Supplementing Your Instruction with Additional Resources

Overview

Some students may need the opportunity to review or catch up on key foundational knowledge. Consider what resources may be available and how you can integrate those into your course. If nothing else, the past year has been a busy time for faculty making lecture videos, video demonstrations, and other multimedia resources. Below are some ideas for how faculty and department heads can integrate supplemental materials and facilitate the process of sharing among faculty peers.

Tips for Faculty

1. Reach out to other faculty members. Your teaching peers may have videos or other materials that they wouldn't mind sharing as refreshers for your students.
2. Integrate the resources into the course, especially when paired with prior knowledge assessment. You may want to consider having students who score less than 80% on a prior knowledge assessment complete a review. This review can be required or suggested, but it's more likely it will be completed if it's required. The key, however, is making sure the additional requirements do not overwhelm students.
3. Add review sessions for students to brush up on foundational material. The review sessions may be lead by a TA, undergradate peer mentor or learning assistant, or by you.
4. Integrate review into current work. Consider adding practice problems to refresh students' memory as they're learning new information.
5. Consider using a tool like Piazza where students can anonymously submit questions and get answers from other students, TAs, and/or the instructor.
6. Encourage students to form study groups and help facilitate the process. You could add a link or form for students to sign up if they're interested in joining a study group.
   

Tips for Department Heads

1. Help facilitate the sharing of instructional materials. Talk to your faculty about how they can share instructional videos or demonstrations from last year with their colleagues as review material for current students.
2. Reiterate a team environment. The sharing of materials is not meant to critique each other's teaching, but rather to provide resources to help our students learn.
3. Consider creating an ad hoc committee of faculty members who curate materials in the most needed areas for the department.
4. Make time for the discussions that need to happen. Creating time and space for these conversations to happen in department meetings is necessary to facilitate collaboration and understanding of what the needs are.