2K. What are some other teaching hints and ideas?

There are many sources of ideas for you to "tinker" or adapt your planning, teaching, and student assessment. Some of the sources are you colleagues, professional magazines, current disciplinary knowledge, the internet, books, and this guide. Changing is contingent upon your desire to make it better for your students. This section of the guide will loosely organize a collage of ideas that may work for you and your students. Please feel free to add to this list by e-mailing Bernie Krynowsky.

Nilson (2003), in "Teaching at its Best" and Gross Davis (1993) in "Tools for Teaching" provided summaries of ideas that both validate and summarize many ideas in this guide.

Student Motivation and Positive Relationships

• Deliver your presentations with enthusiasm and energy. Strive for vocal variety and constant eye contact. Vary your speaking pace, and add dramatic pauses after major points. Gesture and move around the class. Be expressive. To your students, be they right or wrong, your dynamic presence signifies your passion and enthusiasm which can be contagious.
• Make the course personal. Give reasons why you are so interested in the material and make it relevant to your students' concerns. Show how the knowledge skill and attitudes learned are important to them or society. You can become a role model for student interest and involvement as a lifelong learner.
• Get to know your students. Ask them about their majors, interests, and backgrounds. This information will help you tailor the material to their concerns. Your personal interest in them may inspire their personal loyalty to you. Talk to your students about what excites and interests them. In the least if you do not inspire, you have made a personal connection!
• Foster good lines of communication in both directions. Convey your course expectations in a clear and systematic way, both verbally and in writing. Be willing and open to suggestions. If students perceive you are willing to listen and change, they often forgive other shortcomings.
• Provide frequent early, positive, and specific feedback on student performance. Students need or should know how they are doing. Offering extra assistance is a great remediation and public relations strategy.
• Use humour where appropriate. A joke or humorous anecdote lightens the mood and can enhance learning. A positive, open, and occasionally fun learning environment equals great faculty reviews!
• Active learning with a variety of activities is essential. Discussing, questioning, brainstorming, recording, sharing ideas, manipulating concrete material, analyzing ideas with critical thinking. No more than 10 minutes of lecturing in any stretch.
• In summary, student motivations is related to instructor enthusiasm, active involvement of learners, variety of presentations, positive rapport within the group, use of concrete and easy to follow examples.

Course Organization and Delivery

• Design, structure, and develop your course as if you were a student in your own class. Explain its organization and your rationale for the content. In general, most students respond well to reasons versus none.
• Give students some voice in determining what the course will uncover. If students perceive that they have input, they will feel more invested and responsible for their learning. Try a needs survey or pre instructional task to find out what they know and want to learn about.
• be clear about expectations and course requirements. Provide opportunities for clarifying and questions. Assignment examples make instructor life much easier.
• Plan for variety - active student engagement with students listening, writing, sharing, designing, and problem solving. Talk less and have students do more!
• Appeal to extrinsic motivators and make relevance explicit. Inform students about what jobs and careers are available in your discipline and how your course content prepares students for these opportunities.

Effective Teaching

• Explain the how and why foe the lesson/course structure. Many of us respond well to sharing of strategies and rationales.
• Use examples and realistic case studies when possible. Many students learn inductively and relate well to relevant and real examples.
• Provide opportunities for discovery learning. There can be a great satisfaction and motivation by reasoning through a problem or concept versus being told.
• Use a variety of student-active teaching formats and methods for diversity of learning styles that are inevitable. Discussion, debates, press conferences, symposia, role playing, simulations, problem-based learning, and the case method, problem solving, and writing exercise. These activities directly engage students in the material and give them opportunities to achieve a level of mastery for achievement's sake.
• Teach with the arts to stir student emotions. This is a standard culture-learning strategy in the foreign languages, but it has far broader applications. In math courses, show the utility of concepts and equations in visual design and musical composition. In history, anthropology, literature, and comparative politics courses, show students the art of the age or place.
• Make the material accessible. Explain it in common language avoiding jargon and big words which often hide meaning.

Assignments and Tests

• Stress conceptual understanding above rote memorization. While students must acquire some facts to master the basics of any discipline, facts are only tools with which to construct broader concepts.
• Set realistic performance goals and help students achieve them by encouraging students with your genuine enthusiasm and your own goal setting.
• Allow students options for demonstrating their learning. Choices in projects and other major assignments are powerful motivators.
• Design assignments that give students practice in possible future occupational activities. Explain the relevance and importance of these connections.
• Evaluate work with explicit criteria. Clear criteria (e.g. rubric) reduces both instructor and student stress.
• Consider deemphasizing testing and grading as a main motivator. Make tests fair, which means consonant with your students' learning outcomes, topical emphases, and previous quizzes and assignments. Tests should be a means of showing students what they have mastered, not what they haven't.
• Give students prompt and constant feedback on their performance. This feedback also promotes some check points in the process that can help students with their time and energy management.
• Accentuate the positive in grading and feedback. Be free with praise and constructive in criticism and suggestions for improvement. Acknowledge improvements made. Confine negative comments to the particular performance, not the performer.