Teaching Tips
This section is full of timely and evidence-based practices to apply in your teaching. With the recent release of "Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning, Second Edition," we will share a few tips shared by author, James Lang, in his recent interview on Teaching in Higher Ed with Bonnie Stachowiak.
Making incremental change. There are many, amazing teaching tips out there (we should know!), and it can be enticing to try many of them at once to keep students engaged and learning. Lang suggests making fewer changes to your teaching at a time, and being as transparent as possible with your students if you are going to integrate a new approach to facilitate the transition and solicit feedback.
Offering retrieval practice. Providing frequent opportunities for students to remember key concepts from recent lessons will help to promote content mastery. Lang suggests creating low-stakes activities during class (such as an ungraded Canvas quiz or iClicker questions) that give students the opportunity to learn from their mistakes and reinforce learning.
Teaching at the edges. Whether it's indroducing a new teaching practice or encouraging students to reflect on prior knowledge in preparation for a lesson, utilizing the first or last 5-10 minutes of class is a great way to practice small teaching principles.
