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Teaching Tips and Articles Email list

This new Teaching Tips email list group will receive 1-4 emails a month (1 maximum per week), that will include short teaching tips and articles (often with links to more complete information).  Postings to this list began in May, 2006.

How to join:  send an email to the TEC at tec@sfasu.edu and ask to be added to the list.

How to be removed from the list: send an email to the TEC at tec@sfasu.edu and ask to be removed from the list.

If you come across a teaching tip or reference that you would like to share, please send it to us at tec@sfasu.edu!

What Adult Learners can Teach us About All Learners: A Conversation with L. Lee Knefelkamp

Fall 2012

Teaching Tip #1

This Isn't High School: Advice for Faculty Teaching First-Year Students

By Mary Bart

Stop me if you've heard this one. It's week 12 of a 15-week-semester and a student shows up during office hours asking, begging, for some way that he can raise his grade. He needs a B, he says, or he could lose his scholarship.

For most college professors, it's an all-too-familiar scenario. Whether it's the student who is in real danger of failing the course or the student who is unaccustomed to any grade lower than an A, many students make these pleas for the very simple reason that many high schools allow students to retake tests or do extra-credit assignments to raise their grades. When these students get to college, they expect similar options and often struggle without them, said Mary Clement, EdD, director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Berry College, where she also is a professor of teacher education.

Teaching Tip #2

Advice to New Teachers and New Students: Learning is a Quest

By Maryellen Weimer, PhD

Three new teachers at the front end of academic careers, about to face their first classes as teachers, want to know from somebody at the back end, "What's most important for new teachers to know?" I don't hear myself saying anything very coherent. I don't want to give what new teachers frequently get: pat answers and banal suggestions that seem to be helpful without actually being so.

I'm spending the day with a wonderful group of faculty (most of them not new teachers) who teach a two-semester Focused Inquiry course required of all first-year students at their institution. It sounds like a fantastic course with content that grows out of a theme-based set of readings. The faculty's clear focus on learning and students is so refreshing.

Teaching Tips 3-7 were

Seven Tips for Improving Instructional Skills: Reminders for Teachers

http://cgi.stanford.edu/~dept-ctl/tomprof/posting.php?ID=1069

Spring Teaching Tip #1

End-of-Course Evaluations: Making Sense of Student Comments

By Maryellen Weimer, PhD

At most colleges, courses are starting to wind down and that means it's course evaluation time. It's an activity not always eagerly anticipated by faculty, largely because of those ambiguous comments students write. Just what are they trying to say?

I think part of the reason for the vague feedback is that students don't believe that the evaluations are taken all that seriously, not to mention they're in the middle of the usual end-of-semester stress caused by having lots of big assignments due and final exams to face. It's just not the best time to be asking for feedback and so students dash off a few comments which instructors are left to decipher.

Spring Teaching Tip #2

By Christopher Willard

Sometimes, in informal conversations with colleagues, I hear a statement like this, "Yeah, not a great semester, I doled out a lot of C's." I wonder, did this professor create learning goals that were unobtainable by most of the class or did this professor lack the skills to facilitate learning? I present this provocative lead-in as an invitation to reflect upon our presuppositions regarding grading.

Most of us hold deeply rooted presuppositions about grading that have rarely been confronted, and this makes sense. We became specialists in our fields without having learned a variety of grading strategies, purposes, and theories. We never had to interrogate our presuppositions about grading nor have our institutions supported us doing so. At our college, for example, we have a grading percentage chart, suggesting a range of grades might be used for a class, and a line that appears on all official course outlines stating, "Evaluation and assignment of grades will be based upon the quality of work produced relative to the objectives of the course." This, of course, is vague enough to confound students and to allow the use of just about any grading strategy.

Spring Teaching Tip #3

Cultivating Curiosity in Our Students as a Catalyst for Learning

By Maryellen Weimer, PhD

There's not much pedagogical literature on the topic of curiosity. In fact the article referenced here is the only piece I can remember seeing on the subject, which is a bit surprising because curiosity does play an important role in learning. One of the definitions offered in the article explains how the two relate. "Curiosity, a state of arousal involving exploratory behavior, leads to thinking and thinking culminates in learning." (p. 53)

Curiosity is the quest for new ideas and information. Folks who are curious aren't satisfied with what they already know or have figured out. They go after what they don't know or can't understand—and that missing information can become a driving need to find out. "Curiosity's most distinguishing characteristic is its open willingness to explore…." (p. 55)

Spring Teaching Tip #4

Students Think They Can Multitask. Here's Proof They Can't

By Maryellen Weimer, PhD

With easy access to all sorts of technology, students multitask. So, do lots of us for that matter. But students are way too convinced that multitasking is a great way to work. They think they can do two or three tasks simultaneously and not compromise the quality of what they produce. Research says that about 5% of us multitask effectively. The negative effects of multitasking in learning environments is now coming from a variety of studies.

The question is, how do we get students to stop? We can tell them they shouldn't. We can include policies that aim to prevent it and devote time and energy trying to implement them. I wonder if it isn't smarter to confront students with the facts. Not admonitions, but concrete evidence that multitasking compromises their efforts to learn. The specifics are persuasive and here are some examples to share with students.

Active Listening: Seven Ways to Help Students Listen, Not Just Hear

By Isis Artze-Vega, EdD

The title of Nadine Dolby's recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education makes a great point about teaching that often goes unspoken: "There's no learning when nobody's listening." It seems to me that most of us take this for granted. How many of us take steps to ensure our students are not only hearing the words uttered during our classes, but actually listening to them. Should we? And what might this entail?

Dolby, an associate professor of curriculum studies at Purdue, organized a panel discussion to expose her students to "diverse perspectives on classrooms, education, and the complex relationships between teachers, parents, and children." But during the event, she realized that the act of listening was nearly impossible for them. "Unable to talk, to tweet, to update, to text, or to otherwise refocus attention on themselves, they were left with the one activity they felt was useless: listening."

Spring Teaching Tip #6

Classroom Management Tips for Regaining Control of the Classroom

By Rick Sheridan

Losing control of the classroom can be one of the most frustrating and intimidating experiences for both new and experienced teachers. Losing control can happen in several different ways. The most common would be where the class is distracted. This could be from a situation outside the classroom such as noisy conversation in the hall, or from an event elsewhere that students find out about, such as a rumor of the football coach getting fired. Losing control can also happen within the classroom, such as when one student monopolizes the discussion, or where there is a general lack of interest in the lecture, and many students are obviously not paying attention. Here are nine possible ways to regain students' attention.

1. Have a distinct sounding object, such as a bell or cymbal. As long as you don't use it too often, this can be an effective way to bring student's attention back to the lecture or class discussion.

2. Signal nonverbally, and make eye contact with students when they hold side conversations, start to fall asleep, or show contempt for the lecture material. You can also use hand signals to encourage a wordy student to finish what he or she is saying, or make a time out "T" sign with your fingers to stop unwanted behavior.

Spring Teaching Tip #7
GAMES—Your Way

Marilla Svinicki

University of Texas at Austin

Last weekend I went up into the Texas Hill Country on a teaching retreat with faculty from Texas A&M and other colleges and universities in the central Texas area. It was a beautiful spot, bluebonnets in full bloom, bright stars at night, out in the middle of nowhere, and we all enjoyed it a lot (especially since you could still get a cell signal). As usual at teaching events like this, I was reminded of all the things that I know I should do in teaching and don’t. But despite that, I also came away with some insight into a learning survey I’ve been using for a long time called the GAMES survey. GAMES is a mnemonic that represents five important categories of learning strategies that students can use when they sit down to study: setting Goals, being Active, making Meaningful connections, Explaining to understand and Self-monitoring. The survey asks them to indicate how often they use an array of study strategies that represent those categories, like “Before I begin, I make sure I know what is expected of me in the assignment” or “I write down questions that I have as I go so I don’t forget them later” or “I work with a partner to trade questions before a test.” When they compute their five scale scores, they can see where they are doing a good job and where they could improve

Spring Teaching Tip #8

It's Time to Face What Isn't Working in Our Courses and Find Out Why

By Maryellen Weimer, PhD

Not everything we do in our courses works as well as we'd like. Sometimes it's a new assignment that falls flat, other times it's something that consistently disappoints. For example, let's take a written assignment that routinely delivers work that is well below our expectations. It might be a paper that reports facts but never ties them together, an essay that repeats arguments but never takes a stand, or journal entries that barely scratch the surface of deep ideas.

We know in our heart of hearts this assignment (it could also be a classroom activity, a collection of readings, or almost any aspect of instruction) doesn't work. Maybe we're telling ourselves it's not our fault. Students can't write. They didn't learn how to write in their composition courses. Other teachers aren't making them write enough. They don't want to learn to write. They hate to write.