Cultivate Good Teaching Methods:
Many faculty believe in seven principles of good teaching. Here they are in an abbreviated form. Good teachers . . .
Know their subject matter as a whole and are able to integrate it with other disciplines as well as the world.
• Know how learning takes place, for example, in direct, experiential and intimate ways.
• Know their students and their environments well and communicate with them through using that knowledge.
• Are careful about the assumptions they make about students. Students will meet the level of expectation we set.
• Understand the role of self-esteem in teaching. There is a positive correlation between high academic achievement and high self-esteem.
• Are not ashamed to be seen as human and fallible by their students. (A student reported to the colloquium that he didn’t like teachers who present themselves as infallible, whereas teachers who can say “I don’t know” are liked.)
• Have high energy levels, know their material and are constantly improving it, and are concerned with their own self-growth and self-development.
In addition, the research on teaching has resulted in a list of seven principles that support undergraduate learning and are good models for setting up an effective classroom. Students learn the most through:
• Contact with teachers. This includes time in class as well as time out of class. Even the first few moments before class are vital; try to arrive early and spend the ten minutes as students arrive for class chatting with them.
• Collaboration with other students on everything from short, informal opportunities to discuss a problem in pairs during class to formal group and team exercises and projects.
• Active learning strategies that engage students in their own learning rather than allowing them to be passive recipients of information. Active learning also concerns the intellectual challenge of the learning experience. Learning is enhanced when classroom activity moves beyond memorization of facts to critical thinking, analysis and synthesis.
• Prompt and constructive feedback that provides students with good suggestions for improving their work that students can implement. Receiving feedback too late in the course doesn’t allow students the opportunity to learn from their mistakes.
• Focused and sustained attention to the substance of the course content. Help your students understand that they need to return again and again, through their own studies, to the materials discussed and presented in class. The greater the effort spent on understanding the critical issues involved in the course material, the greater the learning that occurs.
• Clear communication of high expectations as students will rise to meet those expectations.
• Acknowledgement of students’ diverse talents and ways of learning. Helping students diagnose their own learning strengths and weaknesses and then building strategies that rely on their strengths while minimizing their weaknesses, contributes to a rich classroom environment. A tool for diagnosing individual learning styles and thus discovering strategies to enhance study skills and academic success can be found by going to the Center for Teaching Excellence Web site:
www.ohiou.edu/teacher/.

1. Personalize the Classroom
You would be surprised how many students do not know their professors’ names. To test this claim, ask a couple of students at random in your class to name all the professors they have this quarter. Similarly, students don’t know each other either. Because of this anonymity they are often reluctant to take a lively role in any class discussions you plan. Here are some strategies for helping avoid a depersonalized classroom.
• Introduce yourself to your students, providing some background information about your interests inside and outside of the classroom. It can be particulary useful for students to learn how you became interested in your discipline and to experience the passion you have for your subject matter.
• Help your students meet each other by having them introduce themselves during an early class session. In a small class, you may want to have students interview each other for a few minutes and then introduce each other to the whole class. In large classes you may simply want to have students introduce themselves to the students on either side of them for the first few class sessions.
• Try to learn your students’ names. There are many straegies for this and you may want to ask around to find out how your colleagues manage this. Some people take pictures of their students on the first day of class and some have their students bring in pictures with their names on the back. It is well worth the effort to learn names, even in a large classroom, as it goes a long way toward personalizing the classroom.
• The more you learn about your students, the better able you will be to connect to their interests and concerns. You can provide students with a short questionnaire or note card on the first day of class and ask them to tell you about what they read, listen to, attend, do in their spare time, want to be when they grow up, and so on. Knowing this information allows you to make reference to or draw examples from their interests.

2. Develop the Attitudes of the Successful Teacher
` Members of the teaching colloquium discovered that successful teachers have many differences in styles, personalities, teaching methods. There simply is no single, correct, way to teach. Successful teachers, however, do share some common attributes and attitudes. Here is a short list of some of them.
• Be prepared, be enthusiastic, be friendly, have a sense of humor.
• A consensus that emerged from several colloquia is that enthusiasm for the material you teach seems to be common to all effective teachers. If you are not enthusiastic about your discipline, you can’t expect students to be interested or enthusiastic about it.
• Students will forgive you for a lot of failings but not for being unorganized. Students who have participated in the colloquia said they enjoyed classes the most when the “professor was challenging and well prepared and the atmosphere relaxed.” Organization goes up there with enthusiasm as virtually universal requirements for good teaching.
• Teaching is more than simply communicating; it also involves an element of personal concern, a caring relationship.
• Be flexible. Several professors facilitate student input about the course itself and its structure.
During fall quarter, undergraduate students on the Athens campus cast electronic nominations for the University Professor award through a specially designed Web site that allows them to include several sentences of explanation for their choices. Studying these explanations provides us with another list of positive attributes for excellent teachers:
• Students are highly enthused about faculty who they perceive to care about their learning and development.
• Faculty who communicate their own passion for their disciplines to their students receive kudos as do instructors who choose examples that resonate with students’ experiences.
• Good teachers are very knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and well-prepared, and use excellent examples and anecdotes to make any topic interesting and fun.
• Faculty who are very intellectually stimulating and who respect their students, yet at the same time demand a lot, receive kudos from students.
• Good teachers make their classes interesting and relate things to the real world and their own lives, making the subject more real to everyone.
• Challenging classes require constant critical thinking and discussion. Outstanding professors enthusiastically present the material in a comprehensive, informative manner that encourages not only learning, but full synthesis.
• Good teachers are extremely organized and focus directly on the material for class.

3. Cultivate Good Teaching Methods
One of the most useful strategies for effective teaching is the use of classroom assessment techniques. While we often connect the term “assessment” to grades, when we use it as classroom assessment we are referring to ungraded activities that are designed to provide information about how well our students are learning what we’re teaching.
• Classroom assessment answers these questions:
• What do students come to my class knowing?
• What are they thinking at any moment in class?
• What did they get out of today’s class compared to what I wanted them to get out of it?
• What are they thinking when they study—or solve a problem?
Classroom assessment is aimed at course improvement rather than assigning grades. The primary goal is to achieve a better understanding of student learning and to improve teaching as a result of that information. Thus, assessment information is gathered at points in time when it can feed back into teaching. Assessment is typically anomymous and ungraded, simple to do and easy to use, and ongoing. An often used assessment is the minute paper where students are given a minute or two to write down the most important material covered in the class session along with any remaining questions that they have about that material. Quickly scanning the results provides information regarding gaps in student understanding that may need to be addressed or future questions that may need to be explored. An overview of different kinds of classroom assessment strategies is included in the appendices.

4. Learn How to Live with Tests, Papers and Grades
Everyone seems to agree that grading is the most difficult part of teaching. From a teacher’s point of view, grading can be very time consuming and can also be the part of the course that generates the most concerns on students’ parts. Here are some tips for staying on top of grading:
• The key to successful testing and grading is fairness. Clearly state the rules for examinations.
If you plan pop quizzes, include that fact on the syllabus. Be fair. Nothing works against effective learning more than tests that students perceive as not testing them over the material covered in the course. A rule of thumb: use tests to find out what students know, not what they don’t know.
• A technique that lowers text anxiety is to give students a sheet of questions that review the material to be covered on the tests. Additional review sessions outside of class also help lower stress levels.
• Professor of English, Loreen Giese helps students understand their writing and how to improve their writing by providing them with very detailed descriptions of what constitutes a paper written at each grade level. She hands the first paper in a class back with extensive comments and no grade--asking the students evaluate and grade their papers in a paragraph and to make a list of the strengths and weaknesses in their writing, using the descriptions she has provided. In a followup conference, she meets with each student and they discuss the paper and negotiate the grade; the students, she reports, are typically harsher in their grading than she: From that point forward, students have a list of the strengths and weaknesses in their writing; they continually refer to this list and work to move their weaknesses to strengths. Her detailed descriptions of grades is included in the appendices. She is happy to have you incorporate it into your own practice as long as you acknowledge her as the source.
• Try as much as possible to develop good criteria for all of your grading, along the lines that Loreen uses (an A on this assignment will include, etc.) This is called criterion-referenced grading and is the best grading system to develop. Curving grades suggests that excellence is a function of the level of the competition in the classroom during any given quarter and is not a defensible method for that reason.
• Encourage students to monitor their own progress and to keep track of their own grades. The better they become at self-assessment, the better able they are to go over their own work before they hand it in and make the corrections and edits that guarantee they’re turning in their best work.
A number of resources on grading, including suggestions on test construction, have been included in the appendices.

5. Avoid Behavior that Provokes Student Complaints
David Heaton, a University Professor and for 8 years University Ombudsman, offers the following list of students’ most common complaints.
• Our defensiveness when questioned about course related matters, particularly grades
• Our confusion of authority and power
• Not being available at scheduled office hours
• Changing the date for final exams, often under the guise of a bogus vote by the class to do so
• Our monomania
• Vague standards of grading
• Denigration and abuse of the course evaluation process
David also suggests that when you get discouraged about the quality of your students’ work, remember yourself between the ages of 18 and 22. Then dig out and read a paper you wrote as a freshman or sophomore in college!

6. Ideas for Teaching a Large Class
Carolyn Tice offers a number of suggestions of ways to personalize a large lecture class. Although aimed at larger classes, these suggestions would be useful in classes of all sizes.
• Establish a class environment that encourages discussion by:
1) arriving to class early to “mingle” with students and remaining after class for questions, and
2) learning the values and interests of students through questionnaires and surveys (What does your major field mean to you? Use five words to describe someone working in your field), through information cards (student’s name, interests, hometown, career plans, favorite movie and singer), and through conducting small group exercises (case studies, reflections on current events).
• Create a carefully designed syllabus to serve as a contract between the student and instructor. Include a statement of your teaching philosophy in the syllabus so students have an idea of what to expect in terms of material presentation and evaluation techniques.
• Design numerous overheads to assist students in note taking (that is, an outline of the lecture with overlays of details as they are presented).
• Consider humor a resource (that is, use of self, family members and experiences).