Weekly Teaching Tips

Helping Students Remember We hope you’ll return to classes next week refreshed and energized. After a week away (possibly a week full of experiences more intense than classwork), our students, on the other hand, may have begun to forget what they were learning before they left. It can be difficult for them to regain focus […]

Reserving Space for Active Learning The classroom itself is an important situational factor for our teaching, one that can present both obstacles and opportunities. From the type and arrangement of the furniture, to the available analog and digital technologies, the features of a classroom enable or hinder various teaching practices, and they can shape students’ […]

Helping Our Students Believe They Can Improve Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck developed the concept of “mindsets” as she studied the varying ways people cope with failure. Dweck was startled and intrigued by children who found failures to be stimulating opportunities for learning—challenges rather than embarrassing defeats. They relished feedback, as it gave them information to […]

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. […]

Small Changes That Create Accountability and Motivation We’re doing our homework for Carl Wieman’s visit on February 14th, and this week, we’d like to share his advice for a perennial problem across disciplines: getting students to come to class prepared. The CWSEI website recommends asking students to get their first experience with course content independently, […]

Teaching for Social Justice FSU is fortunate to have multiple internationally known scholars visiting campus to talk about teaching this spring. Vishanthie Sewpaul, Professor of Social Work at the University of Stavanger, Norway, and Professor Emeritus at the University of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa, will be a guest scholar later this month, co-sponsored by the […]

Setting the Tone for a Productive Classroom In anticipation of Nobel-winner and 2003 U.S. Professor of the Year Carl Wieman’s visit to FSU on February 14, we’d like to share more of his thoughts on teaching. In “Basic Instructor Habits to Keep Students Engaged,” excerpted below, Wieman shares practical suggestions about both what to do […]

Getting Students Ready to Learn We hope you had a restorative break, and resume your teaching with energy and optimism for the new year and new semester. FSU will have an exciting guest this spring: Carl Wieman, a Nobel laureate in Physics who has spent decades studying how to improve university education, will visit on […]

Getting Better All the Time Congratulations on making a success of a tough semester. Thank you for the care and compassion you showed your students—you kept them motivated to persist, and they acknowledged your dedication in hundreds of thank-yous. We can all be proud of the learning our students did this fall; and now that […]