Smith Center Newsletter

October 2026

Scholarship Roundtable on 9/21/26
Chris Fink (HHK), Hank Blume (Classics), and Gabriella Friedman (English) discussing the research they conducted during their Spring ‘26 sabbatical.

Teaching Tip of the Month

We have a double dose of teaching strategies for you this month:

If you need help supporting a student who is struggling:

Check out our Teaching Tip on Reaching Out to Struggling Students. It includes an email template you can use or adapt!

If you’re wondering how you can positively affect your students’ motivation to learn:

Check out our Teaching Tip on Self-Determination Theory & Student Motivation.

**Do you have a teaching-related question or concern you’d like us to address in a future newsletter? Send us an email at smithcenter@owu.edu.

Tech and AI Toolbox

Are you looking for a way to make course readings more interactive?

Social annotation tools allow students to annotate, question, and discuss digital texts, videos, and podcasts directly with each other in real-time. Studies show that annotation tools like Perusall and Hypothes.is can help cultivate deeper critical thinking and richer collaborative learning. For a list of additional tools, see https://annotation.commons.gc.cuny.edu/tools/. If you want to do your own research on social annotation, feel free to use our Social Annotation Bibliography.

Note: If you are interested in using social annotation for your course(s), please contact Barb Bird. If a lot of faculty express interest in using social annotation, we will investigate institutional licensure.

Did you know that Blackboard has an AI Conversation Tool?

You can set it up to have socratic dialogues or role-play with your students.

Ready to try it out? Go to “Add Content” -> select “Create” -> select “AI Conversation” under “Participation and Engagement”. First, you will be asked to share the main question or topic you want your students to discuss with the AI persona. (See examples on Blackboard.) Next you will set up the AI persona by giving it a name and selecting its personality. You can also choose how complex you want the responses to be. Finally, there is an option of assigning a reflection question where students explain how the conversation advanced their understanding of the topic.

**If you try this, we’d love to hear how it went and invite you to send an email to smithcenter@owu.edu to share your experience.

Featured Books, Articles & Podcasts on Pedagogy

Article: Why Good Students Bomb Exams by Leonard Geddes is a short article that tries to explain exactly what the title says: Why is it that students who have done fine on homework and quizzes suddenly bomb the (cumulative) midterm or final exam? Where did things go wrong? Check out the article to find out what Geddes sees as the underlying cause.

Podcast: If you don’t have time to read but enjoy listening to podcasts while driving, cooking dinner or going for a walk, check out Daniel Guberman’s podcast on “How our grading systems impact student motivation.” (44 minutes) In this episode on the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast , Dr. Daniel Guberman, Senior Instructional Developer at Purdue University, examines how traditional higher education grading structures unintentionally undermine student learning and engagement.

**Do you have a favorite article, book, or podcast on teaching and learning that you’d like to see featured here in an upcoming newsletter? Email the Smith Center at smithcenter@owu.edu.

Grants, Funding & Fellowship Opportunities

TLI Grant Applications are due October 22 at 11:59pm!

TLI grants can provide:

Scholarship support: travel for on-site research, purchase a dataset, provide stipends for participants in a study, pay fees for writing an open-access book or article.
Teaching support: attend or present at a teaching conference, take an online training in a particular pedagogy (e.g., team-based learning), pay an honorarium to meet with an expert in a type of pedagogy you want to improve in (e.g., using AI to deepen & reveal student thinking, adopting alternative grading, expanding Universal Design for Learning), explore a location for a travel learning course.
Interdisciplinary support: cross-disciplinary scholarship or teaching projects.

Check out the revised TLI Guidelines.

Ready to submit? Here is the TLI Proposal Submission Form.

Upcoming Smith Center Events

Scholarship Roundtable – Wednesday, Sept. 21, 12-1, Slocum 201, Lunch provided.

The Smith Center invites you to our second Scholarship Roundtable. Come for lunch and hear from Zack Long (English), Danielle Hamill (Zoology), and Liz Starns (HHK) about the research they did during their spring sabbatical. There will be time for questions and conversation. Sign up here if you’d like to have lunch

Just for Laughs

Need Support?

Request a confidential consultation

Request a formative teaching observation

Request assistance with midsemester instructional feedback

Stay Connected

Smith Center Website

Smith Center Happenings Calendar

Email Barb Bird (Director of Smith Center)

Email Andrea Colvin (Assistant Director of the Smith Center)