Weekly Teaching Tips

Checking on Students’ Progress Sometimes faculty feel pressure to cover as much content as we can in the amount of time we have. This pressure is often referred to as the “tyranny of content.” But when we’re racing to cover every topic, we may unintentionally create conditions in which it’s difficult for students to really […]

Can You Remember Students’ Names? Through our Thank-a-Professor Program, student panels, focus groups, and everyday conversations, we are fortunate to hear from students about their best learning experiences at FSU. One undergraduate told us a story about how much she appreciated an instructor who made a point of learning the names of all fifty students […]

Beyond Tradition: Taking a Learning-Centered Approach to Teaching Many of us began our teaching careers convinced that good teaching primarily involved accurate, clear, and maybe even entertaining delivery of content. We may have understood course design as assembling a reading list or deciding which textbook chapter to cover each week. Generations of tradition, and often […]

Elements of a Great First Day Thousands of new students will be starting at FSU on Monday. Your class may be their first experience in a college classroom. What kind of first impression do you want to make? What would help them feel excited to learn and welcomed into our community? These new students (as […]

Five Questions for Course Design First, a warm welcome to all of our new colleagues joining us at FSU this semester, and a warm welcome back to our returning colleagues. We hope your preparations for fall are going well, and that you’re looking forward to meeting your new students and helping them to grow intellectually, […]

What We Learn From Reflection Congratulations on another semester of great teaching. We can all be proud of the learning our students did this semester, and now that we’re done (or almost done, if you’re still grading) we get the pleasure of reflecting a little on what we’ve learned, too. Each semester we learn more […]

Planning a Successful Summer Course Congratulations on all of the wonderful teaching you did this semester! Classes end today, and only finals week remains. We hope you’re looking forward to your plans for the summer. If you’re teaching this summer, you may be in the midst of planning a six-week course. “Compressed” or “intensive” classes, […]

Ideas for Improving SPCI Response Rates With only a week of classes left, we’d usually share some ideas for a great last class, but we recently got some good questions about the Student Perception of Courses and Instructors (SPCI) survey. Several colleagues mentioned that response rates have been lower than they’d wish, and they asked […]

Setting Priorities for the Last Few Weeks All of a sudden there are only two weeks of classes left in the semester. How did this happen? Whether it’s a class session or a whole term, when we feel like we’re running out of time to teach, it can be tempting to speed up the pace […]

Teaching Students How To Study Effectively You’re probably already seeing lots of tired faces in your classes lately, and the season of all-nighters is almost upon us. Many of our students may put off studying until exam week, and many will use time-honored but ineffective strategies like rereading, highlighting, and cramming. With the end of […]

Clarifying the Qualities of Successful Work Those of us who assign final projects (papers, presentations, videos, reports, etc.) have probably all had the experience of feeling perplexed by a lackluster batch of student work. Sometimes we may wonder if students even really knew what they were trying to accomplish. While the issue may sometimes be […]

Recovering After Absences At this point in the semester, you may be noticing an increase in absences or missing assignments. There are plenty of reasons: Students may be feeling overextended, and they often have trouble managing competing priorities. They may stop showing up because they’re stressed. Viruses are still making the rounds as well. After […]