Weekly Teaching Tips

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.

The deadline to order textbooks for spring is October 16. It’s tough to think ahead to next semester when it’s barely midterm, but the best time to reflect on your goals for your students is before you choose a text.

All too often, we let a textbook or list of readings determine the content or structure of a course. And why not?

It’s hard to believe that classes began five weeks ago, but somehow midterm is already on the horizon, and the deadline to drop a class is coming up in two weeks (on October 13). By this point in the semester, both you and your students need some feedback on their learning.

Irma mostly spared our trees, but battered the fall calendar, so we’re all scrambling to figure out how to make up lost contact hours. When you’re reassessing your fall syllabus to determine what you might trim or shift, it will be helpful to review or refine your learning goals for the course.

If someone were to peek into your classroom during a typical class session, what would they see? Research suggests (and experience confirms) that they’d see most of us standing at the front of the room doing all the work—writing on the board, describing, explaining, solving problems–and students sitting quietly, taking notes.