Guidance for how you can be a more effective teacher during your first year at Iowa, and beyond. 

Developing as a teacher is an endeavor that takes an entire career. The most satisfied and impactful college instructors take a flexible, incremental approach to improving their teaching, leading with curiosity and moderation (Boice, 2000). Rather than getting overwhelmed by aiming to “fix” or “perfect” your teaching all at once, we recommend taking a purposeful, bite-sized approach to your teaching. 

The Center for Teaching has outlined a year’s worth of bite-sized activities you can undertake during your first 2 semesters at Iowa that will help you: 

  • Learn about effective, evidence-based teaching practices that you can use in your classroom
  • Set practical and purposeful goals for developing as a teacher
  • Gather evidence of your impact and growth as an instructor for your teaching dossier
  • Connect with colleagues and resources that will ground and empower you in your teaching career 

Below, you will find activities that will help you improve as a teacher immediately and set a foundation of practices that you can build on in the future. We suggest 10 activities mapped out over your first two semesters at Iowa. We encourage you to keep a record of your activities and their outcomes, which you can use to document your growth as a teacher in your teaching portfolio and promotion and review documents. 

For more guidance on successfully starting your faculty role, visit the Iowa Faculty Onboarding website.

Semester 1

Set up your ICON

Your ICON is often your students’ first and last stop in their progress through your course. A well-organized ICON site can help you and your students stay on track, and putting in a little extra work at the beginning of the term to organize your course site can greatly reduce confusion and frustration later. Take a few moments now to share your syllabus on the ICON site, leverage the ICON template, or check the accessibility of your course site. 

The Office of Teaching, Learning, and Technology administers ICON and offers trainings on ICON and other technology tools. Consider registering for one of their trainings. If you need more support, you can book an appointment with Student Instructional Technology Assistant. If you are teaching an online course, Distance and Online Education is another great resource. 

Week 1: Make a plan for working with your TAs

When to do it: It’s never too late to think about supporting your TAs, but this works especially well if done around week 1.  

Estimated time commitment: 45 minutes 

Not all courses include teaching assistants [TAs]. If you will be working with TAs, you should make a plan for how to set them up for success as teachers. Many TAs are new to teaching or new to the subject matter, or new to the organization of your course, and they will need support from you to teach discussion or lab sections, work with students, and deliver material. Below are some things to consider. Find more resources in the Planning an Instructional Team guide.  

  • Schedule regular TA meetings  
  • Clarify ICON questions and workflows
  • Clarify who is responsible for teaching materials and content. Will you be providing lesson plans for sections, or will TAs be responsible for producing their own? If you have multiple TAs, should their sections have a standardized plan or set of activities?
  • Create transparent grading guidelines for TAs by providing rubrics, sample graded work, or similar support. If you have a large teaching team, consider a practice grading session in which you all grade a student artifact together to ensure consistent understanding of expectations.
  • Set up observations and formative feedback 

Identify one student engagement strategy to try

When to do it: If you’re new to student engagement, the best time is to do it in the first week or two before students are locked into more passive patterns. If you’re more experienced with student engagement, you can use your favorite strategies now and try out a new one a few weeks into the semester. 

Estimated time commitment: 25 minutes to prep, and as little as 5 minutes in class.  

Students learn and retain information and skills better if they are actively involved in the learning process. A 2014 meta-analysis of 225 research studies in STEM disciplines revealed that students in classes that incorporate active learning strategies performed 6% better on final exams than students in lecture-only courses (Freeman et al., 2014). You can incorporate engaging learning strategies into your course without overhauling your syllabus or lesson plans, and even if lecture is a critical component of your course design. Even trying out one brief activity per class session can benefit your students, and you can build on these strategies each semester. Starting in week 1 will help set the tone with your students, and give them a sense of what to expect in the course going forward. 

For some ideas for engaging teaching strategies, explore the Handbook for Teaching Excellence chapter on Active Learning and Student Engagement, a list of interactive lecture strategies for larger lecture-based courses, or the book Small Teaching by James Lang (use your HawkID credentials to access through the library). 

Collect Midterm Student Feedback

When to do it: The best time to collect student feedback is between weeks 5-10 of the semester. Consider adding it to your course calendar. 

Estimated time commitment: 20 minutes to prepare, 5-30 minutes in class, and 30-60 minutes to review feedback and make a plan to respond to it. 

Collecting student feedback midway through the term can be valuable because it can help you better understand your students’ experiences and needs, identify areas that you can adjust to better support students before the end of the term (Hurney, Harris, Bates Prins & Kruck, 2014), and even help to improve ratings on end-of-semester evaluations (McGowan & Osguthorpe, 2011). Unlike end-of-term student surveys, midterm feedback gives you information that you can act on to help students while it still matters to their experience. Asking explicitly for feedback can help students feel heard and support classroom community and communication. This is a good habit to get into each time you teach and needn’t take a lot of time. 

There are many quick and effective ways to collect and use student feedback: 

End of Semester 1: Identify one change to make before next term

When to do it: Take some time to reflect on your course and make a plan for improvement before you check out for term break. 

Estimated time commitment: 15-30 minutes to review and reflect on the course, and 20 minutes to make a concrete plan for changes. 

Improving your teaching is an incremental and iterative process, and the best time to make changes to your course is while things are still fresh in your mind. Before you move on to winter break, reflect on the things that went well and the parts of the course that presented challenges to your or your students this term. Sometimes looking over your syllabus or free-writing for 10 minutes can help you identify a manageable part of your course or teaching practice to work on.  

Some ways to identify impactful changes include: 

  • What is one theme from your students’ feedback surveys that you want to concentrate on in the next teaching term?
  • Did you try anything new this term? How did it go? Did you encounter any bottlenecks or challenges? How can you tinker with it for next time? 

What is one (just one!) bottleneck or challenge that you struggled with this term? What is one thing you might try out to address that challenge? 

Semester 2

Explore your teaching resources and identify one professional development activity to do

When to do it: Explore available resources during a low-stress time of the year so that you are prepared to leverage them when you need them. 

Estimated time commitment: 15 minutes 

You don’t need to overload on professional development to benefit from it. Just as your courses will improve over time as you iterate on them each time you teach them, you develop as a teacher by taking purposeful, bite-sized opportunities to learn new things, consult with colleagues and experts, and set goals for the future. Below are just some of the teaching professional development resources available to you at Iowa. Consider choosing one to engage with this semester. 

Revise one assignment or learning activity to make it more transparent

When to do it: One week before you share an assignment prompt or new learning activity with students. 

Estimated time commitment: 30-60 minutes 

One low-prep, high-reward teaching practice that can positively impact your students without requiring much revision in your course is transparency. Transparent teaching practices help students understand not just what they are expected to do, but why and how, and these practices have been shown to enhance learning for all students, increasing their academic achievement, sense of belonging, and graduation and retention rates, and additionally benefitting underserved student populations (Winkelmes, 2016). 

To make an assignment more transparent, focus on three things – the purpose, task, and criteria. Make a point in the written assignment and in your class discussion of it to discuss the purpose of the assignment – the goals you have for asking them to do it and how it will help to learn and demonstrate learning. Help students to think through the specific tasks the assignment asks of them, specifically naming steps that may not be otherwise obvious to someone doing this for the first time. Finally, make sure students understand what constitutes success for the assignment, such as providing a rubric that explains what aspects are most critical or providing examples of a successful and less successful version of the product. 

Transparency is also a useful framework for considering AI in your teaching practice. Including a clear AI policy in your syllabus is a strong first step. Consider adapting a sample syllabus statement that fits your context. Explaining the rationale behind your AI policy helps students see how and why your policy supports their learning. One resource that can aid transparent communication is the AI Assessment Scale. It can help you identify which types of learning tasks are suitable for AI use and guide conversations with students about expectations for AI in assessments. 

Explore more transparent teaching methods at the Transparency in Learning and Teaching website and the Handbook for Teaching Excellence. 

Identify a formative assessment strategy to try

When to do it: Any time during the semester, especially at the beginning of a new instructional unit. 

Estimated time commitment: 15-30 minutes to design, 5-30 minutes to implement in the course, and 10-30 minutes to grade. 

Formative assessment, or the smaller assessment strategies used during the learning process to monitor student progress and give feedback before major assessments, can help you and your students know where they are in their progress toward major learning milestones and allow you to make teaching choices that will help them get there. Grading for formative assessments is typically low-stakes for the student, and can be as simple as grading for completion. 

Formative assessment can help you determine things like if your students have mastered foundational concepts that they will need to apply later, if they know how to ask disciplinarily appropriate questions, and if they know how to approach common problems in the course. You can gather that information using tools such as quizzes, short writing prompts, classroom polling using Top Hat or clickers, and bite-sized modular tasks that will be part of more sophisticated assignments (e.g., practice writing a thesis statement in preparation for a larger analytical essay).  

You can find a variety of ideas of brief formative assessments in the Classroom Assessment Techniques resource. 

Reflect on and document your SPOT feedback

When to do it: At the end of the term and as you prepare materials for review and promotion. 

Estimated time commitment: 15-30 minutes to analyze and reflect on your feedback, and 15-30 minutes to document your results and plans for the future. 

Like midterm feedback, the end-of-course student surveys known at Iowa as SPOT [Student Perceptions of Teaching] can help you make informed decisions about teaching in the future. SPOT surveys are also one possible stream of evidence that you can include in your dossier for review and promotion. It is therefore useful to your students, your teaching, and your career to engage purposefully and thoughtfully with your students’ feedback. Consider taking a few minutes at the end of each semester to review your SPOT surveys, make a plan for using the information, and possibly documenting it for future review periods. 

Some ways to get started include: 

  • Did you notice any patterns in the feedback? 
  • What did students say supported their learning in your course? What can you do more of?
  • What challenges or frustrations did students identify? What one or two things might you implement in the next teaching term to address them? 

This can sometimes be emotionally challenging, so we recommend reviewing your SPOT surveys during a calm moment, and consider calling on a colleague or friend to help you review. The Center for Teaching is available to confidentially help you analyze your students’ feedback and make a plan for what to do with it. 

Consider and plan for more extensive course redesigns

When to do it: Between teaching terms. 

Estimated time commitment: One hour to one day or more. Consider how much time you can reasonably devote to this effort as you make goals for your redesign. 

While you can make minor tweaks to a course while you are teaching it, the best time for major redesign is after the term has ended and you can review the entire thing. Reviewing the course and reflecting on the wins and challenges you experienced while teaching it is best done while things are still fresh in your mind. Before you head off to your summer break, consider blocking some time to reflect on the course, review your students’ feedback, and make a plan for any major revisions you may want to make.  

Some places to start include (you don’t necessarily have to address all of these questions!): 

  • What went particularly well this term? What evidence do you have that confirms that success? What can you do more of next time?
  • What places did students seem most confused or frustrated? How can you address that confusion next time?
  • What bottlenecks or challenges might you focus on addressing the next time you teach this course?
  • Did you learn about any interesting practices or strategies from colleagues or professional development activities that you might want to try out next term? What can you try to implement in a purposeful and sustainable way? 

The Center for Teaching is available to consult on your course design, and you may want to consider applying for the Course Design Institute, a week-long workshop where faculty design or redesign a course in partnership with experts.