Effective presentations are audience-centered. They keep the audience focused while they are informed or persuaded. Effective presentation techniques ensure that your students and peers engage with your ideas in a meaningful way. Mastering the art of effective presentations can even help you to win friends or influence people.

Rubrics are an assessment tool that guide grading by articulating specific components of assignments and communicating expectations for those components. Rubrics lend themselves to assessments where it is important to communicate high expectations, provide targeted feedback, and demonstrate learning priorities. When provided to students and used for assessment, rubrics purposefully communicate your expectations and priorities.

As more students enter health professions programs with multiple language backgrounds, supporting the needs of English language learners (ELL) has become an important focus for educators. Strengthening support for these learners also helps prepare future healthcare professionals to serve patients from a wide range of linguistic and cultural backgrounds. By applying evidence-based practices for working with ELL students, faculty can help ensure that all learners are well equipped to meet the communication demands of today’s healthcare environment.

Planning, preparation, and sleep are vital to the success of students at UTHSC. This section includes advice and techniques that prepare students for academic success.

Accessible learning and course design removes avoidable barriers so all learners—across abilities, languages, technologies, and contexts—can engage, demonstrate competence, and progress. In the health sciences, accessibility is essential for professional formation, clinical safety, and patient care. It is also an anticipatory practice: designing for variability from the start (e.g., captions, structured documents, flexible assessments) reduces the need for individual retrofits and supports every learner’s success.

Effective scaffolding strategies help learners move beyond their current level of understanding by providing structured support as they build new skills. Rooted in Vygotsky’s theory of the Zone of Proximal Development, scaffolding enables students to tackle challenging tasks with guided assistance—promoting deeper learning, confidence, and independence. In the health sciences, where learners often encounter complex clinical reasoning and high-stakes performance tasks, scaffolding allows educators to support the development of competence while maintaining appropriate levels of challenge. Scaffolded instruction can take many forms, including breaking down tasks, modeling expert thinking, providing timely feedback, and gradually transferring responsibility to learners.

TLC‧To‧Go is produced by the Teaching and Learning Center at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, with the assistance of NotebookLM. Find more information about the TLC at http://tlc.uthsc.edu.

Metacognition—the awareness and control of one’s thinking—and self-regulation—the ability to plan, monitor, and adjust one’s learning behaviors—are essential for academic success and professional growth in the health sciences. Together, these processes enable learners to assess what they know, identify gaps, select appropriate strategies, and evaluate their effectiveness in both academic and clinical settings. In health professions education, students face complex tasks requiring reflection, adaptability, and persistence. Teaching students to think metacognitively and regulate their learning helps them become self-directed learners capable of clinical reasoning, ethical decision-making, and lifelong improvement. These skills are not innate; they can be developed through targeted instruction and structured practice.

TLC‧To‧Go is produced by the Teaching and Learning Center at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, with the assistance of NotebookLM. Find more information about the TLC at http://tlc.uthsc.edu.

Engaging lectures keep your audience focused while providing new insight and stimulating thinking and analysis. Active lecturing can motivate your audience to develop new skills and think in new ways.

TLC‧To‧Go is a production of the Teaching and Learning Center at the University of Tenneesee Health Science Center. Visit http://tlc.uthsc.edu/resources for additional information.

Student engagement refers to the degree of attention, curiosity, interest, and investment students show toward learning. In the health sciences, engagement is a key contributor to meaningful learning, clinical preparedness, and professional identity formation. Research shows that when learners are engaged, they are more likely to persist in rigorous programs, develop clinical reasoning skills, and participate actively in collaborative and interprofessional learning environments. Instructors play a crucial role in cultivating engagement. Through intentional strategies that foster psychological safety, relevance, and interactivity, educators can promote environments that support active learning and deeper connections with course material and clinical practice.

Multiple choice questions (MCQs) are among the most widely used formats in health sciences education due to their efficiency in assessing broad content areas, ease of scoring, and suitability for computer-based testing. When well-constructed, MCQs can assess not only factual recall, but also application, analysis, and clinical reasoning. However, poorly written items can mislead students, encourage cueing, or test irrelevant knowledge. Research in medical education consistently emphasizes that MCQs should align with learning objectives, reflect cognitive complexity, and avoid flaws that compromise validity or reliability. Developing high-quality MCQs requires attention to both content and structure, as well as strategies to reduce bias and ensure fairness across diverse learners.

TLC-To-Go is a production of the Teaching and Learning Center at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. This episode was created using Google's NotebookLM.

Visit http://tlc.uthsc.edu/resources for additional content.