Undergraduate Chat Learn and Share Space is a forum for students and instructors to discuss common issues, challenges and possibilities in teaching and learning. Teaching Academy members facilitate these discussions, with a focus on creating and maintaining effective and meaningful instructor-student interaction, in and beyond the classroom. Students are encouraged to share their perspectives on what works and what doesn’t work for them in the classroom.
In April 2025, Teaching Academy members and students discussed five issues and recorded the following suggestions.
Student Suggestions
- Cultural/Social issues – behaviors and assumptions
- Important: Students ask us to be mindful of student behaviors and assumptions related to race, gender and other social issues in their classes and to help remind our students that all voices should be heard.
- They specifically asked that we be aware of cultural differences pertaining to our international students. It is very important that our international students feel welcomed by their instructors. International students say they need to be told that their professors are open to requests for help from international students. This is especially important since it is difficult for international students to create a support system here on campus since it takes a while to make new friends, and their family and other friends are so far away. International students tell us that it is very important, and very useful for their experiences here, for us to make sure we are aware of cultural and social issues.
- Use of clickers and slides
- Provide clicker questions on note cards so that students can go back and look at the questions, and/or provide students with notecards so that they can choose to create their own handwritten notes about the questions and can go back and look at the questions outside of class.
- Design your slides so that students need to fill in blanks at key points on the slide rather than just providing complete slides that the student sits back and passively watches. One exception: completed slides are useful for when students are sick.
- Learning something new
- Having the opportunity to actually use something in class the first time it is taught is very helpful.
- Teaching Assistant guidance
- Students said that professors should make sure that all TAs involved in teaching the course should have the same information regarding what is being taught and what is on the exam.
- Students suggested that professors provide some basic information and guidelines for their TAs regarding how to teach and tell their TAs that it is fine for them to tell students that they don’t know an answer to a particular question.
- Students talking during class (especially in large lectures)
- Students would encourage instructors to ask students who are talking during class to stop. They aren’t referring to a short question asked from one student to a neighbor, but rather any conversation that goes on for more than a sentence or two, which they say often happens around them in large lecture classes. Just simply moving around the room while teaching can help alleviate this problem. Students would also like to be given permission at the start of a course to ask other students around them to stop talking during lectures.
- More suggestions for our teaching
- One final suggestion: Please provide a rubric when assigning a paper.