Best practices for teaching

This summer I was a group moderator for the Teaching Institute at Johns Hopkins, a four-day intensive experience designed for instructors (grad students, postdocs, researchers, faculty) to learn and refine their approaches to teaching. Throughout the Institute, students attended lectures and activities covering a range of topics, including assessment, syllabus design, and active learning.

Attendees also had to design a lesson plan for a course of their choosing (usually one they’ve taught before or plan to teach this fall) and share a 15 minute teaching demo in our small group. As part of this discussion, we shared tips and best practices - what works, how we think through potential changes, etc. Here are a few of the highlights:

• Jargon sheets. Even in courses that are offered at a specific level (e.g., first-year undergraduates), students have varied levels of experience in a subject. Offering a jargon/acronym sheet early (e.g., as part of the syllabus) can help support an informed and inclusive classroom.
• Offering “student” hours. Renaming them can help center the students and make them more comfortable with attending. Language (both on the syllabus and repeated throughout the semester) can clarify that student hours are for the students, for whatever they need - questions about specific course content, help with assignments, broader inquiries regarding the field or careers, etc.
• Clear lines between the assessment and the skill/lesson covered in-class. This helps both with student learning as well as reinforcement; participant ideas included having a “star” emoji on the class slides that will be on the exam.
• Specification grading. More discussion on that here.
• Exit tickets. Each class, students have to submit something. Depending on the course and that day’s material, this can be an answer to a specific question, a piece of code that achieves some function, a self-reflection (e.g., rating their understanding of a key or new idea), a suggestion for a subsequent lecture, an outstanding question or point of confusion, etc. This can support engagement, offer another way of achieving credit (e.g., a student who missed class could watch the recorded lecture and submit the exit ticket for participation points), and serve as a regular check-in on student understanding.