TEACHING GUIDES
intro
Our Teaching Guides span a variety of topics applicable to on campus, online, and hybrid teaching modalities. These on-demand resources provide an overview of evidence-based teaching practices and curricular strategies. Our Teaching Guides are intended to be an introduction to pedagogical topics and the supporting educational technologies, providing guidance on how to implement various techniques in different disciplines, course sizes, and course modalities.
We’ve organized our Teaching Guides into six broad categories, which you can select below, or try out our Teaching Guide Chatbot, which searches for answers across all of our teaching guides. Let us know how it worked for you!
TEACHING GUIDE TABLE
| TEACHING GUIDE CHATBOT | Try our Teaching Guide Chatbot, which searches across our guides. | |
| ASSESSMENT & GRADING PRACTICES | Assessment Planning | Design assessments intentionally across the term using assessment for, as, and of learning to inform instruction and support students. |
| Authentic Assessments | Assess learning through real‑world tasks and products that require application and transfer of knowledge and skills. | |
| Equitable Assessments & Grading Practices | Adopt transparent, consistent, and bias‑aware assessment and grading approaches that support fairness and learning. | |
| Formative Assessments | Incorporate low‑stakes assessments before, during, and after instruction to provide feedback, guide teaching, and promote metacognition. | |
| Rubrics | Develop analytic or holistic rubrics that clarify expectations, support feedback, and improve reliability in grading. | |
| Summative Assessments | Use end‑of‑unit or course assessments to verify learning and align criteria and rubrics with objectives for valid evidence. | |
| DIGITAL LEARNING | AI Writing Tools | Guide students in ethical, effective use of AI writing tools and design assessments resilient to misuse. |
| Micro-lesson videos | Learn more about why and how to produce short videos to support student learning. | |
| EdTech Tools for Student Assignments | Match assignment goals to appropriate digital tools and workflows that support learning and assessment. | |
| ENGAGED TEACHING STRATEGIES | Active Learning | Engage students with structured activities that promote practice, retrieval, collaboration, and higher‑order thinking. |
| Active Learning Cards | Use printable prompts and activities to implement active learning quickly across disciplines and class sizes. | |
| INCLUSIVE & EQUITY-MINDED TEACHING | Accessibility Playbook | Quick-start collection of UIC resources to integrate accessibility into courses, materials, and technologies. |
| Bite-Sized Inclusive Teaching Practices | Pick short, high‑impact strategies—organized by belonging, relationships, transparency, structure, welcoming, and wild card—to make courses more inclusive. | |
| Conocimiento Activity | Use a structured storytelling activity to build community and belonging through shared experiences and reflection. | |
| First Day of Class | Plan an engaging first session that sets expectations, builds community, and primes students for active learning. | |
| Inclusive Teaching Toolkit | Curated checklists, quick guides, and courses to integrate inclusive, accessible practices and diverse perspectives. | |
| Navigating Social Identity in the Classroom | Attend to your own and students’ social identities to build inclusive climate and respond thoughtfully to identity-related dynamics. | |
| Note-taking | Implement proactive strategies and structures that improve students’ note‑taking skills and reduce the need for individual accommodations. | |
| Pronoun Usage | Model and normalize accurate pronoun use to foster belonging and respect across your classroom community. | |
| Universal Design for Learning (UDL) | Adopt flexible goals, materials, methods, and assessments that proactively reduce barriers and support diverse learners. | |
| PREPARING to TEACH | Faculty Resources | Provide faculty with a host of resources for effective instruction at UIC. |
| TA Resources | Provide teaching assistants with quick-start guidance, policies, and strategies for effective instruction at UIC. | |
| REFLECTIVE TEACHING | Peer Feedback on Your Teaching | Invite structured peer observation and feedback to inform reflective improvement of teaching practices. |
| Student Feedback | Gather and respond to early and end‑of‑term feedback to improve teaching and student learning. | |
| SYLLABUS & COURSE DESIGN | Backward Design | Plan courses by identifying desired learning outcomes first and aligning assessments and activities backward from those goals. |
| Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives | Use Bloom’s framework to scaffold objectives, assessments, and activities across cognitive levels from remembering to creating. | |
| Learning Objectives | Write clear, measurable learning objectives using action verbs that align with course assessments and activities. | |
| Sustainability Teaching Toolkit | Incorporate sustainability concepts and practices into course content with adaptable activities and resources. | |
| Syllabus | Design an inclusive, transparent syllabus that communicates learning goals, course policies, and student support clearly. |
Creative Commons License for CATE Teaching Guides
CC BY-NC 4.0
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
Our teaching guides have a Creative Commons license: CC BY-NC 4.0. This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon our work in any medium or format, for noncommercial purposes only, as long as credit is given to the original creator of our CATE Teaching Guides. Please use the appropriate citation, which can be found on each teaching guides webpage, when citing our teaching guides.
- BY: Credit must be given to the creator.
- NC: Only noncommercial uses of the work are permitted. Noncommercial means not primarily intended for, or directed towards, commercial advantage or monetary compensation.