Articles and resources to empower your teaching experience.
Calvin and Hobbes sum up what the week before Thanksgiving can feel like, both for us and for our students. There is too much to do in too little time, in a world that feels too chaotic. Even simple tasks can feel overwhelming and complicated. If we’re being honest, who out there doesn’t just want to take a nap and hope that things seem better when we wake up?
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| As we head into the final weeks of the semester, many of our classes are busy with group presentations and team projects. If you find yourself getting preemptively frustrated with the challenge of grading a team project, take a minute to read Lauren Vicker and Tim Franz’s suggestions about transparent rubrics, mid-project feedback, and opportunities for peer evaluation. |
As we head into the final weeks of the semester and focus on making it through the end of the syllabus, with all of the class prep, assignment organizing, and grading that entails, remember that your students are also facing the pre- and post-Thanksgiving deluge of work and stress. It’s never too late to try a new way to check in with them and help them think through their own learning process, especially at a time of the semester when they may be focusing only on deadlines.
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What a great turnout at last week’s (11/6/25) Teaching Matters morning coffee! Sixteen colleagues from across academic divisions and offices joined us to wrestle with the challenges–new and old–of designing and implementing effective in-class assessments. We talked through some of our reasons for using in-class assessments, including long-term pedagogical practices and more recent AI-related concerns. In the process, colleagues shared a variety of approaches that are working in their classrooms, including:
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These resources address ways to connect with our students as mentors:
These articles give ideas on student engagement during class time:
We can help students engage in the hard sustained work of learning; these articles have some useful insights:
These articles give some good ideas for supporting our students with reading:
Both students and faculty feel anxious sometimes; here’s some articles exploring ways to manage or relieve anxiety:
These articles include ideas for teaching success and avoiding burnout:
