Category Archives: teaching

(Post title with apologies to The Police.)

Yes, this week the first essay, a short research essay analyzing a primary source document, is due. I’m fielding lots of questions, including a surprising number about how they can cite me. Me, me, me, me, me and my lectures! Me from the course manual I wrote for the other course they’re taking or took last year via continuing education. I’ll probably even get one or two wanting to cite from the chapters I wrote for one of the Wiley Pop Culture and History series!

I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be flattered. I’m not. Mostly, I feel worried. We had an in-class workshop on how to find research resources using our library catalogue and our databases. I passed out a rubric that underlined the expectation the research would have to draw on a book, chapter or article from our library collections. I spent a fair chunk of two class sessions explaining what we’re doing and why the research part is important.

When they want to cite me, it feels little better than when they cite some random website. Both strike me as timid or lazy choices made by students who’re afraid of not finding an acceptable source or just don’t want to work at the research required. If they don’t learn to search effectively and in different ways besides using the internet search engines, they’re not going to uncover the majority of scholarship. They need to learn how to start finding other scholars’ writings, how to read those effectively and how to use this information in their essays. That’s one of the objectives of this course!

If all they do is parrot back my own words at me, how will they know if I wasn’t leading them astray? I want them to test my suggestions from our class time, not just blindly accept one of the interpretations that I’ve offered. I want them to see if they can articulate an idea and find some support for it outside of what I’ve said or what’s there in their textbook!

I guess I’ll find out on Wednesday how many of the students got those messages.

My senior seminar on early medieval chronicles has a total enrolment of sixteen.

In twenty years of full-time teaching, I’ve never had a senior seminar with so few students. Two years ago I had nineteen and thought that I was fortunate. Sixteen seems even better. This particular group of sixteen is an absolute pleasure to teach.

I suspect that some of the bliss also results from the background many students bring to the topic. Four of the students have completed at least first year Latin, two others say they’re currently studying it. One student is clearly fluent in both Latin and Greek. I am envious as my Greek is at the elementary level of recognize the letters and about three dozen key words!

While all of our readings are in translation, it’s wonderful to have students critique the translator’s word choice or comment on the echoes of other classical models they see in the writing style they’re analyzing. I’m more accustomed to students taking my seminars lacking even the most basic of prerequisites such as our western civ freshman course or a sophomore-level subject survey. When half the class doesn’t have a clue about the history they’re tackling, no amount of background readings will fix the problem.

But it isn’t just the linguistic and topical course background that distinguishes the class. Almost every student has identified a useful background they bring to the course. For instance, another number of students have a strong grounding in religious and Biblical studies. A few others have a good sense of theory that’s quite applicable. Put all of these together and you have a nigh-on-perfect mix for lively discussions on the class board as well as in the classroom.

I like to think this makes up for my other two undergraduate classes sitting right at the course caps of 80. These are also pretty good classes where students are following my lead to comment and contribute but it is far more difficult to achieve this in a group of 80 than in the much smaller class where I’m mostly scrambling to get out of their way and facilitate the shift from talking to the professor to talking with each other.

Now that my four outlines for the fall courses are finished, it’s time to get through all the assignment files and CMS set-up every course requires. Ya-ay? This includes the lists of discussion questions I circulate in advance for my undergraduate classes. As I explained in Teaching with Monographs, I find that providing discussion questions in advance helps students both focus their readings and have some confidence about how they can contribute to the class when we get started.

Over the years, I’ve honed my craft of questioning. Of course, we all know that leading questions are better than queries which are answered in short order with facts or yes/no responses. I’ve also come to value questions that are linked to the assigned readings for the day. Even if I don’t agree with the authors, perhaps especially when I’m at odds with them, it’s good to frame the question to encourage students to react to those same arguments and ideas.

This year, I’ve set myself an extra challenge by committing to reuse the discussion questions for both classes as essay questions on the exam. That’s going to be interesting: I normally formulate essay questions in western civilization that are more broadly comparative, asking students to compare social or religious elements over time or across places. Now I’m putting that model aside in hopes of enriching the discussion time in class as students perceive the value in answering these fully (because it’ll be “on the test”) as well as understanding that there are no “right answers” (so whatever answer they put forward needs to be well-supported).

We’ll see how that application works out. In the meantime, I’m tweaking my discussion questions and, as I’d promised a few weeks back, thought I’d share some of the current versions here. They’re relating very closely to the two books students will read for the course, Bucholz & Key’s Early Modern England and Barbara Donagan’s War in England, 1642-1649 but I hope they’ll still be genuinely interesting for the students. Any suggestions are still welcome as these examples are still in draft form only:

• What is “affinity” and how was it important in the rise and fall of the Yorkist dynasty?


• What were the three principles of medieval kingship that Henry VII revived and which do you think was the most important in cementing the new Tudor dynasty?


• War, Catholic resistance, parliamentary grievance and noble unrest: which most transformed Elizabethan England?


• Barbara Donagan considers the Civil War an ‘integrated war’. How did culture, technology and/or intelligence link British combatants?


• Bucholz & Key describe the Commonwealth as “too conservative”, “too radical” and “too tolerant of the lower orders” – what do YOU think was its fatal flaw?


• Characterize Britain in 1714: an ancien régime culture or a modern, middle-class society?

Now it’s my turn to ask you a question: what’s your advice for enlivening classroom discussion?

In my fall semester survey on early modern Britain, I’m mixing things up by teaching from just a textbook (Bucholz and Key’s 2nd edition of Early Modern England) and a monograph: Barbara Donagan’s War in England 1642-1649. The book is fabulously well-written, wide-ranging in its treatment of the experience of war in the era and just plain fun. It’s also quite reasonably priced in paperback! (We also have an electronic copy in the library collection so no student can use the excuse, “My student loan money isn’t in so I can’t buy the book!”)

It’s also an ambitious book to hand to many students who aren’t history majors or are only in the second year of their program, but I wanted to get back to teaching some secondary literature before the senior level. (Like many other premodernists, I spent a lot of classroom time working on the challenge of close reading primary sources.) This book appeared to me a good opportunity to do so.

However, now it’s August and I’m wrestling with my course plans for the fall. I have a term to get them up and running on major themes and events in early modern British history. I’ll try to achieve some of that by hammering home the need to do their textbook readings with pre-selected and circulated discussion questions on the textbook opening every single class session.

To build to the challenge of tackling the monograph, I need to get students working with another secondary source in the first half of the term. I think I’ll probably give them a short list of journals they can run through and choose one article relevant to our course to read and demonstrate some simple analytic ability. I’m planning an assignment that would require them to identify the article’s argument, key examples or evidence, and then relate it back to our textbook to see how the two treatments differ in any way.

With that achievement under their belt, we can begin reading the monograph. The course outline will include a reading schedule so that students know by what dates they ought to have read what parts of the book. I’ll also start leavening in some discussion questions that tackle the monograph’s early themes (such as the justification of war, military education and the concept of a citizen-soldier).

Then I need to craft the assignment scheme for the monograph. I’m leaning toward having students sign up for one chapter and carrying out either a compare/contrast analysis with one other work of scholarship on the same topic or use that as the basis for a more conventional research assignment. (You can see that my heart isn’t in the latter. I’m tired of reading badly plagiarized or clueless essays on randomly tweaked topics.)

One of my problems is that students at this level still have great difficulty in identifying appropriate scholarly sources. They tend to turn to the web first. To be honest, Google’s top five results probably provides the largest number of research sources for many student essays. A few of the more enterprising go with something from the top five results from Google Books. Another chunk just pick up something random from JSTOR or Historical Abstracts (failing, despite directions, to check off the box labelled “Peer-Reviewed”). So part of the challenge is to get them to identify a good scholarly source before we even get back to the analytic assignment!

Perhaps if I have them crowd-critique their choice of compare/contrast sources (which could be an article from a list of acceptable journals, a scholarly monograph or chapter in a scholarly collection) by requiring them to post their choices to the class’s discussion list by X date before the assignment is due (and comment on at least two other of the selections). Providing them with a clear list of criteria as to what constitutes an acceptable scholarly source will also be part of the solution.

The final capstone might be to have presentations of their work, either as files to the class website or in-class presentations. The latter would be preferable but given that I already have over fifty students signed up for the course, that’d take more than a week of class time to accomplish. Hmm. . . .

Finally, if I advise students that I’ll reuse the discussion questions for the exam, they also would have incentive to keep up with preparing for those. So I won’t have to pick up and mark discussion question responses (they can just work from their notes or what-have-you) which would be a daunting addition to the marking scheme.

I might have a plan here, but any suggestions you can provide for how to best teach from secondary sources like a monograph would be greatly appreciated. I have a few more weeks before this all has to be “nailed down” but I want the course plans done and out of the way as soon as possible, so I can keep up with my other writing and editing obligations.

I’m pondering whether or not to run midterms in my freshman and sophomore level survey courses this fall (Western Civ and Early Modern Britain for topic areas). Tests seem easy to administer, giving a snapshot of student understanding and communication. But they can become a lot of work, even for the instructor. For instance, once classes reach a certain size, I’m certain to have students who’re injured, ill or bereaved on test dates, necessitating make-up tests. I’ve had eight or ten students needing to write make-ups during a particularly bad flu outbreak! That means writing new versions of the test and organizing the new test time. As my survey enrolments creep up toward the cap of 80, I’m pondering the pay-off.

In defense of midterms:

1. They teach students how to take tests. Especially at the first year level, that’s a not inconsiderable skill. Learning how to write concise responses to short-answer questions, for instance, is a skill they’ll use over and over again, especially because. . . .
2. We have mandatory “final instruments” which, for all intents and purposes in a larger class means a final exam. So if the students don’t learn how to write short identifications and practice extemporaneous essay answers before the final exam, how are they going to do well at the end of the term? I’m able to dispense with a final exam in my senior seminars where I require a portfolio of source analyses, peer review comments and other work they’ve crafted over a term, but I’m not sure how well I could do that in a lower level course with large numbers of students!
3. Tests seem easier to grade than most equivalent assignments. I don’t feel it’s helpful to do more than highlight areas where the prose is so incomprehensible as to defy marking or scrawl “great!” beside a well-crafted argument. A four-page paper, say, even with a rubric that helps me to explain their outcome, still requires a lot of professorial response. Particularly with students in the early stages of their university career, you’ll often encounter essays that reveal problems in grammar, punctuation, expression, spelling, logic and organization. If you don’t help the student by at least identifying these problems at this stage, they’re not going to progress well at all!
4. Midterms give students a good sense of how they’re progressing in otherwise essay-intensive classes. If you’re concentrating almost all of their marks in a big essay and final exam, how do you let students know how they’re progressing, otherwise. Sure, our university (and others, I assume), mandates that students receive feedback on one substantial assignment before the deadline to drop without a mark on the transcript. But if you just have a short essay early to cover that, maybe a proposal or annotated bibliography, a long essay and a final, that’s a lot piling up at the end of term for both students and instructors!

Against midterms:

1. More trouble than they’re worth? Well, certainly more trouble than I like to think – from taking time in the classroom away from actually learning to the trouble associated with making up missed tests, one way or another.
2. High anxiety: I know that tests induce a lot of anxiety in students and it’s difficult to design a test that will reveal their knowledge (requiring some sort of essay response) without evoking high anxiety. I circulate sample tests and finals from early on in the term. I provide review sheets (again, these take some effort to produce). I field many questions and queries about tests despite all of that, so I know testing weighs on them.
3. What do tests really show? We don’t do multiple-choice tests in my department based on long-standing principle but the bigger the class, the more likely I am to retreat to simpler instruments of assessment: fill-in-the-blank questions for terms we’ve emphasized throughout the course, map identifications, short answers. They don’t demonstrate much about student learning beyond the regurgitation of certain facts and key points.

I will likely have one teaching assistant to help me out this year: an M.A. student who’s contracted for ten hours of work a week for the department (which means that I have to allot for the TA’s prep time and the chance that her or his labour might need to be shared a couple weeks out of the term). Grading schemes have to be made in the cold, hard calculation of labour availability.

So I put this out there in hopes that the wisdom of the community (the blogo-brain?) can help me figure out good strategies for these two courses. To midterm or not to midterm and, if I don’t, what’ll come next?