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Teaching Tips

Three Steps to Improve Your Teaching

These three key areas have been shown to make a real difference as you work to improve your students’ experience.

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You can plan now to make your course even better. Research conducted here at the Center for Teaching and Learning
indicates that instructors can take a few simple steps to make their classroom experiences more effective for student learning. Presented here are three things that you can do as you plan for future courses.

  1. Encourage active and practical learning.
    • Make connections to real-world applications of the course material.
    • Provide for hands-on activities (active learning) over straight lecturing.
    • Facilitate in-class discussion groups and group work.
    • Provide opportunities for students to be a mentor and to function as a peer teacher.
  2. Provide for meaningful teacher-student interactions.
    • Learn students’ names and demonstrate that you care about their lives.
    • Listen to students’ concerns and respond appropriately.
    • Be encouraging and quick to recognize students’ accomplishments.
    • Spend more time with students and communicate with them personally.
  3. Make course expectations clear and based on learning outcomes.
    • Make course expectations explicit.
    • State the learning outcomes and make clear connections to the real world.
    • Engage students in assignments that have a clear connection to learning outcomes, as opposed to those that are perceived as busy work.

Don’t forget the value of conducting mid-course evaluations to track where you are right now.

-Based on research conducted by Whitney Ransom, Center for Teaching and Learning,
Brigham Young University

Creating Learning Outcomes in BYU Learning Suite

Learning Outcomes can be included in your BYU Learning Suite course and will appear in the syllabus for students to view if you choose to create one. View the following links for more information about adding, editing and deleting learning outcomes on Learning Suite.