Sharing What We Learn From Teaching
Congratulations! Fall 2024 is a wrap and break begins in just a few days. We join your students in appreciating all you do to make FSU the best place to learn.
As the semester winds down, we often reflect on how it went, thinking about what worked well and what we might like to change for next time. We hope you’ll find a way to capture the useful information that comes from reflecting. When we get swept up in the rush to prepare to teach the same course next time, some of our best ideas might be forgotten, so it’s helpful to jot them down at the end of the semester, or better yet, throughout the term in a running list or alongside a copy of the class schedule.
When you’re reflecting on the teaching methods you used this semester, their results, and implications for future courses, you may find you have some strategies worth sharing with a larger community of colleagues. There are many ways to share and discuss your work with others. You might do so informally in your department or program by sharing resources, giving and receiving feedback, having regular brown bag discussions of teaching, etc. You might also consider doing so more publicly by participating in our teaching showcase (advertised below) or a teaching conference in your discipline. You could even design a SoTL project and publish your classroom research.
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Carl Wieman, who also dedicated decades of his career to improving university STEM education, has written about the importance of sharing pedagogical knowledge and making the ways we work on teaching more similar to the ways we do scholarly work in our disciplines. He said, “Teaching at the university level is now widely seen as an isolated activity, with faculty in a department almost never coming to view each other’s classes and seldom discussing or collaborating on teaching activities or methods.” When we treat teaching as a solitary endeavor, he explains that each faculty member works to “invent everything in isolation.” In contrast, just as we benefit from all of the ways we share knowledge in our disciplines, we benefit from working on teaching as a community as well—we develop expertise better together. As Wieman explains, we can build on one another’s “ideas and methods, gaining new information and insights and making far more progress as a result.”
We wish you a wonderful winter break, and we look forward to working with you next semester!
UPCOMING EVENTS
Provost’s Showcase of Scholarly Teaching
Friday, April 4th | 1:00 – 5:00 p.m. | Location TBA | More details on our website
We’re delighted to announce that CAT and FSU Libraries will host the second annual Provost’s Showcase of Scholarly Teaching on April 4th, 2025. This event is an opportunity for you to share your teaching expertise and innovations with the larger campus community. Even if you’ve never thought about presenting at a pedagogical conference before, you likely have strategies and insights that could be of benefit to colleagues. We invite you to apply to host a roundtable discussion or present a poster.
If you would like to submit a proposal, please fill out our Application Form. The application due date is January 31, 2025. We look forward to working with you!