Weekly Teaching Tips

Valid Tests 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 a common tool for measuring student achievement, but they’re not easy to write. When you give an exam, you’re gathering data on your students’ progress, so the […]

The Pygmalion Effect In the 1960s, Robert Rosenthal decided to test how experimenters’ unconscious expectations shaped the results of their studies. He took a group of average rats and labeled half of them bright and half of them dull before he assigned them to his experimental psychology students at Harvard. In the students’ experiments, the […]

Time to Check In It’s hard to believe that classes began a month ago, but somehow midterm is already on the horizon, and the deadline to drop a class is coming up in two weeks (on October 12). By this point in the semester, both you and your students need some feedback on their learning. […]

Writing to Learn If you don’t already teach with writing, the suggestion may invoke your deepest fears of avalanches of paper, or hours spent writing comments that no one reads; but in fact we can harness the remarkable power of writing to promote learning without sentencing ourselves to perpetual grading jail. Peter Elbow (1994) insisted […]

Transparent Teaching How often have you read through a batch of student work, wondering how they managed to miss the point of an assignment you’d explained so clearly? Because we’ve all acquired expert blind spots in our respective fields, what seems so obvious to us is often a mystery to our students, who may spend […]

Practicing Your Students’ Names Last week at New Faculty Orientation, a panel of students described their best learning experiences at FSU. Presidential Scholar Olivia McConnell remembered an instructor who made a point of learning and using the names of all fifty students in her class. We asked Olivia to elaborate a bit for this week’s […]

First Impressions As we gear up for the fall semester, students (and maybe faculty) will be feeling nervous, excited, impatient, and more. Classrooms are never purely intellectual spaces, but instead are fraught with emotion that can either hinder or ignite the learning process (Cavanagh, 2016). If the first day of class is just an administrative […]

Pre-term Prep “We teach to change the world,” says Stephen Brookfield. “The hope that undergirds our efforts to help students learn is that doing this will help them act toward each other, and toward their environment, with compassion, understanding, and fairness.” The brief calm before the start of the term is a perfect time to […]

“Compressed” or “intensive” classes, like those in summer B or C, challenge us to distill our courses to their essence. We cannot simply cram everything we usually assign into the shorter time frame (even the most devoted English major is unlikely to finish eight Victorian novels in six weeks, for example.) This means that we […]

Congratulations on successfully shepherding your students through an unusually stressful academic year. You all, collectively, make this university a wonderful place to learn. Teaching, the work we share, is sometimes joyous and sometimes challenging; it is always important. Students don’t come to us just for course content: they come to us to grow into the […]

And What Should They Remember? Our students are exhausted. (So are we). We’re limping toward the finish line. But if we want our students to remember what they’ve learned with us, they need to feel something more than just relief when the school year comes to a close (Cavanagh, 2016). It’s easy to let a […]

Rescue Your Students from Poor Study Skills Before we began teaching, most of us didn’t realize that part of our work would involve helping our students to become better learners. Fortunately, we can do this without having to study cognition, ourselves, and without taking up class time. Stephen Chew, whose research addresses the cognitive basis of effective teaching, […]