Derek Bruff is an educator, author, and higher ed consultant. He directed the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching for more than a decade, where he helped faculty and other instructors develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas in teaching. Bruff consults regularly with faculty and administrators across higher education on issues of teaching, learning, and faculty development, and he is currently an associate director at the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Virginia.

Bruff has written two books, Intentional Tech: Principles to Guide the Use of Educational Technology in College Teaching (West Virginia University Press, 2019) and Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments (Jossey-Bass, 2009), and he is co-author with Annette Vee and Marc Watkins of The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching (W. W. Norton, 2026). He writes a weekly newsletter called Intentional Teaching and produces the Intentional Teaching podcast. Bruff has a PhD in mathematics and has taught math courses at Vanderbilt and Harvard University.

For more information, see Derek’s CV.

The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching

The Norton Guide to AI-Ware Teaching by Annette Vee, Marc Watkins, and Derek Bruff (W. W. Norton, 2026)

Annette Vee, Marc Watkins, and I wrote this book to provide practical strategies for instructors across higher education to respond to the challenges and opportunities that generative AI presents in our teaching. We argue that being AI-aware means being clear on our course learning goals and objectives, understanding something about how AI works, and exploring what our students think about generative AI and how they’re using AI tools. When we’ve done that, we’re in an excellent position to decide what roles generative AI should have (if any) in our teaching.

In the book, we walk readers through a series of steps to help them practice AI-aware teaching, and we share lots of concrete examples of how instructors have adapted their teaching to account for generative AI. Seriously, we have so many examples! A few are drawn from our own teaching, but most have been shared by colleagues across higher education from a variety of disciplines and institutional contexts. No matter what approach to AI you take, from resistance or restriction to exploration or engagement, I think you’ll find examples of AI-aware guidelines and activities and assignments that you can easily adapt to your particular teaching context.

Visit my Books page for information on ordering a copy of The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching, as well as information on my other books.

Intentional Teaching

 

The newsletter comes out most weeks on Thursday or Friday and features updates on my writing and other work, announcements about new podcast episodes, the occasional essay on college and university teaching, and links to useful resources around the web. You can read past issues of the newsletter here.

To subscribe to the newsletter, simply fill out this form and look for the confirmation email in your inbox. As a thank-you for subscribing, you’ll receive my six-page guide to teaching with audio assignments.

Agile Learning

I call this website Agile Learning. It’s not just my professional website; it’s also a blog I’ve been writing since 2008. I write about topics that interest me: educational technology, visual thinking, student motivation, faculty development, how people learn, learning at play, and more. I started blogging back in 2008 with a blog focused on teaching with classroom response systems (“clickers”). I had just finished writing my book on that subject, and I wanted to continue exploring the topic. The blog gave me a venue for doing so, one that invited colleagues new and old to share ideas and perspectives. After two years of blogging about classroom response systems, I started writing about other topics, as well. As a result, this blog has become part of what Gardner Campbell calls my “personal cyberinfrastructure,” a platform for sharing and organizing what I’m learning and representing myself to the world.

Why “Agile Learning”? When talking to faculty about their teaching, I often use the phrase “agile teaching” to describe a certain kind of on-the-fly responsiveness to student learning needs in the classroom. In the educational development work I do, helping faculty and graduate students to become more reflective and intentional teachers, I find that I need a similar kind of agility. I never know what resources, ideas, or experiences I’ll be called upon to share with a colleague as we talk about teaching. As a result, I find myself learning about all sorts of things that might come in handy in a consultation or workshop one day. This blog is where I make sense of these things and document what I’ve learned for later use. So, in a sense, it’s a record of the “agile learning” I do as part of my professional life.

To read the blog, click on the Blog link at the top of this page for the latest posts. Or explore post categories, tags, and archives using the links and drop-downs on the right. Or start with the following posts, which are some of my favorites.

• “It’s time to move past the notion of AI as an answer machine.” May 15, 2026
• “Maps as Knowledge Organizations,” February 15, 2024
• “Assignment Makeovers in the Age of AI: Essay Edition,” July 19, 2023
• “Getting students to do the reading… and talk about it!” November 7, 2022
• “Asynchronous Active Learning with Perusall,” July 13, 2021
• “Active Learning in Hybrid and Physically Distanced Classrooms,” June 29, 2020
• “Building a Better Podcast Assignment,” September 17, 2019
• “Puzzling over the Jigsaw,” January 25, 2019
• “Wise Feedback and Compliment Sandwiches,” April 14, 2018
• “A Crowdsourced Rubric for Evaluating Infographics,” April 11, 2012
• “Backchannel in Education – Nine Uses,” January 21, 2010

Statements made on these web pages do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.