Weekly Teaching Tips

Not the Thermometer Most of us would welcome a break from the lingering summer heat, but the climate within our classrooms may not be quite so warm. The social climate, that is. Humans are social mammals, so our learning is profoundly influenced by our social and emotional context. When we feel welcomed and respected, we […]

Wrap it Up All too often, students take an exam or complete a project, check their scores, and then start forgetting the material. The class moves forward, but students who haven’t yet mastered the important concepts rarely go back to identify their weaknesses, and end up building on increasingly shaky foundations. Students will perform better […]

Timely Feedback from Students If you think about teaching as a puzzle, or a series of problems to solve, you’ll never grow bored: no class of students is ever exactly like the last one, and there’s always something to improve, a new idea to incorporate, or an unexpected complication to address as we’re designing learning […]

Feedback, Early and Often How are your classes going so far? Are your students on track? By this point in the semester, students need some feedback on their progress. They, and we, need to know whether they’re learning what we want them to learn, so we can figure out what to adjust and they can […]

And Learning About Learning Few undergraduates arrive at the university with a sophisticated portfolio of study strategies. Students may think learning mostly means memorizing, so they will spend hours going over notes and re-reading (or highlighting every line of) their books. Before they arrive in our classrooms, many of our students have had only limited […]

What Do You Know? Learning, real learning, is a process of change. When we learn, we change our minds. We develop new skills and new perspectives; we approach problems differently; we make different decisions. We’re building new neural connections, changing our brains. Our courses are opportunities for students to grow: the powerful learning experiences we […]

Powerful First Impressions More than seven thousand students will be starting at FSU on Monday: your class may be their first experience in a college classroom. What kind of impression do you want to make? These new students (as well as our returning students, and our transfer students) are probably eager and trepidatious in about […]

Preparing for Fall We hope your summer has been restorative and productive, and that you’re excited for the fresh semester ahead of us. As we gear up for a new academic year, there are some important questions to ask ourselves. Who are our students? On August 26, FSU will welcome a diverse and talented class […]

Making the Most of a Short Semester Congratulations on making it through a challenging academic year. We hope you have plans for some well-deserved rest. But if you’re teaching this summer, you’re probably already refining your plans. “Compressed” or “intensive” classes, like those in summer B or C, challenge us to distill our courses to […]

Congratulations and CAT Survey We’re approaching the end of another academic year! Congratulations on juggling your many responsibilities, and thank you for the care and guidance you provide for your students. Teaching, the work we share, is sometimes joyous and sometimes challenging; it is always important. We help our students to build critical thinking skills […]

What Can We Do With Student Evaluations? The 2019 Spring Course Evaluation window opened last week. Gulp. Most of us have mixed feelings about course evaluations. On one hand, there’s value in surveying students about their perceptions of our teaching. For many of us, evaluations are our main source of information about students’ experiences in […]

Responding to Last-Minute Requests The season of magical thinking has begun. You may have already received some panicked requests from students who are just now realizing that they’re not doing as well in your course as they’d intended. They may hope to salvage their grades with an outstanding, or even impossible, final performance; or they may […]