Weekly Teaching Tips

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 […]

Congratulations on successfully shepherding your students through an unusually stressful academic year. You all, collectively, make this university a wonderful place to learn. Teaching, the work we share, is sometimes joyous and sometimes challenging; it is always important. Students don’t come to us just for course content: they come to us to grow into the […]

And What Should They Remember? Our students are exhausted. (So are we). We’re limping toward the finish line. But if we want our students to remember what they’ve learned with us, they need to feel something more than just relief when the school year comes to a close (Cavanagh, 2016). It’s easy to let a […]

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 […]