At last Tuesday’s Teaching Matters conversation about Teaching Hacks, we enjoyed coffee and Station pastries while talking through a range of strategies that can make course prep and grading manageable while staying focused on our learning goals. A few of the many great examples colleagues shared were:
- Printing out a schedule of all class deadlines for a semester and sticking it on your office wall (or writing it on a whiteboard) for easy reference.
- Structuring self-assessment and peer review exercises in ways that develop students’ critical reading skills and provide tools to make your feedback process less time-consuming.
- Using AI to help create clear rubrics and slides more quickly so that you can use that time to think about other parts of teaching (or other things).
- Using Canvas announcements to share information to the whole class rather than responding to similar questions in individual emails.
- Approaching grading in chunks so it’s less overwhelming and you don’t get too tired to grade objectively.
Some of the questions that came up that will feed future conversations included: How do we prioritize our commitment to fair grading without spending all our time worrying about fairness? How can we structure our work with our own energy levels in mind so that we are working when we’re most efficient? And how might we rethink the traditional structures and rhythms of assignments in our disciplines in ways that would make grading more manageable while still giving students the practice that is necessary to successful learning? |
