Teaching Your Course

Managing Deadline Extensions

Overview Flexibility Starts with Structure

One common misconception about flexibility is that it means chaos or unpredictability. On the contrary, research shows that structure is the foundation of equitable flexibility. Regan Gurung, a psychology professor at Oregon State University, noticed that...

Lecturing Strategies

Overview

Lecture-style learning can work well for communicating course goals and content. If you are to use a lecture as a way to communicate information to your students, consider implementing the following tips:

1. Establish learning goals

Once you and your students know where you’re going, the trip is easier and more efficient. Often the very act of creating learning goals results in reducing the amount of material to be covered, since you have brought your course into more focus.

2. Cut down on the amount of material you...

Flexible Instructional Strategies to Meet Students Where They Are

Overview

Instructors and students alike benefit from approaching their course design with some room for flexibility. As Beth Buyserie, Rachel Welton Bryson, and Rachel Quistberg (2021) explain, “pedagogies of productive disruption seek to create learning opportunities and spaces that engage with and respond to evolving and unpredictable disruptions in the virtual, material, and psychosocial landscapes in which teaching and learning take place” (p. 37). Even if future disruptions are not as widespread as those of the pandemic, students and instructors alike may face...

Encouraging Attendance

Overview

Engaging students during live class sessions is crucial for their learning and academic success. However, it's common for attendance to fluctuate at certain points in the semester. To reinvigorate engagement and encourage consistent attendance, consider implementing the following research-based strategies that focus on communication, flexibility, active learning, and community building.

Sustaining Engagement Without Laptop Bans

Overview

How to maintain student engagement and attention in classes is a long-standing question for many educators. Yet this question has come particularly to the fore in the wake of the emergency remote instruction necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic where uses of technology for learning became a more commonplace part of the classroom environment. As students and instructors alike had more sustained experiences with accessing learning experiences online, they also faced a core struggle of being online all the time: what it looks like to stay focused on the educational...

Working With Students in Groups

Overview

by Terry Johnson, Bioengineering

Team projects can be rewarding. They give students the opportunity to address problems too large or too deep for any single individual to tackle in the limited amount of time they can devote to your course. By bringing together students with diverse skills and attitudes, team projects give students a chance to learn from their peers - and, through discussion with those peers, to refine their own ideas.

Team projects can also be - let’s face it - The Worst. I’d like to share a few things that I’ve found helpful in...

Reflective Teaching

Overview

Reflecting on our teaching experiences, from the effectiveness of assignments to the opportunities for student interaction, is key to refining our courses and overall teaching practice. Reflective teaching can also help us gain closure on what may have felt like an especially long and challenging semester.

Four Approaches to Reflective Teaching

The goal of critical self-reflection is to gain an increased awareness of our teaching from different vantage points (Brookfield 1995). Collecting multiple and varied perspectives on our teaching can help inform our intuitions about...

Teaching a Mixed Level Disparate Class

Overview What do you do when your class is divided between majors who easily master the material and non-majors who continually struggle? Or when you see that a few students find the material easy, are bored, and yearn to be challenged, while some still just aren't “getting it” despite your best efforts? Where should the level of content in the class be set? Should it be the same for all students, or individually customized?
In almost any course you can have students that come from a multitude of academic backgrounds, divisions (upper vs. lower), preparation, majors and...

Formative Assessment of Teaching

How do you know if your teaching is effective? How can you identify areas where your teaching can improve? What does it look like to assess teaching?

Active Learning

Overview What is active learning?

Active learning generally refers to any instructional method that engages students in the learning process beyond listening and passive note taking. Active learning approaches promote skill development and higher order thinking through activities that might include reading, writing, and/or discussion. Metacognition -- thinking about one’s thinking -- can also be an important element, helping students connect course activities to their learning (Brame, 2016).

Active learning is rooted in...