Weekly Teaching Tips

Test What Matters Most & Provide Practice Faculty and students alike often find exams to be stressful—most of us have had minimal preparation in the craft of designing tests—and as Clegg and Cashin admit, “the process is not only difficult; it is also frustrating and often ineffective.” Sometimes we may find that our exams don’t […]

A Perfect Time for Formative Feedback In the beginning of a course, students learn fundamental concepts and skills that they will need to build on all semester, so this is an important time for them to get some feedback on how it’s going. They need to know whether they are “getting it” so far, and […]

Learning Through Inquiry The everyday work of a scholar involves posing questions that matter in your discipline. Your relentless curiosity is part of the love for your field that got you to where you are today. If you can help your students to see their learning this way, too—as a process of asking good questions […]

A Snapshot of What Students Learn The opening of a new semester, full of promise and potential, is a great time to motivate students by providing a vision of the learning they’ll do in your course. Since learning is a process of change, you can help them see the course as transformative: What will they […]

Getting to Know Our Students Happy New Year and welcome back! We hope you had a wonderful break. As we launch a new semester, we tend to have competing priorities; to build a strong foundation for learning, the most important thing we can do is get to know our new students. Of course we need […]

Congratulations! Fall 2022 is a wrap and winter break is just around the corner. We can all be proud of the learning our students did this semester, and now that we’re done (or almost done, if you’re still grading) we get the pleasure of reflecting on what we’ve learned, too. Because the term ends with […]

Getting Ready for Grading Grading isn’t most people’s favorite part of teaching. In fact, for many of us, it’s difficult to get started doing it—it’s not just the work and the tight time frame; it’s also the emotions we’d rather not experience. We may fear being disappointed by some students’ lack of progress this semester, […]

Gratitude From Your Students Welcome to the sixth year of our Thank-A-Professor Program, which invites students and alumni to send messages of thanks anonymously to their professors. Students have submitted hundreds of tributes this fall, and we hope reading some of them will make a wonderful start to your Thanksgiving break. We’ll be sending your […]

A Strong Ending to the Semester Somehow the end of the term is upon us already. With only a week and a half of regular classes remaining, we may be tempted to speed up the pace of the class in a scramble to fit in as much content as possible before we part ways with […]

Designing for Better Final Projects It’s always a pleasure to see strong evidence of students’ learning and growth at the end of a semester. Many of us collect a good portion of that evidence in the form of a final project, so the way we design those projects, and guide students through the process of […]

What’s Going on When Students Tune Out? Have you ever felt like your students were bored in class? When students seem disengaged, it’s natural to wonder whether we might be boring them. We might even assume the material under discussion is not challenging enough to be interesting, which could lead us to speed up the […]

Why Sleep Is Important for Learning Have you noticed students missing from your courses, or seeming more anxious or exhausted when they do attend? Both graduate and undergraduate students have mentioned recently that this is a very busy time of the semester. They have midterm exams and projects, and competing demands for their time and […]