Weekly Teaching Tips

Do Our Students See Themselves in Our Courses? Black History Month is a great opportunity to showcase the work of Black scholars and luminaries in each of our disciplines, from entrepreneurship to engineering, from literature to law. Some colleagues choose Black chemists, poets, doctors, sociologists, etc. whose scholarship they admire and highlight their work, names, […]

Formative Feedback In a recent tip, we talked about the importance of practice, but practice alone won’t move students toward mastery; they also need feedback. Practice doesn’t necessarily make perfect—practice makes permanent. Without feedback, students risk inscribing inefficient habits and ineffective approaches. (For example, many of them have practiced mistaken study habits for so long […]

Giving Good Instructions Imagine you’re a nineteen-year-old college student, and your course syllabus contains the following project description: Write a paper on the reason(s) the U.S. invaded Granada and be sure to form conclusions on your own after synthesizing your sources. Was the invasion justified? Why or why not? How did the media treat the […]

What Role Do Questions Play in Your Teaching? The everyday work of a scholar involves posing questions that matter in your discipline. Curiosity is part of the love of your field that got you to where you are today. If you can help your students to see their learning this way, too—as a process of […]

Creating Opportunities for Practice Any effective learning experience provides students with opportunities to develop their knowledge and skills through practice. In some courses, it’s obvious what students should practice: playing the violin, drawing patients’ blood, speaking a language, etc. In other courses, it may be less obvious what students should practice. We may not yet […]

Finding Out What Students Know We hope the first week went smoothly and your classes are off to an exciting start. Add/drop ended yesterday; rosters (we hope) have stabilized; and now we’re getting to know our students. In addition to learning more about our students as people, we also need to get a sense of what […]

A Promising Syllabus – and a Syllabus Clinic Today 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. A “promising syllabus ” (like the one here) invites […]

Gratitude The stream of Thank-A-Professor submissions is still flowing in, so instead of reflecting on how the semester went (you can read last year’s message here), we can’t resist sharing more of the messages your students sent. Much of the incredible work you do isn’t acknowledged through this program; next year we’ll advertise more widely, […]

What’s the Point of Grading? At this point in the semester, when we’re slogging through stacks of papers and projects, it’s easy to lose sight of the purpose of grading. It’s not, in fact, to make ourselves and our students suffer. Our students’ final work should provide evidence of the learning they’ve done with us […]

Why Your Students Are Grateful Students submitted more than 700 Thank-A-Professor tributes this fall. The outpouring of gratitude should remind us all of the value of our work. Your students appreciate the time and care you invest in them: they thank you for helping them develop into wise, compassionate adults and knowledgeable professionals. Submissions are […]

Bringing the Semester to a Close After the flurry of deadlines, students often forget much of what we—and they—thought they learned in college courses, especially when they mostly memorize material and“parrot it back” for exams. Rather than trying to rush through additional material at the end of the term, it will be more useful, in […]

Do Your Students Know How They’re Doing? The end of the semester is approaching rapidly. The exams and projects coming up in the next few weeks should show us how much our students have learned this fall. Hopefully we’ve designed good instruments, so that we can gather sound evidence of our students’ learning.  And hopefully […]