Thoughts on Teaching History in a Scale-Up Classroom (Part XI)

I just completed my tenth week of teaching History 101: Western Civilization in the University of North Dakota’s new Scale-Up classroom. I feel like I am still figuring out both pedagogical and classroom management issues despite the over 20 hours of teaching in the room. The overarching idea behind my class is for each 9 student table to produce a chapter of a textbook. As of last week, each table has produced a revised draft of their chapter and the next two weeks will involve setting it aside and working on peer review.

1. Taking a Step Back. Over the last three weeks, students have worked hard to write and revise their chapters. I have urged them to consider five major issues with their work (1) coherence, (2) organization, (3) primary sources, (4) citation, and (5) proofreading. The first two issues involve ensuring that the chapter is more than just a litany of facts or content, and the last two involved copy editing type work. I’ve given the students wide latitude on how to integrate primary sources into their chapter.

At our pre-class meeting, my GTA observed that the students may need some critical distance from their chapters. As a result we decided that the next two classes will focus on peer reviewing other chapters in order to give the students a chance to study closely how other groups have approached issues of organization, argument, and structure in their work. The goal of this is explained in point 2.

2. Guided Revisions. One of the great challenges this past two weeks is getting the large groups to revise their chapters without telling them exactly what to do. The groups received feedback after an initial draft and worked on revisions over the past week. The results were mixed with some evidence that the students did not understand the comments that we made on their chapters, some evidence that they did know how to make the necessary changes, and some evidence for predictable student resistance and laziness. The goal of the next two weeks is to encourage students to peer review other group’s chapters and to begin to think of their own work more reflexively. Hopefully this will open the door to more careful and thorough revisions as students will be better able to communicate to each other the kinds of changes necessary than I will be able to communicate to them.

3. Energy and Intensity. I made a bit of a rookie mistake tonight. The students worked hard to write short introductions and to plan revisions for their work. There was a tremendous amount of energy in the room and a flurry of activity at every table as the groups organized their approaches to their revisions and working on writing short introductions to their chapters. As the momentum surrounding this activity began to crest, I introduced the next phase of activities for the week. This involved some lower key list building and more structured group work.

It felt like I had thrown an anchor out of speeding boat when the class dissolved into a morass of distraction. In the future I need to be a bit more careful about how I combine assignments in the classroom so that the groups can maintain momentum and not be driven to distraction.

4. Minding the Gaps. One thing that is fascinating is how students have shifted from worrying about students who aren’t pulling their weight in the group to adopting strategies that allowed the group to succeed without the work of the slacking or absent students. Having observed this transition, I suspect that the best approach to entirely understandable concern by students about the equitable distribution of work in the group is just letting it play itself out. Over time, students will understand that a good final product will benefit them more than they will be hurt by the under performance of their classmates and rally to the cause.

Four more classes this semester and I’ll report back on them here. For my on my adventures in Scale-Up teaching click here.