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Planning our Teaching

Planning our Teaching

This pinned post will be updated with links to other posts as I make them.  Walk through your semester/quarter/term with these ideas for teaching: Thinking: What Do Our Syllabi Really Say? Thinking: Academia is Ableist Thinking: Dis/ability Thinking: Hunger is an Educational Issue FAQ: Content Warnings Thinking: Strong Emotional Reactions Thinking: Where Do We Stand First day exercise: What Do Historians Do? First day exercise and more sources: Revisiting the First Day First day exercise and reflection by Jennifer Sessions:…

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Primary Sources

Primary Sources

One of my favorite courses to teach is my department’s class on historical methods. For a final assignment in the course, students have to create a bibliography of sources that could support the writing of an upper-level seminar paper, and annotate several of the entries. My students often ask how many primary sources is enough, and they’re never very satisfied by my honest answer of “it depends.” I started thinking about this from their perspective. Surely there’s a threshold historians…

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Small Reading

Small Reading

Since the pandemic began, I’ve struggled to read. Part of the root of that has been my fractured focus and concentration, my brain so cognitively overloaded by processing the pandemic and all its attendant inequities that I’ve struggled to pay attention to one thing at a time. Some of the problem has also been time. Like almost everyone I know, my workload increased at the beginning of the pandemic and has not decreased in the intervening years. (Which is not…

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More on AI

More on AI

Winter term began on January 3 at Knox – coincidentally, the day I tested positive with my first Covid infection. My students have been diligently working asynchronously on a number of fronts since then, including reading several articles about generative A.I. After each article, students have filled out reflections in Google forms, reflections I had hoped would become the basis of a discussion once I returned to campus. But since I haven’t yet been able to do that, I wrote…

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Everyone Needs Sabbaticals

Everyone Needs Sabbaticals

Spring 2023 was an unbelievably difficult trimester. I fell ill; I couldn’t keep up with the day-to-day demands of teaching; I had the most pervasive brain fog I’ve ever had and couldn’t see a way through the difficulties I was facing because of it. Gracious colleagues made it possible for me to crawl to the end of the term, but it was not a good term for me or for my students. I have never been so relieved to finish…

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ChatGPT and all that follows

ChatGPT and all that follows

I’m not teaching this fall, which means I have the luxury of being able to take my time to think about how I want to frame tools like ChatGPT in the classroom. This is new territory for almost all of us, and what seems reasonable to us in our particular teaching circumstance is going to vary widely. Most of my classes average at about twenty-five students, which is very different from tussling with this issue in a lecture class of…

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Less as More

Less as More

I read with interest [this article] from Vox on the efficacy of homework in K-12 settings. It’s a great piece, offering no easy answers as to whether homework is a boon or a bust as a pedagogical strategy. But it made me reflect on some changes in my own teaching of late. Last fall, the students in my upper-level seminar (15 students; a Tu/Th class; a 105-minute period) quickly showed signs of struggling to find time for research necessary to…

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Co-Creating a Syllabus

Co-Creating a Syllabus

In 2019, I launched a new course at my institution called History Pedagogy. The course was designed to give students headed to graduate school some training in teaching before they left Knox, but was also a space that welcomed students headed to K-12 educational settings. The course was a mix of philosophy and hands-on, practical learning—wherever possible, by design, I had students create the infrastructure of the course to pull back the curtain on the bells, whistles, and levers that…

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Visualizing Details

Visualizing Details

Those of you who’ve been following me for a while will recall that Once Upon A Time I included checklists at the end of my assignment sheets, telling students (in exacting detail) all the things I wanted them to consider before they turned in a paper. Those particular checklists communicated my distrust – they were entirely about me thinking everyone would get everything wrong without them, and trying to head that off at the pass. I eventually did away with…

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Rethinking the Library

Rethinking the Library

This trimester, I’m teaching an upper-level research seminar on Reproductive Justice in the U.S. Since 1973. It’s required me to engage in some creative thinking on the fly – something I did not anticipate ahead of time. But I quickly realized that a chronological dive into reproductive justice issues wasn’t going to work for my students given that many of them were taking the class as a cross-listed Gender and Women’s Studies elective, and hadn’t taken a History methods course…

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Going Gradeless

Going Gradeless

It’s been almost five years since I wrote “[Making the Grade],” a blog post about my first venture into ungrading. What felt, at the time, like a truly momentous change turned out to be just the first step in reconceptualizing the role of grading in my courses. After I started ungrading I tweaked things. I rewrote my suggested grading rubric. I finessed the self-evaluation questions. I began to allow all late work to be turned in whenever it was done….

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