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
When did you last review the student learning outcomes (SLOs) for your course? When did faculty last review and discuss the program-level SLOs for degree programs offered by their department?
We expect students to write cogent and compelling arguments and use strong evidence when they write class papers. When faculty describe critical thinking skills, they often identify two learning outcomes. Students should evaluate the quality of evidence. Students should support assertions and conclusions with credible evidence.
When faculty attempt to document the impact of their work, they must be able to clearly identify citations for their work and separate these from citations of work by authors with similar names.
Model the use of formative feedback for your students and reinforce the credibility of the end-of-term course evaluations.
The term is finished. You finished grading the exams and papers, computed final grades, and submitted them to the Registrar. Time to celebrate and clean the chaos that accumulates in your office in the last weeks of the term. You hope to begin the next term with a clean desk, an organized bookshelf, and orderly files.
Do your students struggle to write about technical topics in clear language? The Northwestern University Collaborative Learning and Integrated Mentoring in the Biosciences (CLIMB) initiative created a set of video tutorials on professional writing in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). Although the video is directed at a STEM audience and uses writing examples drawn from STEM texts, the five principles will improve writing clarity in all disciplines.
Desirable difficulties (Bjork, 1994) represent challenges students encounter during learning that may slow down progress in learning but produce large long-term benefits.
Do students ever ask, Why am I required to take this course? If you teach a required course, you have an easy answer, You can’t earn a major in xxx without it. However, this answer invites a second question, Why is this course required for this major?
Students enroll in a class with existing knowledge and beliefs about the class topic. Some prior knowledge will be accurate information but some prior knowledge is simply wrong. Students’ knowledge may be simplistic, poorly organized, or include important gaps.
Students are often confident that they know how to study until they receive the results from their first major exam. Students at all levels must adjust their learning strategies to align with the demands of the learning task.
Do students perceive you as an authority or expert in your discipline? Is this perception reflected in your course evaluations?
Faculty ask students questions. We ask questions on exams and we ask questions in class. The kinds of questions instructors ask influence the quality of class discussion.
Students feel more connected to faculty who know their names. Because names are abstract labels and the connection between a specific name and face is arbitrary, many people have difficulty learning names. The task is even more difficult when we meet many new people at one time, such as when we meet new students at the start of the term.
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