Teaching Thursday: Getting a Class to Slow Down

Usually when I think about revising a class, I think about content or even organization. This semester, I’m trying a slightly different approach and trying to change the classroom atmosphere.

As I noted last week, one of the vexing issues that I’ve been facing is post-COVID attendance. For whatever reason, students have become increasingly ambivalent about coming to class. This ambivalence undermines the group work that is central to what I do in my 100 level survey. 

This week, we started the first of a series of installation assignments where students have to think about how to organize themselves to complete a series of assignments. The first of these assignments asks the students to create a glossary for a chapter in the textbook. This not only requires the students to read the textbook carefully, but also to figure out what is important and what is not. I tell the students that their glossary should not be a series of factoids. Instead, it should be a series of related terms, individuals, places, and events that produces an outline of the chapter for a reader. 

The students have a tendency to “divide and conquer” an assignment like this. They want to get on with the program by assigning each of the terms to a student and then combining them in the end. This is an efficient way to complete the task, but it often produces lists of random facts that do not crate an outline of the chapter. In past semesters, I’ve urged students to consider this outcome before they started to work, but left it up to them to figure out how to resolve it. Most groups chose to produce a random list, turn it into me, and then read my feedback and revise accordingly.

This semester — with my emphasis on the classroom as community — I’m going to encourage the students to slow down. Talk to one another first and come up with a list of terms, individuals, places, and events. Then, if they want, they can go and write individually, but after they have written as individuals, they need to reconvene as a group and read each other’s work. While recommending this process is one thing, encouraging the students to slow down and actually engage with it is another. I’m vaguely tempted to have a little in-class quiz where I ask the students to provide feedback on their colleague’s work. At the same time, I want to make sure that the class doesn’t devolve into a series of short assessments designed to condition behavior. Instead, I want to encourage the students to see that slowing down, talking to one another, and doing deliberate work produces better results without a loss in efficiency.

Finally, I spend a good bit of time thinking about my 100-level courses. I have embraced the flipped classroom, I’ve implemented, problem-based, group oriented work, and now I’m exploring the concept of community (perhaps even “communities of practice”) in the classroom. Without patting myself on the back too hard, much of what I do in this class is informed by various pedagogical conversations (in higher education). 

In contrast, my upper level courses tend to be pedagogically uninformed, at least by comparison. In fact, they continue to follow a traditional: lecture as scaffolding for discussion model. I have incorporated some “lab days” into the class, but again, these are fairly traditional and focus on reading sources, taking notes, producing outlines, and writing papers. A mentor of mine once quipped that historians do things backwards. They teach the most complex and demanding material at the lowest level. Diachronic 100-level survey courses regularly traipse over millennia (or at very least centuries) of content asking the students to pivot from one culture, landscape, political regime, and social situation to the next. This makes it difficult to maintain a unifying narrative (hence the traditional misconception that Rome supplanted Greece and the Middle Ages supplanted Rome that has become the bane of many a history teacher). Implementing a broad structural framework for these period, in contrast, runs the risk of being making the class ahistorical. Making the course “skills based” (say, reading primary sources or writing historical papers) threatens to transform a history class into some kind of introduction to the humanities (or worse: basic college skills) course. To somehow make a class like this work, we do what we’ve been trained to do: we apply ample layers of “pedagogy” to it and turn the class into a teaching challenge as a way to overlook the fundamentally flawed conceptual organization of the curriculum. Note, I am using the word “pedagogy” here like we used to use the word “theory” in graduate school; that is: this work is good, but would be better with more theory. 

Upper level courses, in contrast, are more discursively unified. The course aligns better with conversations and conventions in the discipline and, as a result, it is easier to organize the narrative, debates, and skills of these courses around disciplinary practices. There is less need for deliberate pedagogy as the disciplinary conversation alone provides ample structure. Of course, it is possible to add “the pedagogy” to the mix and to make disciplinary standards more accessible (especially in situations where many of the students are not majors), but in many cases, it’s not necessary. While I embrace this approach wholeheartedly, I can’t help feel like this mentality is old fashioned and the pride before the fall.