Student Success

Learning Theory

Building connections between class topics and real-life examples ia a helpful tool for students. Providing students opportunity to make those connections can improve student engagement in your course. This Teaching Tool will provide you with some background information and prompts you can use to help you help your students make connections.

Teaching Tools—Building Connections (PDF)

A community agreement is a shared understanding between learners about how everyone wants to work together during the course. Designing community agreements allows students to feel safer, a greater sense of agency, establish greater trust, and better situates themselves to be able to learn.

Each class context is unique. Culturally informed teaching recognizes and capitalizes on the differences of learning backgrounds in order to enrich the learning experience of all students. This teaching tool provides you with prompts to create a welcoming class environment for students with varied cultural backgrounds and prior learning experiences.

While we know that cramming for an exam is a bad idea, our students are likely studying right before the exam. Research has indicated that cramming does not allow for meaningful learning. This teaching tool will provide you simple ideas to prompt students to engage with the material over a period of time. Coming Soon.

Have you ever explored a hot topic, current event, or discipline specific controversy in the classroom? The diversity of ideas, perspectives, and experiences of students can present unique opportunities and challenges for dialogue within the classroom. Sometimes these conversations can become high-stakes - where the combination of divergent opinions and high-running emotions create challenges for maintaining a safe and positive learning environment. This Teaching Tool seeks to provide a process for facilitating challenging conversations within the classroom through the use of Non-Violent Communication (NVC).

OERs use a license that supports open use of the content, e.g., Creative Commons license, or can be accessed outside of copyright regulation in the public domain. OERs can appear in a number of different forms. For instance, they can be compiled and shared as open textbooks or e-texts. OERs can be combined with commercial content as well. OERs range in size. They can appear as an individual OER such as lesson plans, or they can include whole courses as for MIT open courseware and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).

Preparing to Teach | Teaching
Assessing Student Learning | Student Success