Announcing "The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching "

Coming Summer 2026: A new book of practical strategies to make the best choices about AI for your courses

“Do you think Generative AI is good or bad for writing?” a faculty member asked me at a recent workshop. Some writing teachers would have a confident answer to that question—but I don’t. I replied: “Both? It depends.” The drawbacks of AI are apparent to anyone who’s taught writing over the last couple of years, including the fact that AI has offered tempting shortcuts to students and subsequently created more work for teachers. The positives are more elusive to those who haven’t dived into the tech, but I can attest to AI being helpful for students learning genre conventions, reading widely, exploring research, editing, language-learning, and working through complex ideas.

So, it depends.

This is why I’ve advocated for AI awareness: teachers knowing what AI is capable of so we can successfully steer our courses and students to good learning outcomes. Like a lot of technologies, AI can be useful and dangerous at the same time. The more teachers know about how to use it well, or to avoid it when it gets in the way of learning, the better. GenAI is out there and most students are using it, although they’re not necessarily using it to cheat and they have mixed feelings about it.

There are no easy responses to AI in education. In this newsletter, I’ve tried to be honest about that—while still providing resources and flexible approaches that address both AI’s benefits and its drawbacks. Many of you—from high school teachers to writing center directors to first-time teachers of composition—have reached out to me to thank me for that honesty and flexibility. I’m glad it’s been helpful! It’s a challenging as well as exciting time to be teaching in higher ed, and the journey is better with company.

So, I’m thrilled to announce that I’m now at work with Marc Watkins and Derek Bruff on a new book to support instructors, The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching! You may already know Marc’s writing on AI for The Chronicle of Higher Education, his Substack, Rhetorica, or his work with the University of Mississippi AI Institute for Teachers. He’s a knowledgeable, thoughtful, and pragmatic voice on AI, writing, and higher ed, plus an award-winning teacher of online and hybrid courses. I cited Derek Bruff’s work on AI in workshops before I met him, and am grateful for the expertise he brings to this project: assessment, STEM education, ed tech, and beyond. This project will also rely on the keen editorial direction of Erica Wnek, who’s been behind this newsletter, many of W. W. Norton’s composition and rhetoric books including Everyone’s an Author, and more. She’s joining forces with Betsy Twitchell, Editor in Chief of Science at W. W. Norton, who oversees college textbooks for psychology, biology, chemistry, geology, and more. Marc, Derek, and I will be taking turns posting to this newsletter under its revised name AI & How We Teach, reflecting our expanded, collective expertise. If you’ve appreciated my voice in this space, you’ll love the additional guidance from these great writers and teachers!

How will The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching be useful to you?

The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching will provide practical strategies to navigate the uncertain and rapidly shifting terrain of AI, empowering college instructors to make choices about AI that are best for your courses and your students. In it, we’ll showcase tools, strategies, examples, and knowledge to help you redesign your course to be AI aware. Pragmatic and informed by research, we cut through the hype about AI to help you decide how you want to integrate AI in your course—or steer around it.

One of our early reviewers, Susan Ray, Associate Professor of English at Delaware County Community College, described the guide as:

a foundational, faculty-centered guide that cuts through the noise about AI in higher education, offering instructors both a conceptual framework and concrete entry points. It avoids the overwrought binary of boosters versus doomers (to quote Emily M. Bender) and instead gives us a shared language—embracing, resisting, and experimenting—for thinking through how AI fits into both our classrooms and disciplines.

Because we want this guide to be useful for instructors across the curriculum and across a spectrum of AI engagement, the guide offers:

• Practical Organization: Moving through planning, designing, and teaching an AI-aware course, the structure of the guide will help teachers implement new, effective strategies immediately.

• Flexible Guidance: Instructors can explore flexible, varied options for adapting their teaching to address AI’s impact on student habits and learning through frameworks that make AI-aware teaching both attainable and sustainable.

• A Focus on Learning Outcomes: Compelling research, thorough examples, and practical strategies empower instructors to make changes that best support their students.

• Useful Applications: Example assignments, activities, assessments, and course policies show concrete applications of AI-aware teaching.

• Student voices: The incorporation of students’ thoughts on how they’re using AI, how they wish they could use AI, and what concerns and delights them about AI can help to inform AI-aware teaching.

We want this guide to help build your confidence and agency with AI. We know teaching is most exciting when we keep students at the center!

You may wonder: why read a guide on AI when the terrain is so rapidly changing? How AI affects teaching and learning environments in the future will be impacted by new technological developments, lawsuits, regulations, social acceptance and resistance movements, supply chains, and international politics. This guide, which will go to press in Summer 2026, will inevitably reference technologies or capabilities that have shifted by the time you are reading it.

And yet, how learning works won’t change. The key principles of teaching and learning are well-established. You are a capable teacher, and you are teaching in a new situation. We know the general outlines of what AI can do and what it might be capable of in the future. So, this new situation doesn't have to be overwhelming. You can use the concepts of good teaching that you already know—or that you will learn through the guide—in order to respond effectively to this brave new world.

You may also wonder: how can I find the time to keep up with all this technological change and its impact on my courses? We are keenly aware how little time many of us have to respond thoughtfully to generative AI in our teaching. That’s why we’ve designed this guide with practical and actionable steps you can take now. Whether you are a graduate student teaching a course for the first time, a full professor with decades of teaching experience, or an adjunct faculty member teaching multiple online sections without much autonomy, the strategies and examples within The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching are designed for you. Above all, we believe that the most impactful and powerful force in any learning environment isn’t a computer—it’s you, an engaged and informed educator.

On that note, we'd love to hear from you:

You can sign up to be notified when The Guide publishes here. The ebook will be available for free to W. W. Norton adopters, also available for purchase in ebook or print.

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