Weekly Teaching Tips

At this point in the semester, when we’re slogging through stacks of papers and projects, it’s easy to lose sight of the purpose of grading. It’s not, in fact, to make ourselves and our students suffer. Our students’ final work should provide evidence of the learning they’ve done with us this fall. Students who have […]

What’s Changed? When we learn—really learn, rather than temporarily storing something in our memories—we change our brains. We develop and strengthen neural connections. We may also change our perceptions, our behaviors, our beliefs, our decisions. Thinking about this change, and thinking about our thinking, is a critical part of learning, so reflection is an essential […]

Your Students are Grateful The value of our connections and community is heightened this year, so we want to remind you how much your students appreciate all you do for them. Last fall, CAT started a Thank-A-Professor program, to help your students express their gratitude for you and the learning opportunities you create for them. […]

Planning to Wrap Up After this turbulent fall term, when we’re just trying to hang on until the holidays, it may be hard to remember the aspirations we had for our courses, back in August. We wanted to impart valuable knowledge and insights, to help students gain concepts and skills they could carry with them […]

Humans are fascinating social animals, fragile alone and powerful together. We’re wired to care deeply about how others perceive us, so our learning opportunities are shaped by our sense of belonging (Gilbert, 2018; Hammond, 2015; Steele and Aronson, 1995). In order to learn deeply and stretch intellectually, people need to feel safe, both physically and […]

Teaching After Tragedy Our community has lost a student and a faculty member to violence. The effects of this loss will be many and enduring. At this point, we can only attempt to manage the impact of these events upon the learning we hope to cultivate in our classes, even as we strive to process […]

From Students to Citizens After a week of racist and anti-Semitic violence in Kentucky and Pittsburgh, we were grateful for President Thrasher’s response. “At times like these,” he concluded, “we are reminded of our strength as an institution of higher learning. No matter what our differences — whether race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation […]

Antidotes to Mid-semester Malaise This has been an unusually stressful semester so far: a major hurricane and the upcoming election, on top of all the challenges of balancing work and life in academia… and even in the best of times, it’s common to hit a slump in the middle of a semester. Students get weighed […]

Designing for Academic Honesty Just like we are, our students are struggling to regain their focus and catch up on their work after a major disruption. With exams and projects looming (or rescheduled), and 150 minutes to make up in each course, they’re probably feeling overwhelmed. The weeks (and the learning) before the deluge may […]

Dealing With the Aftermath of Michael We hope you’re all safe, and beginning to recover from your experiences last week. Our thoughts are with our colleagues and their students at the Panama City campus. Those of us on the Tallahassee campus are fortunate to be able to return to classes this week, even though our minds […]

Valid Tests Evaluating our students’ learning is one of the most important tasks we undertake in our teaching, and it’s also one of the most difficult. Exams are a common tool for measuring student achievement, but they’re not easy to write. When you give an exam, you’re gathering data on your students’ progress, so the […]

The Pygmalion Effect In the 1960s, Robert Rosenthal decided to test how experimenters’ unconscious expectations shaped the results of their studies. He took a group of average rats and labeled half of them bright and half of them dull before he assigned them to his experimental psychology students at Harvard. In the students’ experiments, the […]