pedagogy

• 
• SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
  5/22/2023
  

  "Return to Rigor" Isn't the Answer to Restoring Student Engagement

  by Kevin Gannon

  A post-COVID reaction to the improvisations made on grades, schedules and deadlines supposes that students are suffering from too much flexibility, but a singular focus on rigor won't address the causes of disengagment. 

• 
• 5/21/2023
  

  Forget "Finding Forrester"—Our Best Teaching Can Be Ordinary

  by Elizabeth Stice

  Hollywood loves to tell the stories of singularly brilliant students pushed to greatness by similarly singular mentors with unconventional methods and unaccommodating personalities. This ideal won't help anyone teach the real students in their classrooms. 

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  4/27/2023
  

  Review: AP Program Undermines Humanities, Devalues College, and Cheats Students of Learning

  by David M. Perry

  According to Annie Abrams's new book, the Advanced Placement program has subordinated high school students' learning to standardized testing and enabled public universities to gut humanities departments by accepting high school work for college credit. Her dive into education history explains how that happened. 

• 
• SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed
  4/24/2023
  

  New Book Challenges not Just AP Course Content, but Role of Courses in the Education System

  Annie Abrams argues that the prevalence of Advanced Placement courses in American high schools distorts the goals of education and shortchanges students from experiencing higher-level learning in the humanities. 

• 
• SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed
  12/5/2022
  

  How Freaked Out Should Professors Be About Artificial Intelligence Language Tech?

  by John Warner

  ChatGPT can crank out essays full of plausible "content," but it can't engage in contextualization, analysis, or intuitive connection of ideas. The problem it reveals is an education system where outcomes have overtaken process and students are encouraged to write mechanically. 

• 
• SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
  10/26/2022
  

  Disrupt the March of "Disruptive Innovation"

  by Kevin Gannon

  The economy of innovation and publicity in higher education often rewards people who claim credit for ideas over the people who work to develop, test, and implement them. Academia needs a collaborative model of innovation. 

• 
• SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed
  10/11/2022
  

  We Need to Rethink the "Weed-Out" Course

  by Jonathan Zimmerman

  The presumption that a large percentage of students should flunk an introductory-level science course as a necessary safeguard of "rigor" is outdated gatekeeping. 

• 
• SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
  9/12/2022
  

  Should You Cold-Call on Your Students?

  Psychology researchers suggest that the stress of being called on at random can fall more heavily on female students. Are there ways to build participation and accountability into classes without stressing students out? 

• 
• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  3/9/2022
  

  Advanced Placement is Failing Students By Incentivizing Teaching-to-the-Test

  by Annie Abrams

  Initially rooted in an effort to coordinate the curricula of a handful of elite prep schools and Ivy League colleges, the Advanced Placement program has gradually shifted from skepticism of mass testing to resemble a test-prep program disguised as curriculum. 

• 
• SOURCE: Slate
  2/10/2022
  

  Teaching Slavery to Middle Schoolers Raises Emotions. It's Not a Bad Thing

  by Mary Niall Mitchell and Kate Shuster

  A new digital project helps teachers use advertisements seeking the return of enslaved people who escaped as a way of understanding the people whose self-liberation forced those stories into the printed record.

• 
• SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed
  1/25/2022
  

  Why *Did* the Chicken Cross the Road?

  by John Warner

  A recent viral Twitter thread sparked a reflection on how to cultivate critical thinking and how to encourage students to transfer it from one context as a durable and portable skill. 

• 
• SOURCE: Perspectives on History
  11/3/2021
  

  The Purpose of "Purposeful Ignorance"

  by R. Raoul Meyer

  How can effective teaching proceed from a position of ignorance? By strategically modeling a lack of knowledge as a starting point for inquiry.

• 
• SOURCE: Public Books
  10/5/2021
  

  Freedom Education: Dialogues Between Top Scholars and Grad Students

  by Nathan D.B. Connolly and Stuart Schrader

  Nathan D.B. Connolly and Stuart Schrader introduce a series of interviews examining the connections of scholarship and organizing for justice. 

• 
• 7/4/2021
  

  Let's Think about "Thinking" Before We Teach "Critical Thinking"

  by Elizabeth Stice

  The liberal arts have long claimed their value lies in teaching the skill of critical thinking. History teachers can be more effective if they give some thought to thinking, with insights from cognitive theory and behavioral psychology. 

• 
• SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
  

  Teaching: More Pandemic-Driven Innovations Professors Like

  "The themes running through all of these innovations are flexibility and engagement: The more ways in which people can participate in the classroom, contribute to discussions, and share their ideas, readers found, the more learning improves."

• 
• 12/20/2020
  

  Create Collaborative Videos to Build Historical Engagement

  by Andrew Joseph Pegoda

  A history professor advocates collaborative, creative performance as a way to encourage students to engage with primary sources and build empathy for the historical other. 

• 
• SOURCE: University Affairs
  5/28/2020
  

  Role-Playing Games are Breathing New Life into the History Classroom

  Immersive role-playing games offer an alternative method to engaging students with history and with the research, writing and interpretive skills of historians. 

• 
• 5/31/2020
  

  Why Study History? More Than Ever, a Question that Needs Answering

  by Peter N. Stearns

  One of the few bright features of the past two months has been the extent to which the pandemic crisis has clarified the real public need for historical perspectives. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  1-10-14
  

  'You Have to Know History to Actually Teach It'

  by David Cutler

  Eric Foner on what it takes to be a good K-12 history teacher.

• SOURCE: Guardian (UK)
  5-6-13
  

  Lee Donaghy: Writing Like a Historian -- Developing Students' Writing Skills

  Lee Donaghy is an assistant principal at a secondary school in Birmingham in the United Kingdom."Why are we doing English in history, sir?" came the question as I asked my year 9 history class what kind of word disarmament was. Having anticipated this kind of reaction I had an answer prepared: "Do we only use language in English lessons?"The question was anticipated because I have heard it from other classes, and indeed other teachers, since I began to include an explicit focus on language development in my history lessons 18 months ago. And the question goes to the heart of what I believe is a fundamental reason for the attainment gap between children eligible for free school meals and their non-free school meal counterparts in Britain; the misalignment of these pupils' language use with that which is needed for academic success and the need for teachers to explicitly address this misalignment in their teaching.