The posts below are from the CfLT newsletter which includes curated, research-based digital resources to support ongoing faculty development and pedagogical engagement. As of August 2025, CfLT Director Karen Spierling oversees the content. Posts from July 2020-May 2025 were compiled by previous Director Lew Ludwig.
In this series, I share teaching mistakes I have made in the hopes that others can learn from my missteps or try to avoid them. For this installment, I will share a practice that was not my proudest moment.
Early in my career, Denison had a policy that students could add/drop a class within the first three weeks of the semester.
Like many of us, I give in-class tests. Early in my career, I adopted a structure where a test was worth one hundred points. The test consisted of five-point and ten-point questions to keep the math simple. The twelve or fourteen five-point questions were generally more straightforward, while the three or four ten-pointers helped “sort the As from the Bs.”
While I keep a relatively low-key persona in daily interactions, my Myers-Briggs is INTP. If you follow such things, you will be surprised how outgoing I am in the classroom. I was fortunate enough to conduct my student teaching under George Schwipps, a high school math teacher described as “part game show host, part auctioneer.” Some of George’s classroom enthusiasm rubbed off on me, and I try to keep my classes lively and engaged.
Growing up in a single-parent household, my mother played a large part in my upbringing. She taught grades 4-6 for twelve years in the Cincinnati school system before resigning to raise me. My father died when I was five, and mom decided to make a go of the small hobby farm we had started and to raise my brother and me on her own.
It’s that time of year. Students are looking for summer opportunities, trying to land that first job, or contemplating graduate school. Yes, recommendation letter writing season is in full swing! A recent Chronicle article bemoans how the digital age has ruined this process.
Never fear! Recall, the Lisska Center has created this video to provide you with suggestions on writing letters of recommendation, including things to focus on and what to ask of students.
Social annotation brings the individual experience of marking up a text with highlights, notes and questions to a shared online space where individuals can now share their mark ups and commentary as well as respond to each other’s comments and questions.To learn more about social annotation and how it can kick start a class discussion and allow you to see how students are making sense of a digital text (including images, video and audio files) before class, check out this EdTech Blog post, “Let’s Get Social”.
I don’t know about you, but this semester has been particularly bumpy for me with inclement weather and illnesses. Sometimes we need to take a step back and realize why we chose this career path. The Faculty Focus article, “Reclaiming the Joy of Teaching,” is a great article to peruse over the spring break.
Like newspapers, which may be read one day over morning coffee and may be used, as my grandmother did, to wrap vegetables the next day, student evaluations have second, subsequent, and multiple lives. In the classroom, student evaluations are usually resurrected at the mid and endpoints of the semester, but discussing prior course evaluations with your current students at the beginning of the semester can also help in telling the course’s story and the argument it’s trying to make through the act of re-seeing course readings and assignments.
You spent tons of time on it, now how to get your students to read your syllabus? In this video I share five easy-to-enact tips that I use for my syllabi. The five step are based on this short Chronicle piece. These tips are based on the more detailed article, How to create a syllabus.
The below list of helpful publishing tips was compiled by the Faculty Development Center at Hollins College.
