course design
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Civics 101 in History 130 & 131
My friend Virginia introduced me to the New Hampshire Public Radio-produced podcast Civics 101 earlier this year. She was on the board of NHPR and rightly-proud of their new venture. I’ve enjoyed listening to host Virginia Prescott (a different Virginia) interview a different guest each week – including many professors – on topics like “Party Whips,” […]
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can’t leave well enough alone
Last summer I wrote that I was going to try to come up with new projects for my US I and US II survey courses. I did, and they were…fine. But they weren’t spectacular. So I’m trying something new again, while trying to rejigger one of the things I did last semester for use this […]
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Women’s history commonplace blog drafts
As I mentioned last week, my women’s history students are creating blogs inspired by commonplace books. This project not only requires them to produce public writing, but to make the draft stage public. To that end, they have had to put up draft versions of all the contextualized quotes they want to examine, and they are […]
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Commonplacing women’s history
I wrote earlier this summer about my use of commonplace books in my women’s history class, and about how I hoped to turn that practice into a project for the class. Well… My students have each chosen a theme to explore, and are busy selecting and contextualizing passages from primary and secondary sources. By the end […]
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Teaching Resolutions Fall 2016
Talk less, listen more – My classrooms are all discussion based, with no lectures, but you know how it is…you get really excited to talk about what you thought was cool in the readings, or you want to tell them this other contextual information that will totally blow their minds, or you end up re-teaching by […]
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“Rules for Wives”
This list of Good Housekeeping’s 1955 “Good House Wife’s Guide” has been getting a lot of attention on ye ol’intertubes. What are those guidelines? 1.) Have dinner ready. Plan ahead, even the night before, to have a delicious meal ready, on time for his return. This is a way of letting him know that you […]
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Who tells your story, or, how Hamilton is and isn’t changing my teaching
The experience of being a historian of Early America[1]This in itself is a problematic categorization. I study the 19th century, and I am most comfortable with the antebellum period, but my program conceived of me as an “Early Americanist” … Continue reading during the moment of Hamilton has been a complex one for me, and it’s brought […]
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Why we flip
We have a responsibility when evaluating our own teaching to exercise the same skepticism and critical thought we expect of our students. Ed-tech marketing may be masquerading as pedagogical philosophy, but we must not throw the pedagogical baby out with the technological bath water.Ultimately, the flipped classroom shifts the emphasis of a class from content […]
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How Much Should We Assign? Estimating Out of Class Workload — Rice University Center for Teaching Excellence
“How much should I assign?” is one of the most basic questions teachers ask when designing and revising their courses. Yet it is also one of the most difficult to answer. To help instructors better calibrate their expectations, we’ve created a course workload estimator that incorporates the most important insights from the literature on how […]
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Teaching Students to Be Public Intellectuals – The Chronicle of Higher Education
On the one hand, it can make scholarly work seem inconsequential. To our students, an op-ed essay has “real world” value; a college essay doesn’t appear to. On the other hand, these public-oriented assignments sometimes oversimplify public discourse, aiming for a “general reader” who is less sophisticated than a scholar. It’s not unusual to have […]
