While I’ve always valued Beth McMurtrie’s recommendations for teaching and learning in the Chronicle of Higher Education, this past year, McMurtrie’s newsletters have seemed to perfectly correspond with the challenges in my first-year writing classes. McMurtrie’s recent tips focus on strategies engaging Gen Z, and include suggestions for fostering classroom community, increasing participation, rethinking reading assignments, and supporting student success.

These are some of the things I’m taking from McMurtrie’s year of reporting and analysis as I reset and plan for 2025. 

“Should you teach your students how to be students?”

McMurtrie draws on Emily J. Isaacs, executive director of the faculty-excellence office at Montclair State University, to provide suggestions for helping students develop study skills. 

Issacs recommends easy-to-implement and regular check-ins about study habits. Doing some helps show students that study skills need to be learned and adjusted over time, and gives them opportunities to share strategies. 

Ask students questions like these at the start or end of class, via a poll, or in a chat messaging platform if you’re teaching online: 

• What’s your favorite spot to study and why? 
• Who do you ask for feedback on your writing? 
• What do you do when you have writer’s block? 
• How have you started preparing for the exam? 
• If you’ve used _______ campus resource, tell us a bit about your experience. 
• What do you do when you don’t have time to complete every page of the assigned reading? 
• Who in your major or this class can you contact for help with the problem set? 

In my own courses, students will bond over shared challenges, and have sometimes exchanged phone numbers so they can meet up and do homework together. 

“Advice for a new instructor”
(and acknowledging student stress)

Brett Palermo, a PhD candidate at Northwestern University, sought teaching advice from experienced instructors. McMurtie compiles that advice, much of which addresses the difficulty of challenging students while acknowledging the stress they face inside and outside the classroom: 

Determine key phrases and checkpoints to build rapport with students while emphasizing your high expectations and provide affirmations of students capabilities.

• I started responding to most student emails with “Thank you for reaching out” as an opening line. 
• Rather than asking “Do you have any questions?” ask “What questions do you have?” Keith Tookey, an associate professor of computer-information systems at Vermont State University, suggests “How can I help?
• When presenting a challenging activity or assignment, explain why you believe students will succeed by providing concrete examples of how they’ve already made progress, demonstrated similar skills with other work, or impressed you in other ways. 

Propel students into the next week, class, or assignment with scaffolding and in-class work time, even if brief. 

• Make even a small part of an upcoming assignment due before the final draft, or give students one question from an exam ahead of time. 
• Save the last five minutes to start something that’s due soon.
  
  In my classes, I want students to be able to see the way our class periods are connected, have an opportunity to ask questions in class, and feel propelled to finish their work rather than start their work when they get home. 

“Reaching generation why”

McMurtie notes that Gen Z may be more motivated when they feel more in control of their education and when it’s clear why they’re doing the work:

Describe why students are doing the work. 

Talk about how the skills and learning are related to future assignments, how they can be applied outside of the classroom, and why they matter in much bigger ways.

Anne Foster, a history professor at Indiana State University, describes why she’s incorporated each reading, and defines a vision for how the work in the class might impact how students navigate the world. How does your coursework prepare students to do things outside the class? Most of us do this with major assignments, but building this into the introduction of lower-stakes work may also be motivating. 

Explain assigned grades, but also make students more responsible for their work.

Kerry O’Grady, director of teaching excellence at Columbia University’s business school, asks students to grade their own assignments with a rubric. She reviews the graded rubrics, marks where she disagrees with students, and focuses on explaining why she assesses those elements differently. 

Connect success and weakness to future work. 

After grading a test, project, report, presentation, etc., look for ways to connect student successes and weaknesses to the future activities and assignments. Did you modify an activity based on how they did on a quiz? Mention that, and show students how their work is influencing the shape of the course. 

“Modeling good reading habits for your students,” “How to help students who lack critical reading skills,” and “Connecting with Gen Z Through Course Design”

McMurtrie investigates Gen Z reading habits, and argues Gen Z may be less prepared for critical reading and less willing to do a lot of reading. She draws on recommendations from faculty and staff for better integrating  and encouraging reading:  

Give students options for what they read. 

• As Kerry L. O’Grady notes, this can increase motivation and investment. This practice also aligns with Universal Design for Learning best practices.
• In my own courses, I’ll do this by assigning one required text, and then give students options I’ve selected (e.g., choose one of two) or ask them to find something that extends our current discussions. When I ask students to contribute readings, I ask them to link to the text in a Google Doc, and then we use that same Google Doc for in-class note taking and follow-up activities. 

Model critical reading strategies for students.

• Eileen G’Sell shows students how to learn more about assigned authors and scholars before asking students to do this work themselves. 
• I will show students how I annotate texts I’m reading for my own work, and explain my own shorthand. I also try to share my process for researching or learning something new at least once during a quarter, modeling where I struggled, what kinds of things I looked up, and how I read laterally. I keep this honest, so in some quarters, I’m showing students how I did research into the best paintable caulk, and in others, I can tailor my demo more to course content. 

Keep a class glossary or list of new words, or ask students to do so. 

Point out when you don’t know the definition of a word or are missing necessary background information. Talk through how you realistically handle this while reading. For example, I don’t always immediately look up the word or concept the first time I’m reading something! 

Build in additional incentives and scaffolding around reading. 

• Sadé Lindsay, an assistant professor of public policy and sociology at Cornell University, gives credit for reading notes that are due before the start of class, which also help her to tailor her lectures. 
• Social annotation assignments are another way to reward engagement with assigned reading. When I assign social annotation before in-class discussions or a major assignment, I can more easily see where we should focus our conversations. I can also make connections between students’ annotations and the work they submit, further demonstrating the purpose of our assigned reading. 

“How to get your students to engage with one another”

McMurtrie takes tips from other faculty on ways to get students collaborating and talking. 

Ask students to identify a comment or idea from another student that they found interesting or persuasive. 

• This could be done at the end of each class, week, or unit, and students should identify the student by name and include a couple sentence explanation of why the comment stood out.
• Heather Dubrow, an English professor at Fordham University, does this via a discussion board, but this could also be done in a Google Doc, or with physical notes around a classroom. 

Build in low-stakes ways for students to make connections to content outside the class. 

• Richy Thein asks students to do a 2-minute flash presentation about an interesting bit related to the class themes or course content. Students might research more about something briefly mentioned in the course content, make a connection to a current event, or find and summarize some supplemental content like a podcast. These could be spaced out throughout the quarter or semester, and give students agency to engage with and reflect on course content in their own way. 
• Thein has also built a small group game for students that results in a championship at the end of class. 

Change up the format of small group discussions.

• In my face-to-face classes, I set up a version of speed dating. Students get into two lines and I give them a prompt. They have 3-5 minutes for each prompt. When time is up, they rotate partners. I emphasize they should start by introducing themselves, and after each round, I ask them to thank their partner. In this format, the stakes are especially low, and even if students have a challenging round, they know they’re changing partners and prompts soon. I think the cheesiness of this works in my favor too, and students get really into the introductions and thank yous.
  
  

  Here are some moments where this can be built in: 

• “Myths” or pain points associated with your field or class (e.g., Do you think that procrastination is bad? What have you heard about how students do in this class? What do you think about ______ latest phenomenon?) 
• Brainstorming for self-directed projects (e.g., What has stood out to you in class so far? What do you want to learn more about? What topics do you consider yourself an expert in?). 
• Study skills and classroom expectations (e.g., What’s your favorite spot on campus to get work done? What do you do when you have writer’s block? How do you study for major exams? What was your best ever class discussion and why?) 

Erin Sella shares more strategies for how to build community in your class without using icebreakers, including leveraging online tools like Slack or Discord and modeling vulnerability to foster connection and engagement.

Teaching and Learning in this Moment

At the start of this year McMurtrie acknowledged that much of what we learned in 2024 is that teaching and learning are increasingly challenging, and 2025 hasn’t been any easier yet. Consider trying one or two of these things, and check in on McMurtrie’s writing when your classes start to feel stale and you want to see how others are dealing with the same challenges.