Evaluation and Assessment | Teaching Practices |Teaching with Technology| Sample Course Evaluation Forms
Teaching Tools
2. Teaching Practices
2.4. Knowing Your Students
Recommendations for Helping Freshmen to Learn
Teach strategies for organizing information
- Highlight major points at beginning and end of lecture
- Distribute or write on board/overhead a skeletal outline which shows the days agenda and/or the structure of the topic
- Summarize periodically
- Use and teach diagramming and clustering
- Use analogies and metaphors
- Explicitly distinguish between generalizations and examples, conclusions and evidence, trends and isolated events
Teach strategies for making material meaningful
- Plan lectures in 3 or 4 segments to reflect the 3 or 4 major concepts you will cover and actively engage students (in some of the ways mentioned below) during & between those segments
- Encourage students to paraphrase in their own words
- Encourage students to generate examples from their own experience (and thus connect new information to what they already know) or make connections, for example by completing a phrase like "the last time I saw a problem like this was . . . "
- Encourage students to think more deeply about the material, for example by completing a thought like "this information might explain why . . . "
- Use combinations of mathematical, visual/graphical, and verbal representations and ask students to do the same
Be explicit about how you define learning and provide a lot of opportunity for practice
- Explain to students that problems won't always map directly from the ones they've seen before because one of the goals of learning is to be able to use concepts and principles in new situations
- Design assignments and exams to reflect the above (don't spring problem types on freshmen on exams when they've never seen them before)
Teach students to make the most of opportunities to practice thinking and problem solving
- Teach how to verbalize steps in thinking through a problem or issue (e.g. in small groups or with documented problem sets
- Encourage reflection in order to help students see strategies and patterns across problems and solutions and perhaps analyze error patterns in their own work, for example allow students to "redo" problems with documentation that indicates "what I did wrong last time" and "what I learned from reworking the problem" or encourage students to visit the TA to have these types of conversation
Provide a lot of structure and direction
- Clearly define your expectations and course goals
- Create feedback mechanisms and be proactive in getting to students because they often won't seek help on their own (e.g. invite them to your office by e-mail or on returned quizzes/exams)
References
- Entwistle, N. (1988). Styles of Learning and Teaching. London: David Fulton Publishers;
- Erickson, B.L. and Strommer, D.W. (1991). Teaching College Freshmen. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.;
- McKeachie, W.J., Pintrich, P.R., Lin, Y.G. and Sharm, R. (1986). Teaching and Learning in the College Classroom: A Review of the Research Literature. Ann Arbor, Michigan: National Center For Research To Improve Postsecondary Teaching and Learning.
Adapted from the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence at Carnegie Mellon University
