facilitator: John Buck, Ph.D., Electrical and Computer Engineering
How can we prepare our students to work productively with AI? When and where are the appropriate times and places for students and faculty to use AI to improve their courses? What strategies can we use to bring AI into our classrooms to support and challenge students?
A Spring 2025 Reading Group discussing Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning by José Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson tackles these questions. Moderated by John Buck, the Teaching with AI reading group will explore thinking, teaching, and learning with AI as Bowen and Watson present them.
This reading group is open to all faculty, but new faculty and faculty teaching first-year students are especially encouraged to join.
Past Reading Group Titles
- Jennifer Moss, The Burnout Epidemic: The Rise of Chronic Stress and How We Can Fix It
- Rebekah Nathan, My Freshman Year:What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student
- Helen Fox, When Race Breaks Out
- Sarah Rose Cavanaugh, The Spark of Learning
- Jean M. Twenge, iGen: Why Today's Super-connected Kids are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy, and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood
- James Lang, Small Teaching
- Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach
- Emily Wakild and Michelle K. Berry, A Primer for Teaching Environmental History: Ten Design Principles
- Cheryl E. Ball and Drew M. Loewe, ed. Bad Ideas about Writing
- Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel, Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning
- Susan D. Blum, ed. Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead)
- Richard Baumann and Charles Briggs, eds. Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality
- Michael Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things
- Daniel Barbezat and Mirabai Bush, Contemplative Practices in Higher Education: Powerful Methods to Transform Teaching and Learning
If you would like to suggest a topic for and/or facilitate a future OFD reading group, please email ofd@umassd.edu.