Christine von Renesse
Westfield State College
This is the first in a series of four blog posts in response to the call: For many reasons, including AI, we had to adapt our teaching strategies and learn as we go this year. So let’s share what we found that was useful, promising, and/or positive in some way! Our audience is NE-COMMIT and anyone else curious about improving teaching mathematics.
The posts are ordered from those describing practices more resistant to AI to those describing practices more embracing of AI.
Here are links to the remaining posts: AI 2 Changing My Writing Assignments by Debbie Borkovitz, AI 3 Teaching Calculus III in the Age of AI by Ileana Vasu, and AI 4 Experimenting with Potential Ways to Incorporate AI into my Teaching Practice by Rebecca A. Norton.
I feel fortunate to have incorporated many of the teaching strategies already suggested in the time of Gen AI. I do not lecture, and students are using class time to actively do and discuss mathematics. My assessment used to be “learning stories” in which students wrote in detail about how they solved the problems during class time or outside of class. Any written work outside of class may now be done with too much help of AI, so I tried new strategies:
Students wrote brief notes by hand at the end of every class and submitted a picture to plato, see Note to future forgetful self – Assignment. I marked the notes as completed and gave feedback but did give a grade. Reading the notes took time on my end but gave me a good idea of what students had learned from the class or if there were misconceptions that I should address in the next class. Students that missed class were supposed to meet with me in person during office hours and then submit notes from our meeting. I liked the structure of the notes and will continue them with only small adjustments: I had students write on extra pieces of paper and many pieces of paper were lost later. A good prompt that I project and allowing students to write in their notebook could make the workflow easier for them. Student Work Sample Spring 2026.
Instead of written assignments, I asked students to submit short thinking videos in Spring 2026. They would explain the mathematical ideas but also how much time they spent thinking and being stuck and how they used resources. When students made mathematical mistakes, they needed to revise the video until it was marked as “completed”. When students did not reflect in enough detail I did not ask them to revise, which was a mistake. In fall 2026, I will make sure to ask students to revise the reflection portion as well so they can learn to track their learning process and work on their persistence. I did a survey at the end of the semester to learn what students thought of the videos and was pleased with the results. Of course, some students complained that they had to revise or add on until the video was marked as completed. I am used to that reaction from my learning stories though, revisions are part of the design. There were some technological and access issues but most of them were easily solved. Here are some samples of student work to showcase different flavors of student work:
Thinking Video Student Work Math 254,
Thinking Video Student Work Math 205 (MKT 2)
Logistics: I had about 50 students across two classes, one undergraduate, one graduate. I tried giving feedback using video, but found that my written comments were easier for me to read when I watched a revision days or weeks later. I assign a video every 1-2 weeks and noticed that it took a similar amount of time to watch the videos and give feedback as my learning stories used to take. One advantage of watching a video versus reading is that I could keep my hands busy as I listened to the explanations which made the process easier for my system.
