Teaching Tips

The following resources are created as best practices and recommendations for medical faculty. The links are the titles of downloadable PDFs, also suitable for print.

Additional Teaching Resources 

Teaching with Technology

See our Educational Technology page for resources related to teaching with technology.

Grading and Alignment

This video gives an overview of grading, grading schemes, and alignment.  It is useful for designing a course and/or writing a syllabus.

Board-Style Question Writing

The following are resources to help faculty write Board-style questions.

NBME Published Resources

NBME Item Writing Tutorial

  • An Introductory Tutorial is a self-paced interactive tutorial that provides a foundation for writing quality multiple-choice questions. This tutorial is designed to introduce some of the main principles of item writing to individuals who write questions for examinations in the field of medicine and across the range of health professions.
  • Featured topics include:
    • the anatomy of an item
    • basic rules for writing good stems and options
    • characteristics of a quality "best-answer" item
    • writing items to assess clinical reasoning
    • common item flaws
    • strategies for evaluating test items
  • The tutorial is organized into sections so that you can complete only a portion of it and easily return later; the entire tutorial takes about 45 minutes to complete.

NBME Manual: Constructing Written Test Questions for the Basic and Clinical Sciences

  • This manual provides a general overview of topics such as item and vignette writing for the foundational and clinical sciences (concentrating on the recommended item type of one-best-answer), technical item flaws, item analysis, and other areas that should provide useful guidance to the health sciences test development.
Anti-racism in Teaching

Please visit the Applying Anti-Racism Principles in Teaching page to learn more and download the related Checklist that was created to support faculty teaching in SMHS programs.