Weekly Teaching Tips

When moving from in-person to online teaching, you may have lost some instructional options you would normally use to help your students learn, but as you become more familiar with the different features available in Canvas and other tech tools, you may find that you’ve gained some useful options as well. The book Small Teaching […]

More than 2000 students who are brand new to FSU — and to college — began their first classes this week. Many of our Summer C students may have been in high school only weeks ago. Most of them are teenagers, born in 2002. They may not know what a syllabus is, or that most […]

Congratulations to those of you who’ve just finished teaching in Summer B, and also to those who’ve reached the middle of Summer A. If you’d like to check in with your students at mid-semester, this tip has advice for helping them to self-assess and for soliciting their feedback on the course so far. Best wishes to those starting […]

The students starting at FSU in Summer C will be attempting to make the already daunting transition to college at the most chaotic and uncertain moment of our lifetimes, so even the most fortunate of them will be under stress. Many students, new and returning, are experiencing or have experienced trauma, so we will best be […]

In response to current events, the Center for the Advancement of Teaching is offering an additional faculty reading group this summer. How To Be An Antiracist Thursdays, 6/11, 6/18, and 6/25 from 12:00-2:00 Ibram X. Kendi, winner of the National Book Award, traces the structural functions of racism, helping readers see how policies and institutions […]

Since we’ve moved to remote teaching, many of our colleagues report that their inboxes are brimming with even more student questions than usual. When those questions are about course content, it can be a wonderful sign of students’ engagement in the course: They want to know more about the subject; they want to dig into […]

Since we moved to remote instruction, there’s been an uptick in reported cases of academic dishonesty. We don’t know whether this jump reflects technological issues, students’ reactions to the new conditions, heightened suspicions on our part, or a combination of factors. But faculty have always had concerns about academic integrity in online settings. Since the […]

As many of us learned this spring, the human(e) dimension of teaching is even more challenging when we lose our physical proximity to our students. We can’t rely as much on tone of voice and eye contact to provide immediacy, or facial expressions (ours and our students’) to convey concern or disengagement. Instead, we have to make […]

If the unexpected switch to remote teaching was your first experience moving a course online, you may have discovered that the exams, projects, performances, or other graded assignments that your students normally do in your face-to-face class don’t work as well (or don’t work at all) online. As you’re deciding how to adjust for summer, […]

Congratulations on making it through a semester like no other. Thank you for your flexibility, your dedication, and your compassion for your students. We hope finals will be relatively painless for both you and your students, and that the close of this rocky semester is as smooth as it is welcome. Last week, we began […]

As the last week of classes approaches, we would ordinarily suggest wrap-up activities to help consolidate your students’ memories of the most important learning they did in your courses. But in future years, when students look back at this semester, it seems likely that they will remember the disruptions and the emotions most of all. We […]

Since this semester already seems to have lasted several years, it may be difficult to remember what we originally expected our students would learn by the end of the term. Before we were derailed by a pandemic, we had high aspirations for how our courses would help our students to develop intellectually, professionally, and personally. […]