Introducing Teaching Tips: Practical Advice from Colleagues to Colleagues

Teaching can be both deeply rewarding and full of daily challenges. That’s why we’re excited to introduce Teaching Tips, a new initiative from the Office for Faculty Excellence that’s designed with you in mind. In each edition, our staff and Faculty Fellows share their best insights—tips they’ve honed through their own classroom experiences and that they’re excited to pass on to fellow instructors.

Maybe you’re looking for a new way to spark curiosity in a lecture, or maybe you want fresh ideas on how to build a more inclusive classroom. Whatever it is, these tips are meant to be real, actionable, and quick to apply so that you can keep doing what you do best: inspiring and engaging your students.

Look for these Teaching Tips in the newsletter once a month, and if you have a tip or technique that’s made a difference in your teaching, we’d love to hear from you so we can share it with others! Just email your tip to faculty-excellence@ncsu.edu and put Teaching Tip in the subject line. After all, we’re all in this together, learning from each other as we go. Happy teaching!

Tip of the Week: Provide Review Materials for Every Exam
Students appreciate being able to review before an exam, and more so they appreciate having access to old exam questions. It might relieve their anxiety to see how you formulate and format them. You can use old exam questions as homework questions (make sure to let them know that you are doing this) or offer them as supplementary review materials in your Moodle course. (from Maria Gallardo-Williams)