TEACHx 2026

Can a mandatory, reading-heavy course actually be the highlight of a student’s week? In many required courses, students often feel like passive containers for information—what Paulo Freire calls the “banking concept” of education. This session explores how the Ways of Knowing course at Northwestern University in Qatar flipped this script. 
By integrating Freire’s problem-posing method, faculty and students transformed a daunting syllabus on colonial knowledge into an interactive laboratory for student agency. Presenters (faculty and students who have taken the course) will share how they utilized student-led facilitation (using Kahoot and role-play), sensory-based learning (field trips to the Bin Jelmood House), and creative expression (collaborative drawing) to build a community of inquiry. Attendees will benefit from the lessons learned of teaching a course in a postcolonial framework and how activities such as reading outside the classroom or visiting museums can balance the growing use of AI in education by prioritizing deep learning shared spaces experiences.  

As generative AI tools increasingly shape how students approach writing, instructors face a key pedagogical question: how do we preserve the cognitive processes essential to learning while still preparing students to use emerging technologies responsibly? This session explores a teaching approach that intentionally balances AI-assisted ideation with handwritten in-class journaling to cultivate deeper thinking, ownership, and academic voice. Rather than banning AI or fully embracing automation, this model sequences technology alongside deliberate moments of cognitive pause. Participants will examine how structured notebook journals—where students sit with an empty page before drafting—can foster metacognition, reduce performance anxiety, and strengthen confidence. The session will also demonstrate how AI can be productively integrated for brainstorming, outlining, and idea generation without replacing critical thinking. Attendees will engage in a brief reflective activity that mirrors the journaling practice and leave with adaptable prompts, timing strategies, and classroom frameworks that can be applied across disciplines. This presentation reframes uncertainty not as a barrier to learning, but as a skill that can be intentionally taught through pacing, structure, and pedagogical design.

We've all experienced it: despite a well-crafted lesson, clear guidelines, and engaging delivery, our students struggle to bridge the gap between understanding course content and applying it independently. This disconnect often shows up as surface-level engagement, overreliance on AI tools, or outcomes that fall short of what we know our students can achieve. The root cause is rarely student ability or motivation; more often, it's insufficient scaffolding paired with one-size-fits-all instruction.
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) reframes scaffolding as proactive, flexible, and inclusive by design. UDL-informed scaffolding replaces rigid support with multiple pathways that meet learners where they are, not where we assume them to be. Research consistently shows this approach produces significant gains for underrepresented and lower-performing students, positioning it as both good pedagogy and a powerful equity-promoting practice.
In this interactive workshop, we'll share key findings from the research and then get to work. You'll analyze task complexity through a UDL lens, design three-phase scaffolding sequences (pre-task, during-task, and post-task) with built-in flexibility, and receive peer feedback on a scaffold you can implement immediately. Whether you're a seasoned instructor or just getting started, you'll leave with a practical UDL-informed scaffolding plan ready for your next class.

Changing a culture doesn’t happen overnight, nor is it a solo venture. Historically, in academia, ensuring that educational materials are accessible has been an afterthought or seen as an add-on that leads to extra work. Knowing that accessible materials are necessary for many, beneficial for all, and legally required, Northwestern and the University of Chicago set out to change the culture around digital accessibility at their respective institutions to a more proactive approach that’s integrated into workflows…and it’s working!
This session will explore both universities’ journey toward creating a more accessible digital environment. Discussion will focus on each university’s unique, flexible, agile, data-driven approach that not only created initial success, but quickly adapted to amplify the success and build a movement that’s put the Chicago area at the forefront of accessible digital learning environment design. The presentation will also discuss the importance of partnerships both within and across institutions, and how to cultivate and sustain them. The lessons learned in creating this culture shift can be applied beyond accessibility and across course development.   

The claim that "crisis" and "opportunity" share a common root in Chinese is widely repeated but factually incorrect. Even so, crises carry a dual character: capable of genuine destruction while simultaneously compelling a reexamination of prevailing assumptions.


This webinar takes that duality as its premise. Rather than treating the so-called "reading crisis" in the age of AI as cause for alarm, the session approaches it as an invitation to more rigorous thinking. Drawing on current evidence about reading performance and evolving literacy practices, it redirects attention toward the fundamental question of what reading is for, a reframing that, in turn, opens more productive avenues for response.


The session concludes with concrete, classroom-ready strategies for higher education practitioners, offering substantive approaches to deepening comprehension and sustaining meaningful engagement with texts, as well as a demonstration of how AI, when thoughtfully integrated, may function as a resource in support of reading rather than an obstacle to it.

As generative AI becomes embedded in students' creative and analytical workflows, traditional assessment models must evolve. This lightning talk showcases how StratCom 310 was redesigned into an “AI‑first” learning environment that embraces student use of AI while safeguarding authenticity and deep learning. Working from a real client brief for YSL’s Le Vestiaire des Parfums, students used AI transparently to brainstorm, critique, and prototype campaign concepts. Assessment shifted from polished outputs to reasoning, transfer, and evidence‑based decision‑making. The session illustrates how AI‑supported processes can strengthen digital literacy, algorithmic transparency, and critical engagement across creative and marketing courses.

A growing movement has challenged the accuracy and equity of commonly-used grading systems, leading to  practices like standards-based grading, specifications grading, and ungrading as possible alternatives. While promising pedagogically, these practices are often difficult to sustain in reality.  This talk will focus on the role of gradebooks and the way they may nudge us either to continue old practices and discourage adoption of new practices or to lean into more promising practices. The talk will follow the author’s personal experience with alternative grading systems and with a beta-version of a gradebook designed to support alternative grading rather than traditional grading. 

See how AWS can help you integrate AI into your classroom from the novice to the expert and help better prepare your students for the workforce of tomorrow.  This session will highlight strategies, programs and tactics you can take advantage of, no prior knowledge needed. 

This interactive 45-minute session invites educators to actively build accessible learning materials using AI. Participants will follow along as we use tools like Claude and other AI platforms to create accessible PDFs, documents, and simple accessibility-focused apps that can be freely shared. Drawing from ongoing research and real-world consulting, the session emphasizes practical workflows grounded in Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and core accessibility principles. Attendees will leave with concrete examples, reusable prompts, and a clearer understanding of how AI can support while not replacing ethical, inclusive teaching practices focused on human-centered critical thinking.

Graduate students in AI courses face a paradox: the very technology they are studying is generating an overwhelming flood of learning materials, making it harder, not easier, to learn. For working professionals balancing demanding careers, families, and graduate coursework, "overwhelm fatigue" is real — and it is undermining engagement with one of the most important topics of our time.
This session introduces a structured solution: a Claude-powered learning repository designed to give time-constrained graduate students a navigable, personalized entry point into generative AI concepts. Rather than confronting students with an undifferentiated mass of videos, blogposts, and references, the repository uses carefully designed prompts to help each student find their own path through the material.
The session includes a live demonstration — attendees will watch an actual interaction between the presenter and Claude in real time — and participants are invited to engage directly during the session. Attendees will leave with a replicable framework, available as a downloadable PDF, that faculty across disciplines can adapt to build their own Claude-powered course repositories.

Encouraging a group of students who are strangers to support each other and work through the anxieties and insecurities of learning together can be a considerable challenge for educators. While there is a significant body of research that supports the effectiveness of collaborative learning, Kaendler, Wiedmann, Rummel and Spada have demonstrated that an instructor’s ability to facilitate “quality” interactions between students in collaborative work is crucial for the success of this method (Kaendler et al. 2015). When done well, collaborative learning teaches students’ emotional resilience as they face their own social insecurities and supports inclusive classrooms by centering the identities and experiences of individual students within collaborative relationships. In this workshop, we will work on our ability to foster collaborative classrooms by first experiencing and creating collaborative learning for ourselves. We will introduce and experience 15 different techniques, ranging from quick collaborative brainstorming to in-depth, long-term collaborative learning reflections. We will then work together to document and review our learning. Participants will leave the session having identified cooperative learning strategies to apply to their own teaching and with a plan to address any challenges they foresee in using these strategies in their classrooms.

Engage with innovative tools to master course and program design—plan learning with purpose, align objectives, and create courses and programs that work for both instructors and students. The Course Design Helper, Instructional Design Wizard, and Program Design Wizard are three free, user-friendly, publicly available tools that provide step-by-step guidance for course and program planning and development. See how they were created, how they have been implemented, and how you could use these tools and the principles behind them to support your own course and program design. Collaborate with colleagues to experiment with these tools, analyze case studies, and share best practices for course and program design. 

As generative AI increasingly automates the "final product," higher education faces a crisis of cognitive atrophy. When AI provides solutions instantly, it skips the "earned struggle" essential for long-term retention. This session introduces Somagraphic Learning™: a human-first visual cognitive framework designed to bridge the Clarity Gap between AI data volume and human sense-making capacity.


Moving beyond traditional "AI-first" workflows, this interactive presentation demonstrates how to reposition AI as a "Follower" rather than a "Leader". Participants will engage with the Shape-Emotion Grammar™, a pre-verbal language that uses perceptual cues like circles for safety, boxes for structure, and arrows for movement to anchor understanding before a single prompt is typed.


We will workshop a virtual "Attempt → Map → Refine" process, where learners externalize ideas through hand-drawn motion (on paper or digital whiteboards) before utilizing AI for optimization. By the end of this session, educators will possess a replicable strategy to protect the "Human Edge", ensure academic integrity through somatic principles, and foster a "soul-made" environment where technology supports, rather than replaces, the human mind.