Weekly Teaching Tips

Students’ interactions with us and with each other are essential parts of the invigorating learning environments we work so hard to cultivate. Especially during the pandemic, when many people are feeling isolated, students benefit when we provide opportunities for them to connect. If we’re teaching remotely, these interactions need more planning and communication, but allowing […]

First, a warm welcome to all of our new colleagues joining us at FSU this semester, and a warm welcome back to our returning colleagues. As we begin a new academic year in extraordinary circumstances, some things remain familiar: We’re preparing our courses, writing our syllabi, meeting our new students, and helping them to grow […]

As the term draws to a close, we would usually share tips for creating effective final exams and projects and for wrapping up the learning experiences you’ve created for your students. But this year, we need to hear from you. This summer was the first time many of us taught a semester remotely, start to finish. Shifting to […]

Do your students seem to wait until the last minute to prepare for exams? Do they use ineffective study strategies like rereading, highlighting, or cramming? With two weeks left in Summer A and C, we can give our students a head start, and even help them develop more effective study strategies, by encouraging them to prepare […]

When moving from in-person to online teaching, you may have lost some instructional options you would normally use to help your students learn, but as you become more familiar with the different features available in Canvas and other tech tools, you may find that you’ve gained some useful options as well. The book Small Teaching […]

More than 2000 students who are brand new to FSU — and to college — began their first classes this week. Many of our Summer C students may have been in high school only weeks ago. Most of them are teenagers, born in 2002. They may not know what a syllabus is, or that most […]

Congratulations to those of you who’ve just finished teaching in Summer B, and also to those who’ve reached the middle of Summer A. If you’d like to check in with your students at mid-semester, this tip has advice for helping them to self-assess and for soliciting their feedback on the course so far. Best wishes to those starting […]

The students starting at FSU in Summer C will be attempting to make the already daunting transition to college at the most chaotic and uncertain moment of our lifetimes, so even the most fortunate of them will be under stress. Many students, new and returning, are experiencing or have experienced trauma, so we will best be […]

In response to current events, the Center for the Advancement of Teaching is offering an additional faculty reading group this summer. How To Be An Antiracist Thursdays, 6/11, 6/18, and 6/25 from 12:00-2:00 Ibram X. Kendi, winner of the National Book Award, traces the structural functions of racism, helping readers see how policies and institutions […]

Since we’ve moved to remote teaching, many of our colleagues report that their inboxes are brimming with even more student questions than usual. When those questions are about course content, it can be a wonderful sign of students’ engagement in the course: They want to know more about the subject; they want to dig into […]

Since we moved to remote instruction, there’s been an uptick in reported cases of academic dishonesty. We don’t know whether this jump reflects technological issues, students’ reactions to the new conditions, heightened suspicions on our part, or a combination of factors. But faculty have always had concerns about academic integrity in online settings. Since the […]

As many of us learned this spring, the human(e) dimension of teaching is even more challenging when we lose our physical proximity to our students. We can’t rely as much on tone of voice and eye contact to provide immediacy, or facial expressions (ours and our students’) to convey concern or disengagement. Instead, we have to make […]