Universal Design for learning. Students learn in different ways, so I use several at once — lecture, open discussion, live demonstration on screen, individual and group presentations. Students learn as much from each other as from me, often more, because negotiating an idea with a peer forces them to articulate it. Education should be memorable and grounded in concrete examples.

Real briefs. Every project carries a client, a constraint, and a problem that decoration won't solve. Fifteen years of built work for national retail brands means I know which ideas survive. I build that into the brief rather than saving it for the critique.

Critique as practice. Students put their work up on the screen, and the whole room sees it. Most of them find that uncomfortable — they're shy, they'd rather not — and I keep doing it anyway, because that discomfort is the design profession. Your work goes up, people respond to it, and you learn to hear that without taking it personally. Feedback comes from their classmates and from me, every project, all term. By the time they're presenting to a client or an art director, it isn't the first time.

Whether we intend it or not, what gets assessed is what students learn to value.
In studio courses, assessment usually lands almost entirely on the final render. Grade only that, and you've told the class that polish matters more than thinking — while the course objectives, including preparing them for actual practice, go unmeasured.
So I assess sequentially and cumulatively. Research, early iterations, the version that failed and what they did next, and the final piece. Students annotate their own process and describe how each stage moved them forward, which builds the self-assessment habit a working designer needs. Early phases run as low-stakes checkpoints where feedback can land while there's still time to use it.
The result is a fuller picture of what a student actually learned than the last file in the folder can give.