Smith Center Newsletter

Introducing the Smith Center Newsletter

We will send out a Smith Center Newsletter once a month, with each issue featuring a Teaching Tip, a timely article, and additional content. If you have any feedback on our newsletter or wish to opt-out, please email smithcenter@owu.edu.

The Smith Center Has A New Website!

Welcome To Our Fabulous New Faculty

From left to right, starting with the back row: Patrick Wensink, Matt Bowser, Caio Batista de Melo, Hayden Bishop, Abby Trollinger, Esther Akheituame, Leslie MacColman 

Teaching Tip of the Month

What’s better: Requiring hand-written notes or allowing students to take notes digitally? Check out this month’s Teaching Tip on Note-Taking to see what the research says.

Tech and AI Toolbox

How To Teach With AI: 43 Claude Skills that give you the teaching assistant team your department will never fund 

This Substack article explains how you can use Claude Skills to help streamline your workflow starting with Course Design and Planning, Assessment and Assignment Design, Grading and Feedback, even Classroom Engagement and Management, Student Communication and more.

Featured Books & Articles

“When students don’t do the reading (and what we can do about it)” by Lindsay Vreeland (2025)

Do you have an article or book you’d like to see featured here? Send us an email!
Barb Bird (Director of the Smith Center)
Andrea Colvin (Assistant Director of the Smith Center)

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

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

The Smith Center invites you to our first Scholarship Roundtable. Come for lunch and hear from Chris Fink (HHK/Public Health), Gabriella Friedman (English), and Hank Blume (Classics) 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

MLA-Sponsored Webinar on “Designing AI-Resilient Assessment and Grading” – Thursday, Sept. 24, 2-3pm ET.

This webinar will support the development of AI-resilient assessment practices for a variety of modalities and institutional contexts. Learn more and register for this free webinar to get strategies for assessing student writing and research in the era of artificial intelligence.

Smith Center Conversations – Wed, Sept. 30th, 12-1, Slocum 201, Lunch provided.

When we see students struggle with reading complex texts, our natural impulse is often to assign less reading. However, some faculty have found that students can and will engage with challenging texts when explicitly taught how to read disciplinary texts.Join colleague Erin Flynn (Philosophy) for a practical conversation on strategies to teach disciplinary reading, starting with Erin’s explanation of how he teaches both majors and non-majors to navigate professional philosophy articles. We will discuss these strategies as well as your own strategies and questions, such as:

• How can we make implicit reading strategies in our disciplines explicit to novices?
• How does disciplinary reading competence affect our students’ sense of belonging within our discipline or in academic work more generally?

This 3-page article will serve as a starting point: Using Scientific literature. If you have limited time, just read the abstract. If you would like a hard copy brought to your office, please indicate that on the sign-up form: Sign up for Teaching Disciplinary Reading. 

Teaching Circle – Oct. 1st, 2026, 12-1pm, Slocum 201, Pizza provided!

We are bringing back the Teaching Circle! For those who are newer to OWU, these are lunch gatherings to share ideas, strategies, or challenges and connect with colleagues. If you are interested in participating, please fill out this Teaching Circle form. Questions? Contact Barb Bird

Apply to participate in the GLCA Conference featuring Regan Gurung!

Regan Gurung will be the featured speaker at a special day-long workshop focused on practical strategies to improve student success in the classroom. Our goal is to have cross-institutional conversations on critical challenges faculty have with helping their students succeed.

Date and time: Saturday, February 6, 2027, 9-5pm

Location: Ohio Wesleyan

Purpose: To enhance and deepen the culture of student success across GLCA campuses 

Deadline to apply: September 18th 

Form to sign up: Feb. 6 GLCA Teaching Conference 

Just for Laughs