Weekly Teaching Tips

Ideas for Improving SPCI Response Rates With only a week of classes left, we’d usually share some ideas for a great last class, but we recently got some good questions about the Student Perception of Courses and Instructors (SPCI) survey. Several colleagues mentioned that response rates have been lower than they’d wish, and they asked […]

Setting Priorities for the Last Few Weeks All of a sudden there are only two weeks of classes left in the semester. How did this happen? Whether it’s a class session or a whole term, when we feel like we’re running out of time to teach, it can be tempting to speed up the pace […]

Teaching Students How To Study Effectively You’re probably already seeing lots of tired faces in your classes lately, and the season of all-nighters is almost upon us. Many of our students may put off studying until exam week, and many will use time-honored but ineffective strategies like rereading, highlighting, and cramming. With the end of […]

Clarifying the Qualities of Successful Work Those of us who assign final projects (papers, presentations, videos, reports, etc.) have probably all had the experience of feeling perplexed by a lackluster batch of student work. Sometimes we may wonder if students even really knew what they were trying to accomplish. While the issue may sometimes be […]

Recovering After Absences At this point in the semester, you may be noticing an increase in absences or missing assignments. There are plenty of reasons: Students may be feeling overextended, and they often have trouble managing competing priorities. They may stop showing up because they’re stressed. Viruses are still making the rounds as well. After […]

Gathering Midsemester Feedback When teaching, it’s natural to wonder how the course is going for students. We might wonder what’s working for them and what’s not or whether they are really learning what we hope they will. Sometimes a few vocal students can make it seem like everyone’s “getting it” (or not getting it), so […]

Learning from Claude Steele To celebrate Black History Month this year, we’re featuring renowned scholar and educator Claude Steele, whose social psychology research and higher education leadership has inspired generations of university faculty. Steele holds a B.A. in Psychology from Hiram College, an M.A. in Social Psychology from The Ohio State University, and a Ph.D. […]

Planning Active Class Sessions One of the most common inquiries we get from colleagues is how to spend class time effectively. There are many ways to get students engaged in learning during class, and deciding how to make the most of their time and attention involves reflecting on your priorities for their learning as the […]

Encouraging Questions Have you ever stood in front of a class and asked, “Are there any questions?” only to be met with silence and lowered eyes, or only to receive questions about something unrelated, like the word count requirement of a paper or the date of an exam? It’s probably happened to all of us. […]

Exam & Assignment Wrappers By this point in the semester, your students have probably completed graded work and gotten some feedback, so they have a sense of their progress toward the learning goals of the course. After students take an exam or turn in a project, they usually focus on the score they got and […]

What Makes a Course Design Effective? Much of the work of teaching happens before we enter the classroom. Course design is the process through which we plan what students should learn, what they should do in order to learn it, and what methods we’ll use to collect evidence of their progress. Whether a whole course […]

Why Developmental Stages Matter for Teaching If you’ve ever felt frustrated that your students seem to think in black and white, or that they seem reluctant to do their own reasoning and expect you to provide the “right” answers to every question, you might be reassured to know that what you’re noticing is not intellectual […]