I am a strong believer in group projects, even if almost everyone else in higher education thinks they are a waste of time. Earlier this month, I had a conversation with a senior faculty member about one of my syllabi for this semester. She was surprised that I included a group project that was worth…
In previous semesters I have assigned primary sources as homework with varying degrees of success. I could rarely count on students having read the material well enough to jump feet first into discussions and their various levels of reading comprehension meant that quizzing them on the content of primary sources resulted in a lot of…
I’ve already mentioned in a previous post my own aversion to assigning secondary sources in survey courses. But I do think it’s very important to involve secondary sources in upper-level history courses. While it’s always a challenge deciding what to assign, I’ve found it’s equally difficult figuring out how to introduce historiography into my lectures…
Today is December 31st, the final day of 2014. So, in the spirit of the annual rite of passage into the New Year, I have a resolution to share. Although normally I am more focused on the usual spectrum of eating more vegetables and playing more tennis (things that always, quite frankly, feel a bit…
At my lowest moments of teaching, especially while grading a stack of final essays (say, hypothetically, all last weekend), I have always found it tempting to blame my students’ writing problems on other people not doing their jobs. My job is to help students engage with history, someone else is in charge of the writing…
On the heels of Emily Conroy-Krutz’s excellent post about primary sources, I ask the following question to my fellow history teachers: What’s your favorite primary source to use in class, that is outside your area of specialty? I ask because we all have to teach outside our comfort zones, and if you’re like me, you…
Happy Exam Week, everyone! I’ve been trying to get out from this pile of papers all week, so that I can be buried in blue books over the next few days. This time of the semester is so intense for all of us, faculty and students, as we stand at the end of the course…
Some of you may remember a session at the 2013 Southern Historical Association Meeting at which a round-table discussion attempted to weigh the utility of centering military history narratives at the heart of Civil War courses. The panelists endeavored to untangle the stereotyped courses that either decry or ignore military history altogether against those that…
Our blog posts almost always use the past tense and include what worked and what did not. But I’m putting this up immediately in the hopes that it may inspire you to seize the moment in your own way. It’s rushed and surely flawed, but time is important here. Hopefully this is of use. …
Is it right to use competition as a way to foster discussion in class? I am a competitive person, and one of the biggest adjustments I had to make when I began college was realizing that, unlike a high school debate, collaborative discussion doesn’t have a winner (although there are plenty of ways to make everyone…
