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…
I am teaching the first half of the American history survey this semester. We have just gotten the Constitution ratified and Washington elected, but I’m already deep in thought about teaching the second half of the survey next semester. My book list is due soon and it has got me thinking about what we assign…
Mary Dalzell died in 1764 and was buried in Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan, the same cemetery where Albert Gallatin and Alexander Hamilton are buried. But unlike these more illustrious historical figures, she left behind no voluminous collection of papers, and no detailed accounts of her life exist. What we know about Mary Dalzell comes…
Below is an assignment I have given to three different U.S. 1877-Present survey courses. I present it below in its entirety, exactly as I assign it to my students. “The Big Book of ABC’s” is designed to help students do the following: 1) Work well in a group. I have found that students abhor group…
I was reminded this weekend while running errands at the big box stores that Christmas will be coming in the distant future. Then I got to thinking about the ornaments my sister and I made in school that still reappear on the tree every year. These ornaments, along with countless other crafts stored in tubs…
Several months ago, I was online on a social media website when I noticed a colleague’s enthusiastic posting about the successfulness of an in-class activity. In preparing students to turn in their first written assignment in a freshmen English course, he elected to have them participate in a peer-review process that would also teach the fundamentals of…
This semester, I’ve been having my students in both of my courses (Colonial America and Women in American History through 1869) reading full books over the course of several weeks and then devoting an entire class session to discussion. In my smaller Colonial course, this is pretty seamless, but the Women’s History class has thirty students. Keeping…
While the title of my post may suggest contemporary disgust with the political system–really? It is already time for another election cycle?–my intentions today are merely pedagogical. There has been much recent discussion on the utility of exams. Do they truly capture a student’s level of knowledge? Or, do they force a student to cram…
I’m a visual learner, but I approach using images in my teaching with some trepidation. Even with useful guides to analyzing a picture, I worry about the contextual information that often does not accompany photos. Not every image comes with a complete photographers’ notes and an archive. But I recently found some great digital collections…
Recently, several casual conversations with some of my history majors have veered toward historical counterfactuals. Counterfactuals, or the fictional incarnation of the historical counterfactual, “alternate history,” posits a world in which one or more historical variables is different than the actual past. We’ve all played this game at some point, and undergraduates seem to love…
