Teaching History: Instructional Strategies and Ways to Save Time Using Technology
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My name is Andrew Zimmerman and I teach in the History Department. The main undergraduate course I teach is History 40, which is a large lecture on European civilization in its world context from 1715 to the present. And it now has 250 undergraduates and 5 TA’s. So it’s a very large lecture. And the other main course I teach every year is history 201, which is a graduate course. And it’s a seminar for all new history PHD and MA students. It’s a large seminar it has about 20 students. And then I teach other classes depending on my interests and student interests, ranging from smaller seminars to large lectures, but I will talk mostly about those two because those are the ones I teach a lot.
When I do assignments I think of them as ways to give students incentives to do things that will help educate themselves. So I have a research assignment, and its not that I want them to learn specifically about the Russian revolution of 1905, but I require them to use a range of sources from random Google searches to use of academic articles and evaluate those sources. So they know that a random Google search may turn up something fascinating, it’s never going to be very persuasive that it came up on Google. And then a JSOR article, an academic article, is more persuasive, certainly more reliable and certainly more useful for a research paper. And then there is a whole range of things from Wikipedia to Encyclopedia Britannica. I do different assignments every semester. I always do a traditional essay because I think that’s an important skill, but I also do other ones. I think in terms of assessing what they are learning, but I also think I want to incent them to learn key vocabulary for talking about history. So they can’t talk about history if they don’t know what the first, second, and third estates were for example. So I want them to learn the vocabulary, but I don’t want them to obsess about that. I want them also to be able to answer short questions: why the French revolution happened in a paragraph, and then also longer stuff. It’s very hard what to assess what they are learning based on that. I mean you know if someone really didn’t get it, but you don’t know what someone already knew from high school and so forth. and you may just be testing their ability to cram the night before. I do think that having assignments like that gives them incentives to learn what they should be learning. The kind of assessment I get is in so far as I get it is to see how students are able to use the text I assign and the history I lecture about in every day conversation, in discussion section, and ideally in their writing too. So I ask my TAs a lot about what are they talking about, are they at all talking, what are they confused about, are they able to talk about it. I often ask them if they are happy, which the TAs think is funny. I really want them to discuss joyfully the stuff, I don’t want it to be a drag – something they have to do – although they do have to do it.
With a class like 250 students you either hear about the very worst and then mostly about the very best. So it’s a very nice size of class. Some of the most satisfying feedback I get is when students come to me the next semester and say, “that thing you taught me about Walter Benjamin that I though was so obscure, interesting but obscure, actually turns out to be useful in three of my five classes.” I get that a lot actually. They come in thinking that what I’m teaching them is this very esoteric knowledge, but it turns out that half the professors on campus are using it, but not necessarily laying it out in the same way I do because mine is a much more basic course.
In History 201, that’s the course for new graduate students that I still assess in very similar ways. I’m less concerned about them applying the concepts to their lives and to their general thought and much more concerned about them applying it to their own academic work. I think one of the challenges in that course is that students come in with an idea of history, not always but often from popular history, so they tend to be interested in kinds of history that people in the academy don’t really do - elite political history, a kind of military history that’s much more focused on descriptions of combat rather than strategic analysis and stuff that is more understandable to a general audience, which is totally comprehensible because they come in as a general audience. But then, by the end of the course I want them to think in terms of the latest academic research, and how not to abandon their old questions, but if they wanted to write a biography of George Washington at the beginning for their dissertation they come out thinking more about say, what kind of approaches they might take. Biography, maybe not so much, at least not for a dissertation, but maybe a cultural history or a social history of some aspect of the Washington Presidency, or whatever. And you know, I like to keep it very open. These are examples of the kinds of things academics do, but it cannot be a complete survey.
I also have them do weekly writing assignments because they really do have to understand every week, all of the reading. I would recommend to every professor no matter how comfortable or uncomfortable they are with technology, to use blackboard for two things: posting every handout you give in the course, the syllabus, the writing assignments, because you never again will have to bring extra copies to class because someone lost theirs or forgot to pick it up. It’s very easy, it might take 5 minutes of thought the first time, and it might save you 55 hours of work forever after. The second thing I recommend is that you can very easily send an email to the entire class. For instance, they were supposed to read pages 15 thru 60 and not 51 thru 60, then you just email the whole class so they all have it and you never have to worry about communicating with them. It also gets to the whole class, even the ones who were not there. This way everyone receives it, not just those who happened to be awake and taking notes. Both of those things save a lot of time. That’s one of the main reasons to use technology.
I think Using the internet, there’s a couple ways to look at it. One is the Internet is the way most of us learn about stuff that I don’t care about that much. If I want to learn about how to make a roast chicken I may just Google roast chicken. Students may feel about most of our subjects the way I feel about roast chicken, which is I want to make a good roast chicken, but if its not the perfect roast chicken then I’ll try again next time. A chef would think that’s ridiculous and go to an Escoffier or something like that and they would be appalled that I went to google. But people are going to do that, I think that trick has to be to teach them to discriminate among internet sources and I think that’s a valuable skill in a way you can sort of take their natural inclination, which is to use the Internet, and you can teach them to use it a little more wisely than they might use it. And also teach them one thing, they may think that Google is great, and it may be that the first random google search you get does tell you something brilliant and insightful, but you have got to have your sources. It doesn’t look good to have your first source be so and so’s personal interest page on world war II or something. Its probably great, maybe its better than the encyclopedia Britannica article, but it’s going to look worse than the encyclopedia Britannica article no matter what. So I think teaching students how to use the internet is good, but I think the main thing I would advise is to only choose things that seem fun and easier. And I think that basic blackboard stuff, no doubt about it, its much easier, and a lot of the stuff is fun too. One other technology I would recommend too is powerpoint. It looks very hard, but its certainly easier than typing with an actual typewriter, and as easy as Word. I used to come to class 15 or 20 minutes early to madly write all the terms and the outlines on the board, and you’ll never have to do that again. You’ll never have to worry about overhead projectors. It’s easy to show images and maps and slides. It doesn’t require anything more than skills you would use for word processing. Again, like the basic blackboard stuff, the reason to do it is that its less work, less drudgery for us, and it gives more time to do the stuff we like to think about.
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