Weekly Teaching Tips

Scaffolding: Providing Support as Students Learn In the initial phases of building, construction workers need temporary support structures called scaffolding to accomplish their work. Similarly, our students need support and guidance as they learn complex concepts and skills that they are unlikely to master on their own. Scaffolding is the temporary structure we provide to […]

Exploring the Effects of Our Teaching If we think about teaching as an inquiry-driven process, our curiosity about our students, and about learning, can lead us to improve our practice. Among the many useful questions we can pose, this one is essential: How do I know whether my students are learning what I intend for […]

Inviting Students to Office Hours It’s gratifying when students perform well on exams and projects, but if a few of them are struggling, there’s still time to get them on track before midterm. For most of us, office hours seem like the best place to provide individual support to students and to find out what […]

What Can Students and Faculty Learn from Exams? Exams are some of the most common tools for gathering evidence of how much students have learned, but they can also be opportunities to learn, both for students and for us. For students, exams can be opportunities to learn when we assign exam wrappers or other reflections […]

Giving & Getting More Frequent Feedback When many of us were undergraduates, the graded work in many our courses consisted of only a midterm and a final, but a course that has only two exams is one in which most students don’t get the practice and feedback necessary for learning. In such courses, students may have […]

Welcoming Students into Our Disciplines Since the first week of classes didn’t provide the welcome we might have wanted, many of us spent the last week getting our classes back on track and establishing a welcoming and productive classroom community. In addition to the warm welcome we provide on a personal level, it’s also helpful […]

Welcoming Students on the First Day of Class Around six 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 both […]

Developing a Philosophy for Grading First, a warm welcome to all of our new colleagues joining us at FSU this fall, and a warm welcome back to our returning colleagues. We hope your preparations for the new semester are going well and that you’re excited to meet your new students and help them grow intellectually, […]

Self-Reflection & Student Feedback Congratulations! Spring 2023 is a wrap and summer is just around the corner. Many of us are finishing up grading or working on submitting our grades. As the semester winds down, we often reflect on how it went, thinking about what worked well and what we might like to change for […]

Designing a Successful Summer Course Congratulations! You’ve stewarded your students through another semester of intellectual, professional, and personal growth. We hope you have plans for some well-deserved rest this summer. But if you’re teaching this summer, you may be in the midst of planning a six-week course. “Compressed” or “intensive” classes, like those in summer […]

Ideas for a Great Last Class With only a week of classes left, it’s a good time to think about how you’d like to bring the semester to a close with your students. A good closing activity can help them to recognize what they’ve learned, take pride in their accomplishments, and celebrate the ways they’ve […]

Academic Integrity & Artificial Intelligence Has academic integrity been on your mind? Final projects and exams are approaching, so you may be making plans to help students avoid plagiarism or demonstrate their integrity on other end-of-term assessments. You may have seen the recent announcement about FSU transitioning away from HonorLock and reopening the Testing Center. […]