Weekly Teaching Tips

Rescue Your Students from Poor Study Skills Before we began teaching, most of us didn’t realize that part of our work would involve helping our students to become better learners. Fortunately, we can do this without having to study cognition, ourselves, and without taking up class time. Stephen Chew, whose research addresses the cognitive basis of effective teaching, […]

Does Your Exam Make the Grade? Well-crafted exams benefit students and faculty alike. Students will learn, and consolidate their learning, by taking the test; they get to show how much they’ve learned, as well as where they’re still not grasping things. A well-designed exam gives us a more precise measure of learning, and better feedback […]

The papers, assignments, and projects are starting to pour in, and you may be starting to feel harried. An efficient feedback strategy can help lower the stress. When we’re responding to student work, it’s easy to expend a lot of energy and frustration reacting to the surface features (grammatical errors, citation format… etc.), but commenting on sentence-level errors […]

Avoiding Burnout January probably seems like a long time ago to our students, but many of us are wondering how it’s possible that there’s only about a month left in the semester. You’re not alone in your dismay; but if you’re feeling more overwhelmed than usual, you might want to check for early signs of […]

Take Two It can be hard to regain focus after the break: students’ study routines have been disrupted, and the sense of community may have faded when your class dispersed. To get back on track, you may need to reboot. The first meeting after break is like a second take on the first day of […]

Remember When…? Spring break is a great time for forgetting. Students often return from the hiatus seemingly having forgotten much of what we thought they’d learned in the previous eight weeks. To stave off your students’ forgetting, you might want to exercise their memories next week. Researchers studying a phenomenon called the testing effect have […]

Let Learning (Not a Textbook) Shape Your Course Design The deadline to order textbooks for fall is March 5. Fall probably seems like a low priority when you’re in the throes of midterm; but choosing a text or resources should actually come at the end of your course design process, so it’s worth taking some […]

Last fall was an unusually stressful semester for students. Student services, and faculty, saw higher-than-average numbers of students in distress. Students may still have been feeling unsettled, even before Wednesday’s shooting in a Parkland, Florida high school. This event hits very close to home: many of our students are from South Florida, and some may […]

If we want to give all of our students the opportunity to perform, and to learn, to the best of their ability, we must be attentive to the learning environments we preside over, and the cues we send about achievement. Humans learn most when we stretch to the limits of our abilities, but students can […]

The High Cost of Living with Stereotypes Stereotype threat is the term Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson (1995) gave to the “predicament” we each face at some point, attempting to do well at a task, when poor performance could confirm a negative stereotype about people like us. For example, women taking difficult math tests may […]

Feedback, Early and Often How are your classes going so far? Are your students on track? By this point in the semester, students need some feedback on their progress. They, and we, need to know whether they’re learning what we want them to learn, so we can figure out what to adjust.

Hunting for Misconceptions The first principle of learning, in How Learning Works (a fall CAT reading group selection—you can read the first chapter here) is this: Learning must be built on prior knowledge. When we learn, we are “interpreting incoming information and… perceptions through the lens of…existing knowledge, beliefs, and assumptions.” To learn effectively, students […]