Prof Talk Pod, hosted by Dr. Becky Achen, shares practical strategies, real-world examples, and conversations for college professors and higher education professionals. Explore college teaching, student engagement, course design, assessment, generative AI, educational technology, faculty development, academic careers, leadership, and teaching innovation. Each episode offers useful ideas to strengthen your teaching, navigate change, and grow professionally.
Using the Jigsaw Method to Promote Active Learning
In this episode of the Prof Talk Pod, host Becky Achen shares the jigsaw method, a simple active learning strategy she uses to increase student engagement and reduce social loafing. Drawing on her early teaching influences at the University of Kansas and John Bean’s Engaging Ideas, she explains how this activity moves students from discussing answers to teaching peers, which can improve understanding and retention. Becky walks through a classroom example using social media platforms, detailing how students first work in “expert” groups to research one platform and then re-form into mixed groups to teach one another. She discusses logistical tips for uneven or large classes, ways to adapt the method online, and why she uses it a few times per semester.
John Bean Engaging Ideas (https://www.wiley.com/en-jp/shop/general-introductory-education/engaging-ideas-the-professor)
1 Oct 2026
Procrastination, Avoiding Judgment, and Structuring Projects
In this solo episode of the Prof Talk Pod, host Becky Achen challenges faculty to avoid judging procrastination by recognizing similar patterns in their own teaching, research, and service workloads, and suggests building connection by sharing “humanness” and offering grace alongside guidance. Becky offers practical strategies to support student time management, including better sequencing of major assessments, breaking big projects into checkpoints with feedback, providing weekly work plans in Canvas, using no-point draft assignments to populate to-do lists, encouraging self-imposed deadlines in upper-level courses, modeling planning behaviors, and explicitly reviewing assignments and rubrics to clarify expectations and workload.
17 Sept 2026
AI Use Case: Integrating Industry News Into Your Courses
In this episode of the Prof Talk Pod, Becky Achen and co-host Katie share a practical AI use case for staying current in your field and bringing timely, relevant examples into class. Katie explains how she uses ChatGPT Plus Projects and the Scheduled Tasks feature to generate weekly news briefings tailored to specific courses (e.g., sustainability reporting/ESG, tax, accounting) using keywords, preferred credible sources, and prompts that produce headlines, summaries, why it matters, alignment to her syllabus, a teachability score, discussion questions, and activity ideas. They compare Projects with custom GPTs (including memory and organization differences) and note ChatEDU constraints. Becky and Katie discuss how curated current events can improve student buy-in, engagement, and authenticity through routines like “headline huddles,” and encourage iterating prompts and starting with personal use cases.
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