Weekly Teaching Tips

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 […]

Making the Most of the Last Week Believe it or not, there are only three weeks of classes left in the spring semester. Many of us are feeling increasingly frantic, trying to pack too much into the last days of the term. But before you succumb to the impulse to rush through masses of material, […]

Get Your Students’ Best Work There’s a month left in the semester, and the final weeks are always packed with projects, papers, and exams. This time can be intense and stressful for both faculty and students, so it’s helpful to remind ourselves that the purpose of all of this final coursework is to give students […]

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 […]