Weekly Teaching Tips

Teaching Across Cultures It’s International Education Month at FSU, so we’re thinking about teaching across cultures. You’ve probably heard the anecdote about two fish who greet each other as they swim. “How’s the water today?” asks one. “Water? What’s that?” queries the second fish. Our cultural perspective is our water; it’s also the lens through […]

Designing an Exam that Makes the Grade Somehow we’ve passed the midpoint of the semester, so it’s already time to start thinking about… finals? Evaluating our students’ learning is one of the most important tasks we undertake in our teaching, and it’s also one of the most difficult. Exams are common tools for measuring student […]

What’s the Use of Office Hours? Chickering and Gamson (1987) put positive interactions with faculty at the top of their list of Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education. “Frequent student-faculty contact in and out of classes is the most important factor in student motivation and involvement,” they explained. “Faculty concern helps students get […]

Antidotes to Mid-semester Malaise Students report that the excitement of the new semester has worn off, and “exam season” is well underway. Most students have at least one major exam or project due each week, until the end of the term. They’re starting to look exhausted. Faculty are looking weary, too: the deadlines and grading […]

Monitoring Microaggressions Learning is fostered in conditions of mutual respect — amongst students, and between students and faculty. Slights, stereotypes, or low expectations, even if they’re unintentional, can erode that sense of respect, and inhibit learning, so it’s important for faculty to manage interpersonal and intergroup tensions in our classrooms. We can make a start […]

Not the Thermometer Most of us would welcome a break from the lingering summer heat, but the climate within our classrooms may not be quite so warm. The social climate, that is. Humans are social mammals, so our learning is profoundly influenced by our social and emotional context. When we feel welcomed and respected, we […]

Wrap it Up All too often, students take an exam or complete a project, check their scores, and then start forgetting the material. The class moves forward, but students who haven’t yet mastered the important concepts rarely go back to identify their weaknesses, and end up building on increasingly shaky foundations. Students will perform better […]

Timely Feedback from Students If you think about teaching as a puzzle, or a series of problems to solve, you’ll never grow bored: no class of students is ever exactly like the last one, and there’s always something to improve, a new idea to incorporate, or an unexpected complication to address as we’re designing learning […]

Feedback, Early and Often How are your classes going so far? Are your students on track? By this point in the semester, students need some feedback on their progress. They, and we, need to know whether they’re learning what we want them to learn, so we can figure out what to adjust and they can […]

And Learning About Learning Few undergraduates arrive at the university with a sophisticated portfolio of study strategies. Students may think learning mostly means memorizing, so they will spend hours going over notes and re-reading (or highlighting every line of) their books. Before they arrive in our classrooms, many of our students have had only limited […]

What Do You Know? Learning, real learning, is a process of change. When we learn, we change our minds. We develop new skills and new perspectives; we approach problems differently; we make different decisions. We’re building new neural connections, changing our brains. Our courses are opportunities for students to grow: the powerful learning experiences we […]

Powerful First Impressions More than seven thousand students will be starting at FSU on Monday: your class may be their first experience in a college classroom. What kind of impression do you want to make? These new students (as well as our returning students, and our transfer students) are probably eager and trepidatious in about […]