Tools and Resources

Case study: A teaching assistant discovers that many of the class activities she planned will be physically impossible for one of her students.

Best practices for teaching assistants as they interact with students. Includes tips on creating rapport and establishing effective boundaries.

Reference list for TAs: links to resources for undergraduates, including Counseling and Psychological Services and the Women's Resource Center

Tasha Souza developed this communication framework as an interactive response so that instructors can have response strategies they can activate in critical moments to maintain inclusive teaching environments. Having language/phrases that we can see ourselves use, can be a critical step in our immediate responses to microaggression and an important action to take to support those who have been targeted by a microaggression.

All instructors will need to address a course disruption at some point in their teaching career. When instructors do not have response strategies that can be activated in that moment, it can lead to undermine student confidence in you and may send the wrong message to those who have been targeted. The phrases below can be adapted so that you are prepared to use them. Developed by Tasha Souza, Ph.D., Director of the BUILD Program at Boise State University, developed this interactive communication framework for instructors to use in the immediate moment.

Students may feel uncertain about the ethical use of AI in a given course and academic/professional field, and instructors may find it helpful to understand how students think about the ethical aspects of using AI and how they are using AI tools as learners. This resource offers recommendations for starting conversations with students about AI.

Instructors are the most important determinant of student participation in the Student Educational Experience Questionnaire (SEEQ). Students are more likely to complete the questionnaire if they know that instructors read their feedback and value it as a source of ideas to improve the course.

Instructors are the most important determinant of student participation. Students are more likely to submit feedback if they know that instructors value their feedback and use it to make improvements in the course. Below are suggestions for how you might discuss mid-semester feedback with your students.

Teaching portfolios provide an opportunity for instructors to show evidence that they are effective teachers. This PDF includes a list of questions that can be useful in filtering the kinds of evidence to be included in one's portfolio.

A teaching portfolio provides materials associated with the experience of teaching and learning. This PDF describes items that might be included in a teaching portfolio, categorized by source: personal material, material from others, and products of good teaching.

Learn more about faculty options for Teaching and Learning Scholarship (TLS) at Penn State. TLS is also known as Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) and it forms the foundation for evidence-based teaching. This flyer outlines short term, medium range, and long term options for TLS support and resources. Contact information is included on the flyer.

Listing of the Atherton Award winners up to 2010.

Listing of Teaching Fellow Award winners from 1986 to 2010.

This flyer lists a variety of services provided by our consultants divided into 5 broad categories: Course Design & Planning, Teaching Strategies, Testing & Grading, Reearch on Teaching & Learning, and Course Evaluation.

These PowerPoint slides accompanied a presentation by James M. Lang delivered at University Park on Thursday, Feb. 27, 2020. As faculty struggle with the problem of distracted students on our campuses and in our classes, they have become increasingly frustrated by the ways in which digital devices can interfere with student learning. But are students today more distracted than they were in the past? Has technology reduced their ability to focus and think deeply, as some popular books have argued? This interactive lecture draws upon scholarship from history, neuroscience, and education in order to provide productive new pathways for faculty to understand the distractible nature of the human brain, work with students to moderate the effects of distraction in their learning, and even leverage the distractible nature of our minds for new forms of connected and creative thinking.

Information for instructors who want to learn more about how to plan for instruction before and after a presidential election.

A brief overview of dos and don’ts to assist your planning for class sessions prior to and after a presidential election.

Students may bring their thoughts and feelings as well as their trauma related to the violence and humanitarian crisis of the Israel-Gaza conflict into your course, even if your course material is not related to current events. This resource describes actions you can take for your students (and yourself) as well as Trauma Informed Pedagogy.

Rubric used to evaluated teaching grant proposals.

This is a one-page tip sheet that guides instructors in thinking about instruction beyond just covering content.

This one-page tip sheet provides background and approaches to guide instructors in directing students toward mastery of content.

This one-page tip sheet discusses the idea of "differentiated instruction" and suggests ways instructors can differentiate their own instruction with respect to content, processes, and products.

This one-page tip sheet guides instructors through evidence-based components of an effective lesson plan.

This is a one-page tip sheet that guides instructors in thinking about how to "decode" their discipline for students and to strategize ways to help students navigate the challenges of learning in the discipline.

This classroom observation form (faculty peer evaluation) provides both scaled and open-ended questions for use by anyone who is observing an instructor.

Guidelines for a teaching philosophy.

How to write a teaching philosophy.

Rubric for a teaching philosophy.

Evaluating a teaching philosophy.

This document provides a tool for use in evaluating a teaching philosophy, or teaching statement, that might be included in a job application packet or a tenure and promotion dossier. The matrix includes evaluative criteria for: history/herstory; relation to course(s) and discipline; grounding in theory and/or experience; appropriateness of language to audience; organization and succinctness

Provides a tool for evaluating a teaching philosophy / teaching statement that might be included in a job application packet or a tenure and promotion dossier. Areas evaluated include format, clarity, specificity, degree of reflectiveness, and foundation in beliefs about teaching and learning.

This resource was designed to help UBC instructors self-assess their teaching dossier (portfolio) and reflect on its content. It can be used alongside the detailed information in the Teaching Portfolio section at the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology, University of British Columbia.

This document describes how to use case studies as strategies to provide active learning experiences for students.

A brief description of course portfolios is provided along with resources and links to portfolio examples.

This document shows how to add the Penn State "Teaching Events" calendar to your list of Outlook Calendars. Over 40 units at Penn State offer Teaching and Learning events, seminars, visiting speakers, workshops, short courses, etc. The calendar was created so all faculty and TAs can see what is happening around the university. Some events will be open only for targeted audiences, but others will be open to all. Before scheduling an event please ensure that other events with similar audiences are not already on the calendar!

Teaching and Advising Resources for the Inauguration and Beyond
This document offers resources for creating a positive learning environment for all students and addressing challenges that might arise at the beginning of this semester. Main topics include: Checking in with Ourselves and Our Students; Engaging in Dialogue with Students; Managing Classroom Disruptions

This document was created to provide you with a source of options for gathering data on teamwork assignments and projects. You may choose to adopt one of the examples as is, combine elements from several of the examples, or use the examples to identify characteristics that correspond to particular aspects of your assigned work, course content, or student population.

This is a resource indicating technological tools to support teaching and learning at Penn State. This document contains a list of centrally supported tech, and also other that are not centrally supported but have wide support available online.

This template can be used to develop a curriculum map, or matrix, which allows faculty to see which courses address each program level learning objective. Developing a curriculum map is an important step in the learning outcomes assessment (i.e. program assessment) process.

This document provides an example of a test blueprint, which can be used to help guide test development and ensure that the test questions appropriately reflect the learning objectives of the unit that the test is designed to assess. It can also help students when they study for the test.

This document is an example of a test blueprint (written for a research methods course), which can be created to help you match your test questions with your learning objectives *and* to help your students study for a test.

This article "The Agony and the Equity," produced by the Center for Teaching at Stanford University in 1992, addresses issues associated with fair testing and grading.

This document suggests a variety of testing models and explains why each is effective. They are alternatives or supplements to the "mid-term and a final" model.

This is the PowerPoint presentation that includes information from Dr. Susan Rankin's national study of the state of higher education for LGBT people. Dr. Rankin presented this in a session for the Schreyer Institute in April of 2011.

This document describes a strategy for getting students involved with the content by having them pair with other students to discuss the answer to an instructor-posed problem. The pairs then share their answers with the class.

Addresses common challenges instructors might face when creating a teaching portfolio. Offers how-to suggestions for getting started with the development of a teaching portfolio.

This resource is from Texas Tech University and is written by Jenny Lloyd-Strovas, Ph.D. at TTU's Teaching, Learning, and Professional Development Center
Texas Tech University in August, 2015.
Teaching large classes can be a daunting experience. How do you keep students engaged and active without losing control of the classroom? With so many students, how do you know if they are learning? Should you attempt to take attendance or risk losing students? How do you build rapport when learning 200 names isn’t a possibility? If you have taught (or are preparing to teach) a large class, you have probably asked yourself these questions. Here, I will discuss possible solutions for these challenges and more. This resource is organized to be a quick and efficient reference for challenges that you are experiencing in your classroom.

This PowerPoint, giving by Bill Welsh, provides suggestions for how faculty can accommodate students with disabilities in their classrooms.

This resource offers principles of trauma-informed teaching and recommendations instructors
might consider as they are developing trauma-informed practices for their own courses.

This document describes a strategy to help students get more involved in lectures by periodically posing an question and having them discuss with a neighboring classmate.

This paper outlines twelve tips for undertaking peer observation of teaching in medical education, using the peer review model and the experiences of the authors. An accurate understanding of teaching effectiveness is required by individuals, medical schools, and universities to evaluate the learning environment and to substantiate academic and institutional performance. Peer Observation of Teaching is one tool that provides rich, qualitative evidence for teachers, quite different from closed-ended student evaluations. When Peer Observation of Teaching is incorporated into university practice and culture, and is conducted in a mutually respectful and supportive way, it has the potential to facilitate reflective change and growth for teachers.