Tag: lectures

Storytelling and Interpretation: A Classroom Activity

Jonathan Wilson

Some days ago, my world history survey course covered the First World War, and I came up with a new idea. I wanted to do something I hadn’t managed to do yet, at least not very explicitly: engage these students in building basic historical narratives themselves, in order to learn how narratives are constructed as vehicles for historical interpretation.

Before we met in class, my students had already studied a textbook chapter that focused on the war. So I set up a small-group activity to review that part of the reading.

I asked students to form groups of three or four, and I set a timer. (Four minutes seemed to be about right.) I showed each group a matrix that looked like this:

BackgroundWarEffects
Key Thought
Example(s)
Historical Narrative Matrix for the First World War

I asked each group to try to identify just one key thought they wanted to communicate about the war’s background (including either context or causes); one key thought about the war itself (in its nature, conduct, evolution, etc.); and one key thought about the war’s effects or aftermath. For each main thought, they should also come up with a few illustrative details—examples that would clarify or justify the thought or that would simply make it more concrete.

Toward the end of the time, I encouraged groups that had already finished in the matrix to do one more thing: Try to distill their three key thoughts into a single overall point to make about the war.

When the time was up, we compared notes as an entire room. And the answers were really, really good.

Each group, I pointed out, had explained what we need to understand about the First World War in the form of a simple narrative. This narrative had a beginning, middle, and end; it also had specific factual content. But its fundamental purpose was to convey a larger idea, not simply to describe a sequence of events.

With this exercise done, I offered students my attempt to do exactly the same thing. We spent the rest of the class period on my interactive lecture. That students had already gone through the work of constructing a similar narrative on their own made everything in my account more intelligible and useful—as well as easier to consider critically.

Learning How to Teach: Beyond Recipes

Jonathan Wilson1 Comment
Advertisement in the Ladies Home Journal (1925) (public domain)

An article published by the Chronicle of Higher Education last week is still making its rounds on social media. “Changing Your Teaching Takes More Than a Recipe” 🔒 is also circulating under the subtitle “Professors Have Been Urged to Adopt More-Effective Teaching Practices. Why Are Their Results So Mixed?”

Continue reading “Learning How to Teach: Beyond Recipes” →

How I Built a Narrative Lecture: Teaching Reconstruction in U.S. History II

Jonathan Wilson

This spring, I’m teaching a college course called United States History Since 1865. It’s a staple of American curricula. I have decided that it might be interesting to provide a walkthrough of the first lecture.

This should be an opportunity to articulate, step by step, some basic intuitions about how to achieve truthful storytelling in the classroom. (It’s also a chance to show—in a real situation rather than a political taking point—how I handle “divisive concepts” and “widely debated and currently controversial issues” related to American racism, inasmuch as this first lecture was about Reconstruction.)

This lecture was not perfect. It didn’t represent especially sophisticated historiography. But I am going to try to use it now to demonstrate the problem-solving nature of an interactive lecture about a fraught topic.

Specifically, I believe this walkthrough will illustrate the following nine aspects of my method for telling a story in the classroom:

  • Setting scenes
  • Posing problems
  • Integrating primary sources into a lecture
  • Enlisting students in telling the story
  • Showing change over time through examples
  • Identifying specific turning points
  • Explaining the significance of key memorizable concepts
  • Building to a crisis, confrontation, or moment of decision
  • Creating an open or provocative ending

Each of these elements will appear in the description that follows, and most will appear several times.

Continue reading “How I Built a Narrative Lecture: Teaching Reconstruction in U.S. History II” →

To Teach in Narrative, Think in Scenes

Jonathan Wilson

When I started teaching history on my own—working from my own syllabus rather than assisting someone else—I was thrown into a college U.S. history course just a couple of weeks before the semester started. I was still a graduate student, though I had my master’s degree, and I was replacing another adjunct instructor at the last minute. (I would eventually get to meet her at a conference. She’s nice.) She had chosen a set of textbooks that I’d never heard of, much less seen, and I found the department’s description of the course bizarre.

When I walked into the classroom, which had broken desks and obvious water damage, I still didn’t have access to my university email account or the university library. For the first few days, I had to ask the department secretary to come unlock the classroom computer any time I planned to use it.

Did I mention this was going to be the first time I had ever taught my own solo course?

I won’t keep you in suspense: That semester did not end up being my best work.

Continue reading “To Teach in Narrative, Think in Scenes” →

The False Choices of Pedagogy Critics

Jonathan Wilson

Framing the instructional situation as a set of either-or choices, such as abandoning textbooks in favor of primary sources or substituting student inquiry projects for teachers’ lectures, ignores the perennial challenges that history students and, consequently, history teachers face in trying to learn history and develop historical understanding. History is a vast and constantly expanding storehouse of information about people and events in the past. For students, learning history leads to encounters with thousands of unfamiliar and distant names, dates, people, places, events, and stories. Working with such content is a complex enterprise not easily reduced to choices between learning facts and mastering historical thinking processes. Indeed, attention to one is necessary to foster the other.

—Robert B. Bain, “‘They Thought the World Was Flat?’,” in M. Suzanne Donovan and John D. Bransford, eds., How Students Learn: History in the Classroom (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2005), 180

What’s a Good Small-Group Activity to Illustrate the Concept of a False Dichotomy?

Jonathan Wilson1 Comment

America's most movie-friendly classroom

An interesting new study conducted at Harvard University and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that undergraduates in introductory physics courses learn more in classrooms that employ active-learning instruction methods (specifically, problem-solving in small groups) than students taking notes on “passive” lectures—but think they learn less. The researchers propose that this discrepancy between actual and perceived learning happens because active learning requires more effort on students’ part; it feels frustrating or inefficient. They also warns that this means that relying on student evaluations of teaching could lead instructors to use “inferior (passive) pedagogical methods” in their quest to achieve the popularity of “superstar lecturers.”

The study (full version in PDF format here) seems excellent in design and careful in its conclusions. Unfortunately, Harvard has publicized it with a news article that draws a tiresome false dichotomy between lectures and active learning, going so far as to quote the peer-instruction proponent Eric Mazur—who helped with the study—this way:

‘This work unambiguously debunks the illusion of learning from lectures,’ he said. ‘It also explains why instructors and students cling to the belief that listening to lectures constitutes learning.’

Of course, the study does no such thing as Mazur’s first claim.

Continue reading “What’s a Good Small-Group Activity to Illustrate the Concept of a False Dichotomy?” →

PowerPoint Basics for Historians: Part 1

Jonathan Wilson3 Comments

powerpoint-for-historians

Part 1: Design Fundamentals

This is the first installment of a series designed to help historians use Microsoft PowerPoint effectively in the classroom. (You may want to read the series introduction first.)

Today, I’m writing about the big picture of PowerPoint design. This post is about how to set up a slideshow to communicate in the classroom (or conference hall) clearly and effectively. It’s not really about the technology, per se—at this stage, we’re just talking about how to build a visual communication element into a history talk.

As you design your presentation, you should keep three core principles in mind:

  1. Minimalism
  2. Argument
  3. Flow

Continue reading “PowerPoint Basics for Historians: Part 1” →

PowerPoint Basics for Historians: Introduction

Jonathan Wilson2 Comments

powerpoint-for-historians

Let’s face it: If you teach or make other kinds of history presentations, you probably use PowerPoint.

Microsoft’s presentation slideshow software is more than thirty years old. It’s a standard piece of classroom technology. Students expect it. Instructors rely on it.

Yet many of us are sheepish about it. We complain about presenters who simply read their slides aloud. Some teachers warn that relying on PowerPoint is dangerous; a good professor, they say, can walk into any classroom and teach no matter what technology is available that day. Many claim the premise of PowerPoint is flawed because the lecture itself is an outdated teaching method. Also, a lot of presentations are really ugly.

There is some merit to all of these complaints. And there are other slideshow software programs on the market. But the chances are good that if you’re teaching history, you’re using PowerPoint anyway.

There are good reasons for that. PowerPoint is an excellent tool.

I learned some of PowerPoint’s virtues the hard way in my first training-wheels-off teaching job. Hired at the very last minute for a U.S. history survey, I hit the lectern before I even had a university email account or network login—and without the opportunity to assign books ahead of time. My students were lost for the first few days, my printed handouts notwithstanding. PowerPoint, when I could finally access the classroom computer, probably saved the course.

Lately, on course evaluations, students leave me a surprising number of comments like these:

img_1143img_1144img_1145

I’m certainly not claiming that PowerPoint is the only way to present history. But it can be a powerful way. Contrary to some critics’ expectations, using it effectively means more than simply projecting text on a screen. To use PowerPoint well is to design a more immersive narrative for your course. And your PowerPoint slides don’t have to be ugly, either.

In this series of posts, I plan to explain some of the things I’ve learned about using PowerPoint in history classes. Some of what I have to say is very practical–it’s about avoiding basic technical hiccups. Some is about graphic design. Some is specifically about using PowerPoint to craft a story and exhibit historical evidence.

Tomorrow, in my first post, I’ll begin with a few fundamental principles.