Questions tagged [teaching]
This tag is related to the role and duties of a teacher, an academic instructor, tutor or a teaching assistant.
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Having students scribe lectures
When I'm teaching an advanced graduate class where the source material is drawn primarily from current research papers, there isn't a canonical text per se, and a typical lecture, while loosely ...
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Best practices when allowing exam cheat sheets
Context: I am an assistant professor of mathematics at a small liberal-arts college in the US.
I am currently teaching an applied mathematics course for about thirty students with business-related ...
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Can I say no when my principal investigator asks me to help cover lectures next semester?
I'm a postdoc at a US university, and my principal investigator (PI) asked me to cover some of his lectures next semester. I do not want to do any lecturing as I want to focus solely on my research. I ...
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Why not offer credit by exam to students who have failed a course?
Summary: Students who have never taken a particular course often can get "credit by exam". However, it's extremely common for credit by exam to be disallowed to students who have previously ...
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How should a university deal with outsourced essay writing?
My campus is full of flyers, typically attached to lightposts and so, advertising to write essays for money. There's plenty of such services offered on the internet as well. Presumably, many ...
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Teaching the daughter of a lecturer, while being simultaneously enrolled in his course
I'm a student in a bachelor program at a local university, while I'm also a teacher (professional school) of apprenticeship students within the same sphere of study.
A few days ago I received the ...
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Term to describe paradox where those with less subject matter expertise can sometimes make better teachers?
A teacher of teachers in a field I'm involved in frequently says:
the best teachers are often those who only recently learned the material themselves
The rationale for the statement is that someone ...
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Is it professional for a professor to ask "surprise" questions on a test?
To clarify, I am asking if it's professional to ask questions that while relevant to the subject/course, and are related to the topic, but have not been discussed in class, assigned as homework, ...
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I caught several of my students plagiarizing. Could it be my fault as a teacher?
I have been teaching for three years now. This year, for the first time, I caught multiple students in a class (out of 50) either handing in the task of a colleague or copying the majority of someones ...
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Do student reviews of teachers matter?
As the title says, do student reviews of teachers actually ever matter?
At least in the U.S most universities I know of have their students evaluate their teachers at the end of each term. I do know ...
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What can I tell a student I am mentoring who claims: "I want to do pure mathematics because it is superior to any other subject in the world"?
This question is partly inspired by this thread.
I am mentoring a student who claims: "I want to do pure mathematics because it is superior to any other subject in the world like applied math, ...
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A few students requesting to cancel lectures due to their personal reasons. What should I do?
I give lectures to postgraduate students. The number of students in this batch is very low (< 20). The lectures are foundation lectures for the course. We are only into the basics of the course.
...
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How do you respectfully give a teacher feedback about their teaching?
My teacher's teaching style isn't working for me, and he asked for feedback about the class and how he could teach it better. He teaches with powerpoint and gives quizzes that are all about rote ...
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How to deal with a student who insists on getting a higher grade?
Student presentations were a part of my grading policy in one of my classes. I had a student who tried hard to get a higher grade in the class. But after his poor presentation, he persistently asked ...
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How should I handle students who ask questions that are "beyond the scope of the course" as a TA
One of the most common replies I have gotten as a student in engineering is the phrase "what you are asking is beyond the scope of this course". But I always found it a bit funny coming from the prof ...
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Why do some professors with PhDs leave their professorships to teach high school?
I can surmise that some of them mightn't have gotten tenure and needed to find another job, but wouldn't these former professors be bored teaching the same (relatively basal) material yearly?
Let me ...
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Why are [some] professors ambiguous about material that is actually tested on exams?
I've noticed a majority of professors that I have had will tell students something along the lines of, the exam covers Chapters 1, 2, 3, or the exam covers topics X, Y, Z. Sometimes this is ends up ...
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Is "read the syllabus" a sufficient transfer of responsibility?
In my experience, most instructors spend a large portion of the first period in a term talking about the syllabus. This seems to serve to pass responsibility onto students:
Students see the deadlines....
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Why do academics work only nine months of the year?
I'm wondering how best to respond to queries from non-academics along the lines of "Why should you be paid during the summer holidays?" This is the sort of question I hear a lot in this economic ...
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How to deal with a lazy class?
Imagine that you want to conduct your undergraduate classroom in a more creative way and introduce practical projects as a part of the final grade. However, students are lazy to embrace extra ...
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How to evaluate students? Resources on educational assessment for higher education
Most academics are involved to some level in teaching classes and evaluating students. I never got a proper education in teaching, unlike what we had for research, and neither did any of the lecturers ...
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Why do colleges attempt to teach students who lack prerequisite skills?
Inspired by Tutoring is depressing because my students are struggling too much with my exercises. What do I do?
The text of that question says:
I am a tutor for first year math majors at a European ...
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How did modern western post-secondary education become tied up with research and publications?
Teaching, research and (academic) publishing are three different pursuits. Our society and its institutions, particularly most universities, enforce links between these in various ways.
People who ...
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How can I encourage students to ask questions in class
In my field (as in many others), students are assigned articles or textbook chapters to be read as preparation for classes (i.e. the whole class has to read the same set of texts). I encourage my ...
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Is there a correlation between being a good teacher and being a good researcher?
I have been told that there is a correlation between being a good teacher and being a good researcher (like this paper, in page 15, point 3.6), but i have not found any references or studies about it.
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Is it dishonest to guess on multiple choice exams?
I have never seen a thing, until recently, like someone not marking a cross on a multiple choice test just because he didn't know the answer.
I wonder whether this is a East Asian right-thing-to-do ...
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How to motivate students to complete low-point homework?
I teach a course consisting of about 50 assignments. These include readings, many short writing assignments, and group projects. Additionally, students complete 2 large projects as the mid-term and ...
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How can one successfully run a reading group?
This is related to "Skimming through a math paper with a group" and "What do professors gain out of teaching reading courses with individual Ph.D students", but from the other side :)
I've ...
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Planning a course: lecture-by-lecture or topic-by-topic?
I'm planning my first course, and I'm starting to realize that it's actually broken into a long string of smaller topics, and that each smaller topic is unlikely to fit into a single lecture. ...
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What to do when students bring me questions related to other courses and subjects?
I teach all of the writing courses for one of my college's STEM department. Occasionally, students bring me questions related to their field, e.g. they are doing some project for another course and ...
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What should be put in the final slide when preparing teaching presentations?
When preparing my PowerPoint slides for a lecture, I often find myself wondering what to put as the final slide.
For presentations in industry, when not in a university setting, I often have a final ...
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Pursuing a research career in a university without teaching duties, is it possible?
Is it possible to pursue a research career inside a university without teaching duties?
I don't like to teach, I love research and I love being affiliated to a university.
The universities I am ...
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What do the abbreviations 2:2, 2:1, or 3:2:3 mean in terms of teaching loads?
I often see people abbreviate faculty teaching loads ("course loads") as 2:2 or 3:2:3 or 2:1.
Sometimes a note such as "3:3 with 2 preps" is added.
What do these abbreviations mean?
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Dangers of allowing students to resubmit assignments
There are two closely related questions here:
If a student submits their assignment and is unhappy with their mark, are there any dangers (which I might not be seeing) in allowing the students to do ...
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Should one offer to take over a lecture that the lecturer is struggling to teach?
Once upon a time in a lecture I attended, the lecturer had clearly not fully understood the material and was struggling to explain it. I was a student, but very knowledgeable about the topic, and had ...
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Do I need to define all forms of cheating in the syllabus?
Every year, students seem to find new ways to "cheat" on the work. Every year, my course policies section grows longer and longer (a full page now) to match the newfound methods. I list all forms of ...
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How do Universities deal with poor teaching?
At one school I worked at the strategy for dealing with poor teaching was to get feedback from students around midterms. If the students criticism was strong enough the teacher was pulled from the ...
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How to handle relevant, but disruptive, questions
I've seen on this site several posts about how to handle silly or "trolling" questions, but I recently faced the opposite situation. Several students in a class I'm teaching continuously bring up ...
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Why have lectures in the information age?
The primary method of instruction at most colleges is lecturing, where the professor delivers and explains a set of well-established knowledge to the students.
However, there are drawbacks to this: ...
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Is it recommended for a professor to not entertain advanced questions for a basic course?
Recently I worked as a teaching assistant for a digital logic course. The topic for the day was full-adder. Professor explained the full concept of the full adder, along with question and answer ...
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Retyping some material to obscure source of a textbook with a solution manual?
This is my first time teaching mathematics. I've been giving lessons based on a certain textbook which contains excellent exercises (not just the exercises, but the order in which they appear leads ...
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Why are oral tests and exams not common in American educational systems?
My family originates from Russia but I only have experience with American academia. My parents constantly describe oral exams whereupon a student is required to choose one of many cards that have a ...
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Do sample solutions increase student 'productivity'?
I'm not 100% sure whether this belongs here, but since I am a PhD student (teaching) in the TCS/Algorithms department, I'd like to know what fellow, maybe more experienced, teachers think.
The ...
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How to write a teaching statement without any classroom teaching experience?
I have a friend who is applying for teaching positions in biochemistry with no teaching experience. She has a strong research background, with several publications as a grad student and post doc, but ...
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Should a lecturer be friendly with students?
I have been thinking about this question for a while and did a few googling here and there; but, didn't get anything good. Probably, academia could help.
I am early in my teaching career as a ...
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What is a teaching prep in terms of teaching load?
I am new to this job search thing, and I keep seeing the teaching load description along with something called "preps," what is this?
For reference, I am a Ph.D. student in mathematics in the U.S. ...
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Should live sessions be recorded for students when teaching a math course online?
I am a course instructor. In my courses, which are now online due to the pandemic, I have optional live sessions. In those live sessions, I give examples of how to solve problems (it's a math-based ...
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How to react to a student who provides very critical comments about your teaching in a student evaluation survey?
I am a teacher in an institute and I teach English as a foreign language to students in an 8_week session. At the end of each session, the students are required to give their opinion about the class ...
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Drawing Lines when Giving Ideas to Undergraduate Students
I teach quite a few 'unprepared' students and I find they struggle with finding source material on which to base their reports. Basically, they need to read a lot and apply theories to different ...
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How to verify authenticity of submitted assignments
When teaching 250 students in the same subject, knowing each student can be quite difficult. In smaller classes, it may be possible to learn enough through classroom interaction that when assessing ...
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