Weekly Teaching Tips

Helping Students Prepare for Exams With finals around the corner, those of us who give exams are thinking about how to help our students do well. Even if you don’t usually build review sessions into your course, you might consider making time to guide the way students prepare for exams. Your guidance can enhance both […]

Structuring Peer Feedback Many courses conclude with final projects, and many of us hope our students are already making good progress on those by this point in the term. But we also know that sometimes students wait until the day before the deadline to start, and then we don’t get to see their best work. […]

Bridging the Break Most of our students (and maybe our colleagues) can’t wait for spring break. We hope you’ll return on the 23rd refreshed and energized, but before we go, we have a week to help students consolidate their learning and hopefully stave off some of the forgetting that often happens over the break. The […]

Adding Structure for Success One of the most effective ways we can use our all-too-limited class time is by giving students guided practice as they learn our course’s most complex or challenging skills and concepts. This process is sometimes called scaffolding, like the temporary support structures construction workers use in the early stages of building. […]

Summer 2026 Course Design Institute To accommodate more schedules, CAT will be offering our summer Course Design Institute twice, once in Summer A and once in Summer B. We’re pleased to invite applications now. Summer 2026 Course Design Institute May 12-15 | 10:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. | Bradley Reading Room, Strozier Library July 13-16 […]

Harnessing Students’ Attention Students learn more effectively when they figure things out for themselves, rather than just receiving information. If a well-designed activity sets them up to “discover” how gravity works, they’ll have a more robust understanding of the concept and be more likely to remember what they’ve learned than if they’d simply heard an […]

Getting Midterm Feedback From Students Last week we talked about giving students feedback that can help them learn, but it’s also useful to get feedback from them. If we think about teaching as an inquiry-driven process, our curiosity about our students and their learning can lead us to improve our practice. As we mentioned last […]

Helping Students Learn With Feedback All of a sudden we’re a quarter of the way through this semester. (No, we can’t believe it either.) The seven-week drop date is coming up on February 20. This means students will be deciding whether they need to drop any courses. In order to make informed decisions, students need […]

Helping Students Help Themselves Even if we mention them in our syllabi, most of us have not had time to visit many of the campus resources available to students. We probably list them at the end of the syllabus, but we may not spend time discussing them since we have so much to accomplish in […]

Learning to Think Like Experts Since we faculty have spent years or decades immersed in our own fields of study or creative work, we may not often think about the conventions and idiosyncrasies of our disciplines. To us, it may seem like our field’s ways of knowing are the ways of knowing, and our field’s […]

Designing for Action If you read our weekly messages, or other resources about teaching, you’ve probably seen the term “active learning” used many times. Simply put, the goal of active learning is for students to actively engage in meaningful work as part of the process of learning. In a classroom, it might involve solving problems, […]