Cate Denial

There’s an old adage that to know something really well you have to teach it, an adage that’s backed up by countless studies about the concept of retrieval practice.  Retrieval practice is the act of having students pull information from memory – ideas they’ve studied on their own, things they’ve read, something they heard, or data they learned in a previous class session, for example, and applying that information in a new way.  By remembering information – by retrieving it…

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There’s a conversation happening on Twitter right now about accommodations in college classrooms for students with disabilities.  Many people have articulated beautifully why accommodations are not just a matter of law, but of justice, ethics, and professional responsibility.  But there’s one more big piece of this that I think we’re missing. Institutions of higher education in the United States are inherently ableist.  The ways in which we typically assess student learning are predicated on being able-bodied and neurotypical.  It’s not…

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I’m someone who needs to-do lists. If I try to carry around everything I need to do in my brain alone I forget things (including deadlines), and I feel a tremendous pressure to not forget things, which is a terrible one-two punch. I’m constantly searching my memory for things I know I’m not keeping track of, and when I do remember those things it’s usually somewhere inconvenient – the shower; in bed as I’m falling asleep; at the grocery store….

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I picked up John Warner’s Why They Can’t Write : Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities after hearing good things about it from colleagues, and following John himself on twitter.  I quite frankly longed to be told why my students found writing challenging.  (There is much I can intuit about my students’ habits, and still more I suspect, but there are limits to both.)  I thought the book would be a brief accounting of someone’s faults (students, faculty, administrators…

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I was lucky enough to be part of a panel at the AHA last week that talked about formative assessment – assessment that provides an instructor with an opportunity to see what students are learning and provide them with feedback mid-stream, usually separate from the act of awarding a grade. I talked about SOCC, a structured way of teaching my students how to analyze primary sources that doubles as a formative assessment method. You can read all about the panel…

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Thanks to everyone who came to the panel I was part of yesterday at the American Historical Association’s annual meeting in Chicago. I was lucky enough to present with Lendol Calder of Augustana College, and Steve Mintz from the University of Texas at Austin on formative assessment in college classrooms. Natalie Mendoza kicked us off and brought us home with great comments, and the questions from the audience were insightful and thoughtful and I enjoyed talking to everyone so much!…

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I’m someone who’s a big believer in content warnings. Each term, my students and I identify topics in my courses that might trigger someone in the room – cause a profound psychological and physical reaction, for example. I then indicate that on the syllabus, in class, or on my LMS so that those students can make an informed decision about how to interact with readings, discussions, and in-class materials. I believe that warnings allow students (and professors) to manage otherwise…

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[TW/CW for discussion of sexual assault] Fifteen years into my active recovery from more than one sexual assault, my ability to speak honestly about what I’ve experienced is conditioned by wariness, protectiveness, and fear. There are relationships to protect; there is the relative power and influence of one of my abusers with which to contend; there is societal investment in my silence. I’ve done the math, sat down with my therapist and weighed my wish to bare all with the…

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Over on twitter yesterday, @zavoodie asked a really great question: [A tweet that reads: Do you have favorite grad and undergrad assignments that utilize @AHAhistorians ‘s five skills?  I’d love to hear about them and how they worked in your classes.] I wasn’t familiar with the Five Skills before Jeff’s tweet – which isn’t so surprising since the AHA seems to be pitching them toward grad school faculty and students and I teach at an undergraduate-only institution. But in reading…

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Over the last week I’ve been lucky enough to be part of the inaugural cohort of Bright scholars at the Bright Institute at Knox College. Under the leadership of Serena Zabin (who has deftly challenged us to think creatively about all manner of issues related to the American Revolution) we’ve talked about new books in the field of Vast Early America, things we’d like to see the field do better, and ideas for where the field could go next. In…

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