Teaching resources
The Faculty Room
Ideas, formats and time-savers for people who teach at university level — shared by people who get it.
Letting students work on their own is not the same as guiding them
A debate you set up in two lines gives students freedom and no direction. The gap between the two is all the detail you never had time to write down. Here is what one teacher found when the detail came ready-made.
Read more →Class assessment: how to know the lesson worked before the exam tells you
Most courses find out whether teaching worked when it's far too late to do anything about it. Class assessment closes that gap — five checks that fit inside the lesson you're already teaching.
Read more →Assessment tools for teachers: which one you actually need, and when
\"Assessment tool\" usually means one thing in people's heads — a quiz platform. Assessment is really three separate jobs, and most tool stacks only cover two of them. Here's the one most people are missing.
Read more →Most feedback explains the grade. Good feedback changes the next piece of work.
You designed the assessment, built the criteria and held your standard across sixty submissions. Then all of that reaches the student as one sentence that would fit anyone. You've already done the hard part — this is about finishing it.
Read more →You designed the perfect graded project. Now you have to mark it.
The brief is done, the brief for the graded project reads well, students are into it — and then it lands on your desk to be marked. Designing it was the fun half. Deciding how to grade it fairly is the other half, and it's the one nobody plans for in advance.
Read more →Assessment in education: what it's actually for
Assessment isn't the thing you do at the end of the module. It's the evidence that learning happened — and most courses collect the wrong kind. Here's how to tell what yours is really measuring.
Read more →Grading rubrics: the complete guide
What a grading rubric actually is, why a vague one costs you more than it saves, and how to build one that holds up — for any assessment, from a first-year quiz to a final-year dissertation.
Read more →The invisible hours: the course prep nobody counts
Your timetable shows the hours you teach. It says nothing about the ones that make teaching possible — the evenings and weekends spent building, rewriting and refreshing. Here's the cost no one measures, and why it quietly shapes what we're able to do.
Read more →Assessment design: creative activities that still map to your outcomes
Creative doesn't have to mean unmeasurable. The hard part was never the idea — it's tying it cleanly to your outcomes. Here's how to stop shelving the good ones.
Read more →Keep assessments original for every cohort, without lowering the bar
Reuse last year's exam and risk leaks, or rewrite it under end-of-term pressure? There's a third option: fresh every cohort, at the same standard, without the hours.
Read more →Holistic vs analytic rubrics: which one fits your course
Most of us pick a rubric type without noticing we picked one. The two main types answer different questions — one is faster to mark, the other is far easier to defend. Here's how to tell which your assessment needs.
Read more →Summative assessment examples that aren't just another final exam
Most courses end the same way: a three-hour exam, or an essay. Both are fine instruments — for the narrow thing they measure. Here are ten summative formats, what each one actually lets you see, and how to pick the one your outcomes ask for.
Read more →Types of assessment in education, and when each one earns its place
Diagnostic, formative, summative, ipsative — the vocabulary is familiar, but the useful question isn't what each type is called. It's what each one is for, and what it costs you to run it.
Read more →Grade the 60th paper like you graded the first
By the fortieth submission, the standard you started with has quietly drifted. It isn't carelessness, it's what a vague rubric leaves to a tired evening. Here's how to grade the last paper the way you graded the first.
Read more →Using AI for course design without dumbing it down
The fear is fair: most AI writes bland, generic, lowest-common-denominator content. But the dumbing down doesn't come from AI — it comes from AI that ignores your course. Here's the difference, and how to use it without lowering the bar.
Read more →\"Activities are just games\" — and other myths that keep the lecture on life support
There's a quiet prejudice in higher education: that classroom activities are playtime, fine for schools but beneath a serious university. It's wrong — and it's costing us the most rigorous teaching we could be doing.
Read more →Your students have changed. Why our course formats haven't kept up.
The empty seats aren't laziness. Students have changed — and the lecture is losing a competition it didn't know it was in. Adapting is the obvious answer; affording to experiment is the hard part.
Read more →From case studies to simulations and exams: 15 university-level activity formats
How many genuinely different activity formats have you used this year? A tour of fifteen rigorous, classroom-ready formats — and why the hard part was never the list, it's the fit.
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