The CTL is very excited to be welcoming James M. Lang to Trinity on Thursday, September 13. If you have read the Chronicle of Higher Education with any regularity over the past decade, you probably have read some of Lang’s columns on teaching & learning (such as one this summer on the virtues of “disfluent conditions” for learning.) If you’re a relatively new college teacher, you may have turned to one of his books to guide you through your first year.
Prof. Lang’s visit to Trinity will feature two events: a common-hour talk about (but not really about) academic dishonesty, and an afternoon workshop for faculty on “grounding” our classes.
Prof. Lang’s talk, “Building a Better Learning Environment: Lessons from Academic Dishonesty,” will be in the Washington Room from 12:15-1:30 on Thursday, September 13. In researching his forthcoming book, Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty, Lang found that the most convincing studies of academic dishonesty in higher education point out conditions under which cheating seems to flourish—certain kinds of assignments, certain classroom environments, certain structural features of college courses. We can greatly decrease the occurrences of academic dishonesty in our classrooms, Lang argues, by changing these conditions. But, more compellingly, we can draw from this research a set of principles for fashioning courses that promote the opposite of cheating: earnest student initiative to learn—or, to put it another way, curiosity.
The afternoon workshop, “Cultivating Curiosity through the Grounded Curriculum,” will take place in the Reese Room from 4:30-6:00. Drawing on ideas laid out in a recent series of columns in the Chronicle, Prof. Lang will provides hands-on opportunities for participants to think through ways of “grounding” the curriculum of their current or future courses. What’s the value of face-to-face interaction in the classroom, as opposed to online learning? How can we make the most of our physical environment—our campus, the city of Hartford—in engaging our students? Please RSVP to ctl@trincoll.edu by September 10 if you plan to attend. Refreshments provided.