Why I’m Thankful I Teach in the Age of Trump

No, really.

Caitlyn Cotton

“If you build it, they will come.”: Authentic Assessment and Student Learning

“Ms. Cotton, writing my paper was actually interesting,” my student said, with an air of incredulity, as she entered my classroom for our final meeting of the term. “Well, that was the whole point,” was my reply. Students have become accustomed to viewing school as a “grind,” days of sitting in class, taking notes, cramming…

Robert Greene II

Emotion in the Classroom

I can still recall sitting in an Honors World Literature I course as a sophomore in 2005. The course, which covered most literature from the ancient world until the 17th century, was one of my favorites in college. I loved the course partially because my professor seemed to genuinely care about the material being discussed…

Cassandra Clark

Let The Students Speak

As we are all aware, the current news cycle is exhausting. Each day we are showered with stories about corruption, dishonesty, violence, sexism, natural disasters, and racism among many others. Social media provides a medium for individuals to respond immediately to any news story in real time. At first glance, it appears that the internet…

Chris Babits

Student-Centered Exam Prep: A Gallery Walk Model

Preparing students for exams used to stress me out. I used to do what many novice teachers do: I had students come up with a list of questions they could ask the day before the exam. This was an unsatisfactory experience, to say the least. These exam prep sessions were exhausting. I answered a ton…

Deviating from the Standard(s)

The timing of the Civil War is suspect. While we might trace the conflict to April 12, 1861 and the shots fired at Fort Sumter, one could argue that it began in Kansas four years earlier. Still others would argue that the civil conflict was raging in 1850, 1820, or in 1787 as delegates wrestled…

Teach My Book: Jason Phillips on The Looming Civil War: How Nineteenth Century Americans Imagined the Future

Looming Civil War explores how nineteenth-century Americans imagined the future, particularly the sectional crisis and Civil War, to understand how collective forecasts formed, spread, and made history. After researching a host of sources, including political speeches, economic predictions, sermons, literature, military records, music, diaries, private correspondence, and artifacts, I learned that two, competing temporalities framed…

Reflections on EJI Legacy Museum and Memorial for Peace and Justice

Every semester, I try something new in my classroom. Recently, I’ve been working on decentering my courses in various ways, specifically through the use of active learning assignments. These involve assignments such as my archives project or creating more student centered discussion through the questions I pose in class. This summer, I taught a minimester…

Making Course Evaluations More Useful

Student evaluations are part of life for college instructors. Is there any way to make them more useful, or at least to mitigate the harm they can do?

Always Be Teaching: Historical Advocacy Outside the Classroom

You know the scene. It’s Alec Baldwin’s only scene. In just over seven minutes, Alec Baldwin’s “Blake” harangues four hapless real estate salesmen to Always Be Closing. The film, of course, is Glengarry Glen Ross, and its language should probably be kept out of your classroom. But there is an essential message to Baldwin’s diatribe: Go and…

Keep Calm and Zinn On

On September 16, 2018, Slate published an excerpt from Sam Wineburg’s new book, Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone). The piece, “Howard Zinn’s Anti-Textbook,” comes from a chapter entitled “Committing Zinns.” As the Slate byline makes clear, Wineburg believes that Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (originally published in 1980)…

Teach My Book: Richard Blackett’s, The Captive’s Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery

Teaching United States History is excited to present Teach My Book, a series of posts where distinguished authors reflect on their work and how instructors might integrate their insights into the classroom. Our thoughts today come from Richard Blackett, Andrew Jackson Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, the author of The Captive’s Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves,…

Discussion Boards and Memos in the Classroom

For my literature courses last spring, I tweaked a previous assignment and started a new practice that assisted students in learning the material throughout the semester. Today, I want to briefly cover the ways that I changed my discussion board and how I incorporated post-class memos into the course.

Seeing Both: Teaching Students to be Healthy-Critical in a Polarized World

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it. – James Baldwin James Baldwin said these words to a group of educators during a tumultuous time for teachers and all Americans alike–1963, the same year that segregation was being fought in Birmingham, Alabama and…

The Value of a Methods-and-Approaches Week

It started almost on a whim, but it was the best thing I could have done. Students responded eagerly. They found it fascinating to talk about history as a process of investigation, to puzzle out strategies for telling truer and more creative stories about the past. And they used these concepts later.