It’s that time of year. Students are getting their midterm grades, and you’re faced with that inevitable question, “Can I do some extra credit?” This short article from Faculty Focus argues that extra credit does not treat the issue – a deficiency in understanding. If a tennis player is struggling with their serve, doing extra practice on their backhand will probably not help their serve game.
CfLT Newsletter
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.
Tidbit – The Emotional Labor of Teaching
The past 18 months have been challenging. Even with the return to the classroom, there are still many issues and concerns when it comes to our teaching. Ashley Harvey refers to some of these challenges as the emotional labor of teaching. Her article Seven Strategies for Embracing the Emotional Labor of Teaching helps us navigate this.
Teaching – Career – So You’re Mid-Career, Now What?: Next Steps of Your Faculty Journey
Faculty careers are long, characterized by many transitions from achieving tenure and promotion to balancing work and family. The longest stage of the faculty career is the mid-career stage, which includes recently tenured associate professors up to faculty colleagues who are 10 years out from retirement. The purpose of this professional development workshop is to assist mid-career faculty across the GLCA in navigating in and through various transitions and career paths successfully.
Teaching – Midterm Course Evaluations
As we near the half-way mark, consider getting mid-semester feedback from your students. Mid-semester evaluations:
- provide a chance to correct student misconceptions or make changes to the course schedule, activities, etc. if necessary.
- give students an opportunity to reflect on their own expectations, efforts, and learning.
- let students know you care about their input.
Here are some sample mid-semester evaluations you can use or adapt for our course:
- This check-off format from Seattle University makes it easy for your students to provide specific feedback, as well as some open-ended questions.
Tidbit – What’s in a Nombre?
Have you used the new Say My Name feature from NoteBowl to learn how to pronounce your students names? This article from Inside Higher Ed explores the importance of using and correctly pronouncing the names of Hispanic and Latino students in the New York City school system, and how this impacts their later learning.
Tech – Interactive Video Lessons
Creating interactive videos for your class offers a different learning experience for students, increases student engagement with media content, and provides a way to gauge student comprehension of content through checking in on what they understand. Check out this post “Interactive Videos for your Classes” to see some of the options that ETS recommends for creating these videos.
Teaching – How to hold a better class discussion
Now that we are back in-person, many of us are excited to engage in those lively classroom discussions. Could you use a few pointers? The Chronicle article, How to Hold a Better Class Discussion, has many practical tips and suggestions. The article is nicely divided into sections:
- Why Discussion Matters
- 7 Strategies to Change the Norms of Class Discussions
- How to Keep a Discussion on Track
- Common Challenges: Participation Grades, Bad Answers, and Divisive Topics
- Resources
Don’t forget, you can access Chronicle articles directly through Denison’s institutional account.
Tech – discussion boards on Notebowl
Back in classrooms does not mean we have to leave behind the opportunities to create meaningful asynchronous class discussion in Notebowl. This summer, ETS hosted a workshop titled “Engage Students with Meaningful Discussion Boards.” This ETS blog post covers the main takeaways from the workshop, and it also includes resources for creating discussion boards in Notebowl (on the ETS YouTube Playlist).
Teaching II – how is class going?
Trying something new this semester? It’s never too early to get feedback from your students. Here is a simple feedback technique I head from Dr. Sarah Wolff in Mathematics she calls KQS. Students complete the following:
- Keep doing this
- Quit doing this
- Start doing this
It only takes a few minutes, and is a low-cost way to get some valuable feedback and act as a conversation started of why you do something a particular way.
Teaching – how to access participation
Class discussion plays a key role in many of our classes at Denison. So much so that many of us include class participation as a percentage of the course grade. But how do we access participation? Is it just how many times a student speaks in class? Does this reward the risk-taking extrovert and penalize the introvert who needs time to process?