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Teaching Tip – TTT
Articles and resources to empower your teaching experience.
Teaching – Presentations and groups
We’ve reached that point in the semester – student presentations. For many students, this can be daunting. Help build student confidence with some low-stakes presentations, as explained in this short Faculty Focus article. Want more resources on presentations? Check out this Guide to Effective Presentations from the Learning Scientist.
Are you using groups this semester? How are they going?
Teaching – Your teaching doesn’t have to be perfect.
In the recent book, The New Colleges Classroom, the authors provide a host of activities to get students engaged: think, pair, share, and entrance and exit tickets, etc. But what happens when these fall short; the students aren’t engaged, and the class doesn’t gel? This short Chronicle article provides some advice on making that reset.
One way to get that critical “reset feedback” is midterm evaluations (the last TTT’s focus).
Tidbit – ‘Stop With the Academic Clickbaiting’ on the Humanities
Did you see the recent article, This Is How the Humanities End, by Steven Mintz? How did it sit with you? Our own Karen Spierling had some thoughts on the article and shared them in this IHE letter to the editor, ‘Stop With the Academic Clickbaiting’ on the Humanities. In it, she cautions not to dismiss the efforts of fellow academics—and especially the hard work of junior professors—to keep the humanities vital.
From the teaching archive – Midterm Course Evaluations
As we near the halfway mark, consider getting mid-semester feedback from your students. Mid-semester evaluations:
- If necessary, provide a chance to correct student misconceptions or make changes to the course schedule, activities, etc.
- Allow students to reflect on their 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 your course:
- This check-off format from Seattle University makes it easy for your students to provide specific feedback and some open-ended questions.
Teaching II – We should correctly pronounce colleagues’ and students’ names.
One of my most considerable angst for a new class is correctly pronouncing my students’ names. While my rural upbringing did not provide many opportunities to practice pronunciation (my school district was Milan, pronounced MY-lin), I do make a concerted effort to pronounce students’ names. I ask them to work with me and help me learn, just like I will work with them to learn in my class.
Teaching – some thoughts on grading
As we head into the fifth week of the semester, the grading has started in earnest. Are you happy with your grading process? A group of Denison faculty created a Faculty Learning Community – Alt-Grading – to consider different approaches to grading. In part, they are exploring the many facets of the term “ungrading,” which aims to focus more on the learning process and less on points.
Why students won’t read
With all the formalities of the first few weeks behind us, hopefully, your classes have settled into a routine of productive learning. How is the reading going? Often we get frustrated that students are not doing the reading we assign; reading that is critical to course discussion and understanding. The short articles Why Students Won’t Read—and What to Do about It by Chris Hakala and Want Students to Do the Reading?
Six steps to a more inclusive syllabus
As we put the finishing touches on our syllabi, here is a quick list of things to consider to make your syllabus more inclusive from this short handout from the STEM Inclusive Excellence Collective at UNC:
- Identify and eliminate or explain jargon
- Think about tone
- Tell the students something about you as a person or professor
- Help students understand what it takes to be successful in your course
- Normalize struggle and provide information about how to get help
- Formatting and Organization
Please follow the handout link for a brief explanation of each.
What can inclusive teaching look like?
Are you interested in incorporating inclusive teaching practices but unsure where to start? Want to see some examples of inclusive teaching practices in action? Please look at the Inclusive Teaching Visualization Project website, developed by Dr. Addy and her collaborators. View examples in a social science lecture course, STEM laboratory course, or a first-year seminar.