Weekly Teaching Tips

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 […]

Time to Check In It’s hard to believe that classes began a month ago, but somehow midterm is already on the horizon, and the deadline to drop a class is coming up in two weeks (on October 12). By this point in the semester, both you and your students need some feedback on their learning. […]

Writing to Learn If you don’t already teach with writing, the suggestion may invoke your deepest fears of avalanches of paper, or hours spent writing comments that no one reads; but in fact we can harness the remarkable power of writing to promote learning without sentencing ourselves to perpetual grading jail. Peter Elbow (1994) insisted […]

Transparent Teaching How often have you read through a batch of student work, wondering how they managed to miss the point of an assignment you’d explained so clearly? Because we’ve all acquired expert blind spots in our respective fields, what seems so obvious to us is often a mystery to our students, who may spend […]

Practicing Your Students’ Names Last week at New Faculty Orientation, a panel of students described their best learning experiences at FSU. Presidential Scholar Olivia McConnell remembered an instructor who made a point of learning and using the names of all fifty students in her class. We asked Olivia to elaborate a bit for this week’s […]

First Impressions As we gear up for the fall semester, students (and maybe faculty) will be feeling nervous, excited, impatient, and more. Classrooms are never purely intellectual spaces, but instead are fraught with emotion that can either hinder or ignite the learning process (Cavanagh, 2016). If the first day of class is just an administrative […]

Pre-term Prep “We teach to change the world,” says Stephen Brookfield. “The hope that undergirds our efforts to help students learn is that doing this will help them act toward each other, and toward their environment, with compassion, understanding, and fairness.” The brief calm before the start of the term is a perfect time to […]

“Compressed” or “intensive” classes, like those in summer B or C, challenge us to distill our courses to their essence. We cannot simply cram everything we usually assign into the shorter time frame (even the most devoted English major is unlikely to finish eight Victorian novels in six weeks, for example.) This means that we […]