A New Beginning
(but still a lot of feeling)
Greetings, previous Substack subscribers!
Notes on the Move to Ghost
I hope that you'll pardon the disruption of this migration to a new newsletter hosting service, but the content moderation crisis over at Substack grew too dismaying for me to stay. I've heard great things about Ghost, and naturally I like the name.
My plan is still to bring you links and inspiration from teaching and learning, emotion science, social neuroscience, and mental health, as well as sharing general updates on what I'm up to currently. Like on Substack, I'm going to continue to provide all content to all subscribers with no payments required - but since Ghost costs me money, I'm going to take a page from my buddy John Warner's book and create an option for folks to toss a few coins at the subscription fee if they'd like to opt into that.
Now that I'm retired as a high school drama booster club President and peering over into an empty nest, my goal is to make this newsletter monthly. It should hit your inboxes the first full week of each month.
BE THE SPARK - Thoughts on Teaching and Learning
Maybe this will slow down as I increase the frequency of this newsletter, but as usual I am overwhelmed by the number of new and exciting books there are in the teaching and learning space.
First up, in the Oklahoma University Press teaching and learning series, two books I've been eagerly anticipating, both with artful covers: Jessamyn Neuhaus' Snafu Edu: Teaching and Learning When Things Go Wrong in the College Classroom and Chavella Pittman's Empowered: A Woman Faculty of Color's Guide to Teaching & Thriving.
As someone whose first few workshops were a disaster and who wished there had been a guide to read ahead of time, I am so excited for Tolu Noah's Designing and Facilitating Workshops with Intentionality: A Guide to Crafting Engaging Professional Learning Experiences in Higher Education - now available for pre-order! You can also register for her book launch on June 18th.
In the realm of cognitive science, Smart Teaching Stronger Learning: Practical Tips From 10 Cognitive Scientists is a short series of essays edited by Pooja Agarwal with lots of practical applications for the classroom.
Finally, I was honored to blurb the upcoming Of Many Minds: Neurodiversity and Mental Health Among University Faculty and Staff. Edited by Rebecca Pope-Ruark and Lee Skallerup Bessette and with a forward by Katie Rose Guest Pryal, it is an edited collection of essays about navigating academia.
Would love to hear your book recommendations in the comments! What are you excited for?
On the conference front, later this month is the second annual fully virtual gathering for educational developers and teaching faculty - and the roster of presentations I've been seeing on LinkedIn is impressive. Last year was a joy, and this year promises to be the same. Register here.
On the research side of the house, I've been hearing more and more about the practice of deadline grace periods or automatic extensions open to all students, and so I was gratified to see that Regan Gurung and colleagues have put these deadline "buffers" to the test. Across six introductory psychology classes utilizing these buffers, they found that on average, 70% of students submitted assignments on time, while roughly 20% used the buffer period, and 7% submitted an online extension request. There was not much of a difference in grades between those submitted on time and those submitted within the buffer period, though in general turning things in on time related to better grades. I would love to see a follow-up study where sections were randomly assigned to have these buffers or not and the overall performance of the classes.
In personal news, I was thrilled to join Bryan Dewsbury and RIOS Institute's Knowledge Unbound podcast to talk about a variety of topics related to teaching, mental health, trigger warnings, and well-being. Listen here - or wherever you get your podcasts.
On June 18 at 2 PM ET, I’ll be speaking at Top Hat Engage: Virtual Edition in a session called "Sparking Joy: Strategies for Happier High-Impact Teaching." We’ll explore practical, research-informed ways to nurture well-being, build connection, and bring more meaning to our work in the classroom. Pop in, it should be a fun conversation! Register here.
Finally, somehow so far our NSF grant on cultivating an ecosystem of feedback in undergraduate biology education has survived termination thus far, and this past May we had a joyous launch with some forty folks. If you're interested, you can find the recording of the launch and our slides here. Get in touch if you'd like to be involved!
STRIVING - Emotion, Motivation, Our Synchronous Selves
I've been shopping a new book proposal around and so thinking a lot about what motivates book sales and editors alike. Two recent articles that I've been musing over are Derek Krisoff's recent newsletter on what the decline of Twitter means for book promotion and speculative fiction writer Lincoln Michel on the "hard math of selling books."
In this fraught book-making landscape, just a general plea - if you love a book, maybe tell Amazon, Goodreads, a friend, your library... links self-servingly go to my pages there in case you liked one of my books and want to tell the interwebs, but really just an encouragement to do this for all the books and book writers you love. I'm going to try to do more of it myself.
OUR MONSTERS, OURSELVES - Uncertainty, Challenges, Mental Health
Local friends (Boston area), I'm running an exhibit next week at the MIT Museum for their "After Dark" program. Cocktails! Tapas! Monsters!
My corner will be a card sorting exercise threading folkloric monsters, case studies of unusual experiences, and neuroscience. There will lots else to do though, as well as exploring their current museum exhibit "Monsters of the Deep." Tickets and details on the other exhibits here.
INCIDENTALLY - Why Tom Cruise Will Never Die
I have long been taken with people who seem utterly unafraid of committing 1000% of themselves, who don't seem to let a fear of being seen as "cringey" or too earnest or too melodramatic stop them from giving their all. It's why I love Nic Cage and Baz Luhrmann.
I think it is also why despite the questionable Scientology and the couch-jumping and the fact that Tom Cruise dared think he could ever (ever!) portray my beloved Lestat, I also do love a good mission of the impossible variety. It's also why I read every word of this rather long New Yorker profile of Tom Cruise and his obsession with going over the top in the Mission Impossible stunts in order to bring the most authentic experience to his audiences. It's pretty wild stuff. Enjoy.