Chairs' Toolkit
Chairs: Use the resources below to help you coach and guide your faculty's teaching development.
These materials are intended for use year-round, but can be most useful during the period of Faculty Annual Evaluation each year.
This infographic document (click the title) includes steps you can take to understand the many dimensions of teaching development, how to promote it regularly with your faculty, how to coach individual faculty, and ways the CTE can support you.
This letter-style document can be downloaded/printed and used with individual faculty members (during FAEs may be ideal). It includes a menu of ways faculty can continue to develop their teaching skills and abilities. You can check off those that seem to be most relevant to an individual faculty member, depending on their needs or interests.
Using this tool, it is important to provide several suggestions, encouraging your faculty member to take advantage of one or more, but mandating none. When these opportunities are required, the faculty member is more likely to be resistant, rather than receptive, to new ideas.
Remember that the CTE is here to help you. If you aren't sure what workshops or other learning opportunities are coming up or are most relevant to a faculty member's needs, just reach out and we will help you!
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Coaching through Instructor AI Concerns
Use the information below to understand best practices instructors should adopt for the best approach to mitigate misuse by students of GenAI in their classes.
Questions to ask your instructors:
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Does their syllabus have a clear course policy about Gen AI use?
It is university guidance from our Gen AI policy that all course syllabi contain a statement about acceptable or non-acceptable uses of Gen AI.
Statements can be blanket statements (how GenAI is used in the whole class) or can provide guidelines for how acceptable use will be shared per assignment. See our Gen AI Toolkit for more information.
Instructors will have a difficult time arguing student misuse of Gen AI if they do not have clear statements about how it should or should not be used in their course syllabus. Winning a grade appeal may be more challenging.
Please remember that "all or nothing" is a difficult approach with Gen AI, which is popping up even without consent during standard Google searches. Explaining the nuance around use of Gen AI for the course in question is important.
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Have they provided opportunities for authentic student writing or voice?
Encourage instructors early in the semester to offer low- or no-stakes activities that provide the instructor with smaller writing samples that are more likely to be authentic.
Authentic writing (that is, not generated by AI) is more likely when the task asks for personal opinion or thought. Short, reflective assignments (such as a 2-minute reflection at the end of a class meeting or a text-based dropbox assignment asking for responses to a Thinking Routine) are great ways to gather some samples of how students typically write and in what type of voice.
These submissions should be kept in the event a non-authentic-sounding submission comes in later in the semester. They provide good comparison points when the instructor meets with the student to voice their concerns about the potential for misconduct.
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Are they leaning too heavily on the Turnitin Gen AI detection score?
Remind your instructors that Turnitin's Gen AI detector is notoriously poor for accurate detection. Test-run this yourself with some of your own writing to see for yourself.
University policy and guidance discourages the use of a detection score as the sole indicator of academic misconduct with the use of Gen AI. Instead, relying on past (more authentic) work samples and knowledge of the student will be better indicators.
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Are they accusing students before having a conversation?
Even if your instructors' suspicions are strong, encourage them to have a face-to-face (in office or on Zoom) meeting with the student to explain their concerns.
This meeting works best with phrases such as, "I notice," "I'm concerned that...," and "It feels as though..."
For example, "I notice that the work you most recently submitted is very differently written in style and format from other things I've seen from you in this course. It feels as though it was created by Generative AI, and I'm concerned that this means you are bypassing the learning process."
[Then, allow space for the student to respond to the implied question.]
More tips for having this conversation are available in our Gen AI Toolkit.
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Are their assessments in the course all high-stakes?
Students feel more compelled to use unethical methods to get good grades if they lack the confidence that they can be successful - and when success desperately matters.
Encourage your instructors to break down large, high-stakes types of assessments into lower-stakes versions or segments, and to lower the weight of large, end-of-term writing assignments.
You might also help instructors explore alternative grading methods, which take the emphasis away from grades and onto the learning process. These approaches to grading, which all include opportunities to correct mistakes, lower the temptation to cheat.
- Come back for updates. We hope this page will be a living document, with the main pdf (Creating a Culture) receiving updates per feedback, as well as other documents that it becomes evident will be helpful in this toolkit!
If you have suggestions for ways to improve our toolkit offerings, please email us and let us know!