Teaching in the Age of the Easy Button: Motivating Students to Embrace Desirable Difficulties and the Slow Work of Learning Dr. Betsy Barre, Assistant Provost and Executive Director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching at Wake Forest University Description In a recent Substack post, the cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham argued that there seems to be widespread agreement about the problem LLMs pose for education. Most educators recognize that “learning is a product of engaging in mental work,” that “students may use AI to replace that mental work,” and that if they do so, they are unlikely to learn. In September’s TLL Speaker Series Presentation, Dr. Betsy Barre, Assistant Provost and Executive Director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching at Wake Forest University, will help us think about how to confront this now familiar challenge. Drawing on recent research and TLL data about MIT students, Dr. Barre will explore the way time pressures, performance-oriented goals, and inexperience with challenging academic tasks can each lead students to lean too heavily on artificial intelligence to complete their out-of-class work. She will then offer practical strategies to help instructors address the threat posed by AI to student learning. Participants will leave with concrete, evidence-based approaches to make challenging work both accessible and compelling, and a framework for designing out-of-class learning experiences that reward depth over efficiency. About the Speaker Betsy Barre is Assistant Provost and Executive Director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching at Wake Forest University, where she's led faculty development since 2018. A nationally recognized voice in higher education, she's been featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education and on NPR, and she co-developed the widely used Course Workload Estimator. Trained as a comparative ethicist, she also holds an affiliate faculty appointment in the Department for the Study of Religion. All are welcome! Please register on Zoom