Mid-Semester Check-Ins We can help students learn to be better learners by providing opportunities for them to get an accurate sense of how they are doing in our courses. By now, your students should have already received grades on a variety of course work, but grades are not the only useful data. The middle of […]

There’s Still Time to Recover From a Disappointing Exam It’s an irony of human learning that the less we know the more confident we tend to be; as novices, we don’t yet know how much we don’t know (Nilson, 2013). Students may start a course feeling invincible—until they encounter the first exam. When they perform worse […]

Getting Students to Practice Expert Thinking Nobel-winner Carl Wieman will be speaking at FSU next week; we want to fit in one last message citing his practical advice on teaching, which is applicable across disciplines. We’ve condensed a bit, but the original is available here (and includes both references and strategies for minimizing the burden […]

Helping Students Learn to Collaborate There are many ways to engage students in collaborative learning, from informal small-group conversations to highly structured team-based learning. Regardless of the level of formality or the type of activity students are doing, collaborative learning works best when we and our students agree upon some norms for working together productively. […]