On the Teaching Track
Insights on teaching, learning, & faculty development
What I Taught, Learned, and Added to My TBR at NCTE 2025
NCTE 2025 came to a close after four full days of teaching conversations, creativity, and community. In this 3×3 recap, I’m sharing what I presented, what I learned, and what I’ve added to my to-be-read list for the trip home.
What do Readers Want? Teaching Students to Think Like Editors
I share how my Introduction to Poetry students create a multimodal critical edition, a project that blends digital creativity and literary analysis while teaching them to think and act like editors in the twenty-first-century classroom.
So We Teach On: Strategies for Managing Heavy Teaching Loads
I share three strategies — global feedback sheets, lesson plan calendar blocking, and Canva templates — that can help any faculty member survive a heavy teaching load for the first time.
Do You Need to Write Better Course Descriptions?
Celebrate Open Access Week with a free toolkit for writing stronger, more engaging course descriptions that attract students to your course and discipline.
#WhyIWrite
In celebration of NCTE’s National Day on Writing, I reflect on why I — despite a (self-inflicted) heavy teaching & service load — write.
Getting Started with Open Educational Resources
OERs provide an extraordinary opportunity to circulate innovative teaching practices, amplify faculty voices, and expand educational equity. But doing so well requires intention. After all, open isn’t just about access. It’s about authorship, agency, and the story we tell about how we teach.
Digital Creativity Is Not Optional
This post explores why digital creativity should be treated as both a fundamental literacy and a human right in general education and beyond.
Sonnet Puzzles: Active Learning in the Literature Classroom
In this active learning exercise, students work collaboratively to reverse-engineer a sonnet, focusing on the poem's formal characteristics to predict the correct order of the lines in the original composition.
Exit Ticket Questions for the Data-Driven Educator
In this post, I guide you through the process of making our data collection transparent to students, and I provide a list of adaptable questions that you can use to assess your students’ understanding of the content and gather their thoughts on the course in progress.
5 Essential Resources for Teaching Poetry in Introductory College Courses
Are you a veteran poetry teacher looking for new ideas, or are you preparing to teach poetry at the college level for for the first time? Use these resources to jumpstart your lesson planning this semester.
From Semester Prep to Career Prep: Questions to Prompt Faculty Reflection
I’m kicking off a new mini-series designed to help you reflect on your goals and commitments as you navigate life inside and outside the classroom. Each semester is a chance to pause and take stock, in this case of your of service commitments, areas for growth, and how you’ll document your impact.
3 Back-to-School Canvas Tips
I consistently receive comments in my student evaluations about how much they appreciate the intentional and transparent design of my Canvas pages and how organized it keeps us. I’m sharing three tips (and some custom code!) to level up your Canvas sites and improve your own students’ experience.
3 Back-to-School Active Learning Strategies
I had the pleasure of being a guest speaker at IUB’s New Faculty Orientation to talk about active learning in my GenEd courses. I’m sharing 3 active learning strategies from this session and my classroom that you can apply to your courses this fall.
Bringing BYTE to Future Faculty
A recap of our week-long, three-part BYTE workshop series attended by future faculty and educational developers from the United States and abroad for POD Network’s Graduate Student, Professional Student, and Postdoctoral Scholar Development Special Interest Group.
3 Back-to-School Canva Tips for Educators
I’m sharing three ways I use Canva to advertise my courses, customize my LMS, and create easily editable and shareable course materials.
Teaching Composition with Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe died on this day sixty-three years ago, on August 4, 1962. Ever since, she has remained an enigmatic, spectral presence in the public imagination. These days, she haunts my composition classroom.
- creative technologies
- Canva
- creativity
- career management
- Branding Your Teaching Excellence
- lesson planning
- walking the walk
- OER
- philosophy statement
- discussion
- active learning
- back-to-school
- Canvas
- Adobe Express
- career documents
- course design
- poetry
- lms
- BYTE
- week in the life
- NTT
- woman artist
- Women & Film
- digital portfolios
- creative women
- education
- evidence
- Interview
- assessment
- creative confidence
- reflection
- multimodality
- honors curriculum
- learning outcomes
- NCTE
- workshops
- collaboration
- data
- accessibility
- Elizabeth Taylor
- future faculty
- Hypothesis
- National Day on Writing
- feedback
- Kate Chopin
- Notion
- social annotation
- canvas
- data-driven instruction
- Publication
- close reading
- teaching award
- literacy
- Mary Blair
- exit ticket
- conference
- Trello
- reading roundup
- Marilyn Monroe
- remediation
- work in progress
- SoTL
- icebreaker
- composition
- podcast
- design
- canva
- authentic assessment
- scholarly teaching
- grading
- Radio
- multimodal literacy
- women & tech
- cv
- course descriptions
- service