Team Teaching: Rewards and Challenges

At this point, we have a lot of evidence that the lecture-based model isn’t optimal for student learning. We also know that the more active students are in class, the more information they will retain. But the larger question for history professors is how to create an active learning environment in a discipline that has…

Prep Time: Being Deliberate

September has to be the busiest month of the year. New courses, committee meetings, student organizations, campus events, research, writing, conference prep. What did I leave out? For college faculty, the demands of the fall semester seem to pile up. Even the most dedicated teachers face the temptation to reduce course prep time in the…

Faculty Advocates: Speaking Up for Teaching and Learning

Like most Ph.D. students (especially in the humanities), most of my thoughts during the last two years of graduate school centered on one question: Will I have a job after graduation? For obvious reasons, I didn’t spend much time considering the larger political realities of the academy. I basically assumed that being a college professor…

Teaching Free Speech: Edward R. Murrow

In my history/psychology learning community (team taught with a colleague from the Psychology Department), we have given special attention to the role of personality in history. Exploring 20th-century history through the lens of biography led me back to Edward R. Murrow, to whom my undergraduate professors first introduced me. Murrow’s courage in taking on Joseph…

The Flipped Classroom: What’s the Big Deal?

Recently, I noticed a blog post on the flipped classroom that frustrated me. (For those who need a refresher on flipped classrooms, click here). The author is an academic whose comments I normally agree with; I’m guessing we share many of the same political, social, and even pedagogical values. But I have a really hard time…

Teaching Healthcare History in the Age of Obama

I should have seen it coming. Really! But when I planned a class discussion on the origins of Medicare, I hadn’t considered the implications for our ongoing national conversation about universal healthcare. Fortunately, my students are more perceptive than I am, and they instantly made the connection for me. “So, even back then people were…

The Politics of Politics in the Classroom

“History has a liberal bias,” one of my undergraduate professors informed us on the third day of class. His comments were in response to a student who asked why all his professors seemed to be left-leaning. I thought about that statement a lot throughout graduate school, as I met professors and students who, with very…