Weekly Teaching Tips

The opening of a new semester, full of promise and potential, may not seem like the best moment to give a test…  but it’s worth taking time in the first week of class to gather some baseline data on what your students already know or can do.

Happy New Year! There’s a fresh semester ahead of us. If one of your resolutions is to build an even more galvanizing learning experience for your students, your syllabus–the learning guide for your course–deserves a fresh take, too.

“We teach to change the world,” says Stephen Brookfield. Such meaningful work will not be easy, he continues. It requires rigorous critical reflection on our practice, and a refusal to teach “innocently”: “teaching innocently means thinking that we’re always understanding exactly what it is that we’re doing, and what effect we’re having.”

As you brace yourself to tackle mountains of papers, projects, or exams, here are a few suggestions to make grading a little easier:

A good rubric can save you time and frustration. When we’re evaluating student work, it’s easy to get distracted by the surface features (formatting, sentence structure…the list goes on).

By some estimates, up to 40% of students suffer from test anxiety; around 20% experience anxiety severe enough to compromise their academic performance. A modicum of anxiety spurs focus and motivation; but severe test anxiety is associated with reduced working memory, confused reasoning, increased mistakes, and (no surprise) lower test scores.

This 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. The outpouring was astonishing: hundreds of heartfelt messages attest to your students’ appreciation and esteem.

This has been a tough semester for many of our students: Irma was just the beginning. Students are stressed, and some are grieving. Soon they’ll be swamped in exams and final papers; you’ll be buried in grading–but your course deserves a denouement that isn’t frantic or underwhelming.

Why don’t we treat the last five minutes of class more like the finale of a gripping movie? Nobody packs up to leave the theater minutes before the  big reveal. The last few minutes can shape what students take away from  the whole lesson, like an unexpected twist can alter our understanding of a film, but too often they’re lost in a shuffle of announcements.

It’s hard to believe, but finals week is a month away. Your students may be feeling anxious already, since final exams tend to have a disproportionately-significant impact on students’ grades.

You may not be thrilled about exams, either: most faculty have had minimal preparation in the craft of designing tests.

Why are we, and our students, so distressed by their mistakes? Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel (2014) attribute education’s fixation with correctness to B.F. Skinner, who—convinced that mistakes result from poor instruction– advocated “errorless learning” methods.

We’ve probably all heard this plaint: “I studied so hard for the test. And I still got a C! How is that possible?”

One explanation is a phenomenon known as the “fluency illusion” or “illusion of comprehension” – an illusion that we may unwittingly perpetuate. “Students are afflicted with this malady on a regular basis for some good reasons,” explains Marilla Svinicki (2004).

All too often, students take a midterm (or a final exam), check their scores, and then start forgetting the material. The class moves forward; students who haven’t yet mastered the important concepts rarely go back to identify their weaknesses, but end up building on increasingly shaky foundations.