Weekly Teaching Tips

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 […]

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 […]