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
As faculty adopt new formats and strategies to teach in classrooms modified for health and safety during a global pandemic, we should give some thought to how students will access and use learning resources. Select tools, materials, platforms, and learning activities with inclusion and equity in mind. What does this mean?
Over the last 50 years, higher education has come to serve an increasingly diverse student population. In addition, students now report increased levels of stress and anxiety. Counseling Centers on campuses reported addressing student concerns about anxiety at a higher rate in 2016 (50.6% of responding institutions), an increase from 39.4% of responding institutions in 2007 (Reetz, 2017).
The first days of class are always important for building community among a new cohort of students and establishing a positive climate for learning. In the current context, class climate must extend beyond the usual norms for civil discussion, academic integrity, and respectful inclusion of students from a variety of backgrounds.
As UWF continues to engage in remote instruction through the fall term, students need access to virtual career development assistance.
In a face-to-face class, students encounter multiple opportunities to socialize and build community with little effort. They only need to arrive a bit early and chat with students sitting nearby. Some instructors create warm-up activities that orient students to discussion topics for the day. For example, they might post an outline of topics for the day on the white board.
UWF librarians answer questions virtually in a variety of ways. For example, students and faculty can send librarians an email, set up an appointment via Google Meet or WebEx, use live chat, or send a text message (described on the UWF Libraries Ask A Librarian page). Students can now send messages directly to their subject-specialist librarian from Canvas courses when instructors add an Ask Your Librarian Discussion Board.
If COVID-19 were not enough stress, we also find ourselves confronting the raw emotions associated with ongoing cultural issues surrounding race in the United States. Past teaching tips have given advice on how to respond to and defuse microaggressions in the academic environment. Today’s tip repeats some of this advice and offers some additional guidance regarding the ways in which well-intentioned efforts might misfire and exacerbate a problem.
We understand intuitively what it means to be present in a face-to-face class. We are regularly in the room when class meets. We engage with ongoing discussion and learning activities. We interact with one another. In an online course, instructor presence describes how an instructor communicates, interacts with students, and engages students in meaningful and effective learning activities (Sheridan & Kelly, 2010).
Social distancing and the shift to remote instruction have created a variety of challenges for higher education. The rapid shift to remote instruction required faculty and students to learn the fundamentals of multiple technologies.
Students tend to silo their learning, even if they sometimes think about course content and skills outside of class. When faculty teach remotely, students are outside the classroom all the time. Design assignments and learning activities that build on the current remote learning context and make the learning process more visible to both instructors and students.
Videos can create powerful learning experiences. The most compelling instructional videos enable learners to observe an instructor execute a motor skill or solve a problem step by step, making their thinking visible as they write out the problem components. In the remote learning context, videos can bring a student into a laboratory or studio or out into a field setting, where they can observe real applications and watch processes and procedures unfold in real time.
Ratings on course evaluations play a pivotal role in annual evaluations and decisions about tenure, promotion, and teaching awards. Faculty should also use course feedback from students to reflect on teaching and course design. However, both processes require that we interpret student ratings appropriately and use the feedback from student comments wisely.
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