Teaching, learning, and assessment tips that facilitate student learning or promote student engagement based on scholarly literature and suggestions from faculty who have successfully used these strategies.
CUTLA Teaching Tips are weekly e-mail messages to the faculty of UWF describing an instructional strategy that faculty might find helpful in promoting active learning and student engagement. If you are a UWF faculty member and do not currently receive the Teaching Tip e-mail but would like to receive future postings, contact CUTLA.
Do you have an instructional strategy that improves student learning or promotes student engagement with your class? Send a description of your teaching tip to Claudia Stanny at the Center for University Teaching, Learning, and Assessment for posting in a future Teaching Tip mailing.
A collection of 80 of the best teaching tips from 2006-2016 categorized and presented in an easily readable PDF format. Best of Teaching Tips
A well-written syllabus serves as an invitation to students that describes the overall purpose of the course, documents your expectations for assignments and how you will evaluate students, and creates a common course reference that you and students will used to manage day-to-day activities during the term.
Horror vacui. Aristotle Aristotle may or may not have been right when he said nature abhors a vacuum, but when we create a rubric, academics loathe leaving cells empty.
Have you or your students been frustrated when the products of a small group activity don’t seem to reflect specific learning goals? An in-class activity can be misperceived as mere entertainment that distracts from “real” learning if students don’t clearly understand connections between the activity and learning goals.
Grading is generally one of the least favorite parts of teaching. Grading can feel stressful when students challenge their grades, attempt to cheat or plagiarize, or focus on earning grades rather than acquiring skills or learning.
Carol Dweck (2006) describes a fixed mindset as the belief that talent, intelligence, or other skills are static, enduring characteristics. The fixed ability mindset assumes that abilities can be assessed, but little can be done to change abilities. In contrast, a growth mindset is the belief that ability can develop and improved.
Skilled teachers identify clear goals (student learning outcomes) for their course, identify and develop learning activities that create opportunities for students to practice and develop skill on these outcomes, and create assessments that are sensitive to the articulated goals (Blumberg, 2009, 2014; Fink, 2003).
Freeman et al. (2014) examined 225 scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) studies that compared the impact of active learning components included in the class meetings (versus laboratory, homework, or recitation sections) to traditional lecture-only class meetings.
Universal Design of Instruction (UDI) is an approach to teaching that consists of a proactive design and use of inclusive instructional strategies that benefit a broad range of learners including students with disabilities.
College students frequently waste time using ineffective study strategies because they are unaware of which strategies are effective or don’t retain the suggestions for effective study provided by their instructors. Stephen Chew, a cognitive psychologist at Samford University, created a series of 5 short YouTube videos that describe effective study strategies and explain why these strategies produce learning that lasts.
Skilled teachers identify clear goals (student learning outcomes) for their course, identify and develop learning activities that create opportunities for students to practice and develop skill on these outcomes, and create assessments that are sensitive to the articulated goals (Blumberg, 2009, 2014; Fink, 2003).
One of the greatest surprises for a new faculty member (and a repeated surprise for faculty accustomed to teaching advanced undergraduate and graduate students) is that many students do not approach learning with the same study skills and motivations we used as students.
The first exam or major graded assignment in the term delivers a loud message to a certain number of students in a course: You are not performing well enough to succeed in this course. What can faculty do to help students who are “on the edge” pull back from the brink of disaster and succeed in the course?
How much do you know about the students enrolled in your class? When was the last time you checked your assumptions about how much time your students spend studying versus working or playing, how motivated they are to learn, or how well prepared they are to tackle the content and skills in your course?
A well-written syllabus serves as an invitation to students that describes the overall purpose of the course, documents your expectations for assignments and how you will evaluate students, and creates a common course reference that you and students will use to manage day-to-day activities during the term.
The Topical Archive Teaching Tips is an accumulation of CUTLA's weekly Teaching Tips arranged in categories. Archived Teaching Tips
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