Weekly Teaching Tips

Preparing for Fall We hope your summer has been restorative and productive, and that you’re excited for the fresh semester ahead of us. As we gear up for a new academic year, there are some important questions to ask ourselves. Who are our students? On August 26, FSU will welcome a diverse and talented class […]

Making the Most of a Short Semester Congratulations on making it through a challenging academic year. We hope you have plans for some well-deserved rest. But if you’re teaching this summer, you’re probably already refining your plans. “Compressed” or “intensive” classes, like those in summer B or C, challenge us to distill our courses to […]

Congratulations and CAT Survey We’re approaching the end of another academic year! Congratulations on juggling your many responsibilities, and thank you for the care and guidance you provide for your students. Teaching, the work we share, is sometimes joyous and sometimes challenging; it is always important. We help our students to build critical thinking skills […]

What Can We Do With Student Evaluations? The 2019 Spring Course Evaluation window opened last week. Gulp. Most of us have mixed feelings about course evaluations. On one hand, there’s value in surveying students about their perceptions of our teaching. For many of us, evaluations are our main source of information about students’ experiences in […]

Responding to Last-Minute Requests The season of magical thinking has begun. You may have already received some panicked requests from students who are just now realizing that they’re not doing as well in your course as they’d intended. They may hope to salvage their grades with an outstanding, or even impossible, final performance; or they may […]

Making the Most of the Last Week Believe it or not, there are only three weeks of classes left in the spring semester. Many of us are feeling increasingly frantic, trying to pack too much into the last days of the term. But before you succumb to the impulse to rush through masses of material, […]

Get Your Students’ Best Work There’s a month left in the semester, and the final weeks are always packed with projects, papers, and exams. This time can be intense and stressful for both faculty and students, so it’s helpful to remind ourselves that the purpose of all of this final coursework is to give students […]

Helping Students Remember We hope you’ll return to classes next week refreshed and energized. After a week away (possibly a week full of experiences more intense than classwork), our students, on the other hand, may have begun to forget what they were learning before they left. It can be difficult for them to regain focus […]

Reserving Space for Active Learning The classroom itself is an important situational factor for our teaching, one that can present both obstacles and opportunities. From the type and arrangement of the furniture, to the available analog and digital technologies, the features of a classroom enable or hinder various teaching practices, and they can shape students’ […]

Helping Our Students Believe They Can Improve Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck developed the concept of “mindsets” as she studied the varying ways people cope with failure. Dweck was startled and intrigued by children who found failures to be stimulating opportunities for learning—challenges rather than embarrassing defeats. They relished feedback, as it gave them information to […]

Mid-Semester Check-Ins We can help students learn to be better learners by providing opportunities for them to get an accurate sense of how they are doing in our courses. By now, your students should have already received grades on a variety of course work, but grades are not the only useful data. The middle of […]

There’s Still Time to Recover From a Disappointing Exam It’s an irony of human learning that the less we know the more confident we tend to be; as novices, we don’t yet know how much we don’t know (Nilson, 2013). Students may start a course feeling invincible—until they encounter the first exam. When they perform worse […]