UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence at Penn State will offer an AI workshop, a reading program and an individual coaching program for instructors during summer 2025.
Designing AI-Conscious Assignments: Navigating AI Integration and Exclusion
Penn State faculty are invited to participate in a three-day intensive workshop to consider the impacts of generalized AI on assignment design. Attendees will explore how to incorporate AI use into an assignment or design an assignment to constrain AI use. This multi-day workshop will be facilitated by the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence and by Teaching and Learning with Technology, and the cohort will meet at the University Park campus on May 20, 21 and 22.
Travel funding will be available for those from campuses other than University Park.
Participants will design or redesign an assignment they have selected and will use in a course in the 2025-26 academic year and explore AI-related teaching issues as a community of faculty colleagues and consider the implications for their assignments. In addition, participants will explore Penn State-approved generalized AI tools and connect with existing Penn State educator communities focusing on impacts and roles of generalized AI tools in teaching and learning.
Space is limited. Apply by April 21. Applicants will be asked to describe their experience with AI and briefly outline what theywould like to accomplish during the intensive experience.
Summer reading groups on teaching, learning and the power of thinking outside the brain, forming now
Considering the impact of teaching style and course design can help create more effective learning experiences. This summer, reading groups will read the New York Times-bestseller “The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain,” published in 2021, by acclaimed science writer Annie Murphy Paul.
The book highlights research that challenges conventional models of learning (and teaching) focused primarily on what happens inside our heads. Instead, Paul provides compelling examples of how learning can be understood as embedded and embodied in the people we engage with, the places where we interact and the actions that we take. She argues, “A host of ‘extra-neural’ resources — the feelings and movements of our bodies, the physical spaces in which we learn and work and the minds of those around us — can help us focus more intently, comprehend more deeply and create more imaginatively.”
Instructors are invited to join one of the Schreyer Institute’s sponsored reading groups for lively conversations that consider how the extended mind can be integrated into teaching and learning practice. Participants will be eligible to receive a copy of the book while supplies last. Register for a reading group, or form a group, using this form. Sign up by April 28.
Apply now for the Targeted Teaching Transformation program
The Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence’s Targeted Teaching Transformation (T3) program is open to all Penn State instructors of record, working as individuals or in small groups.
The T3 program pairs instructors with an expert coach who will work with them to identify teaching transformation goals, work toward those goals and celebrate with them when the goal is reached.
Some examples of goals instructors could achieve through the T3 program are: adopting alternate forms of grading, planning to teach in a different modality, redesigning assignments, redesigning a course an instructor inherited to make it their own, redesigning a course for more students and much more.
Apply to the T3 program using this form.
The Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence is part of Penn State Undergraduate Education.