Archive for the 'Best Practices' Category

Happy Earth Day!
Greener living has increasingly become a central issue in American life. In our personal lives, we recycle, use reusable bags at the grocery store, and light our homes with CFL bulbs. However, what can we do to make our teaching practices environmentally friendly? There are many simple changes faculty and instructors can make [...]

What is microteaching?

Why wait for student evaluations to receive feedback on teaching practices? Microteaching provides an opportunity for faculty and teaching assistants to improve their teaching practices through a “teach, critique, re-teach” model. Microteaching is valuable for both new and experienced faculty to hone their teaching practices. It is often used in pre-service teacher training [...]

Teaching Through Key Questions

Asking students challenging and thought-provoking questions encourages students to tap their existing mental models and build upon previous knowledge. Faculty can ask key questions to get students to see the relevance of a topic. In turn, it is hoped that students will then ask follow-up questions, engaging in dialogue while [...]

Online tutorials can be an effective strategy to enhance teaching, whether instruction is entirely web-based, or supplements a traditional face-to-face class. While the design of online tutorials range from passive and basic to interactive and sophisticated, many times design decisions are made by costs, resource demand, and time considerations.
Simple web-based tutorials can be [...]

What does a faculty member do in order to be present in the classroom? The answers to this question may seem obvious; show up for class, lead class activities and discussion, and assess student learning, to name a few. Such in-person interactions have been a benchmark of quality instruction for years and are [...]