In a couple of earlier posts (1) (2) I described a project I’ve been a consultant to that is examining best practices in the teaching of introductory college courses. We held our final meeting on Monday during which we reviewed the 15 top syllabi (out of something like 115) to determine what elements of “best practices” in the teaching of European history they exemplified.

The final reviewers came from institutions across the spectrum of type–PhD granting, MA granting, liberal arts and community college–and our task was not a simple one. And, as I said in my earlier post on this final group of syllabi, the courses we were charged with reviewing were quite the range of type–those with only 12 students to those with more than 250 students.

I’ve already ranted about the fact that exactly none of the syllabi we were looking at had any sort of technology component other than simply using the Internet to provide access to a primary source here or there. it may be that digital resources were hidden behind a WebCT/Blackboard password, but if so, there was no mention in any of these syllabi of the use of digital resources, except a couple that issued dire warnings about the problems students might encounter online.

Our review panel talked about this lacuna quite a bit and agreed that at a minimum all of the syllabi should have included exercises that are designed to teach students how to use digital resources effectively and that it would be even better if they included the use of exemplary digital history projects. But this was, in the end, whining on our part, because we had to work with what we were given.

The lack of thinking about how to teach students to use digital resources does make me wonder what my colleagues around the history circuit are thinking? I don’t know a single person who would write into their syllabus something like this: “The University library contains many books and articles that use questionable sources or are written by people with uncertain qualifications. Before entering the library, students should be very wary about using materials they find there as they prepare their essays.”

Here are the equivalent warnings from several syllabi I found online in a quick search with our Syllabus Finder (none were part of the study I’m discussing):

Be careful about internet sources. For example, Wikipedia is not a reliable source.

In my experience you will find internet sources to be of only limited use in this paper; don’t plan on using internet resources exclusively or even extensively. There are exceptions, of course, and a few useful sites are listed below. But beware; there are many uncritical and worthless sites out there.

Although the internet provides some great resources for scholarly research, it’s also much more unreliable than a good research library. Beware of relying on internet sources that are not scholarly publications such as peer-reviewed journal articles.

To our students, these warnings I’ve just listed and the warning about the university library that I made up sound no different. Telling them to not use the Internet for research is akin to my professors in the 1970s telling me to avoid Alderman Library if at all possible.

The other interesting thing that came out of our discussion of “best practices” was the speed with which all of the reviewers punted on the issue of content–what was or was not taught in the course–to focus on the teaching methods and the habits of mind the instructor was seeking to promote in his/her students. This willingness to allow historians to teach whatever we think ought to be taught under the course number we’re using is one of long standing. Just yesterday I read the inaugural lecture delivered by Warren W. Lewis when he assumed his chair of history at Queen’s College (Belfast) in 1975. In this lecture, titled “Undergraduate History”, Lewis argued that it was really only appropriate for historians to discuss the methods of historical learning and teaching among their colleagues–that the content decisions were to be left to the individual professor (page 5 if you want to look it up).

What did my committee of reviewer colleagues decide was best practices in teaching and habits of mind? We tended to focus much more on interactivity, two-way communication, collaborative learning opportunties (even in large classes–study groups anyone?), as well as the old standards of continuity and change over time, helping students understand that the past is both foreign and contested terrain, and the ability to evaluate evidence found in both primary and secondary sources.

I’ll be very interested to read the final report that emerges from this project, particularly to see if those in chemistry, physics, world history, american history, and other disciplinary specialties felt the same way about these issues as those of us teaching European history.

I’ve just returned for a two-day meeting where groups of scholars tried to determine what might constitute “best practices” in introductory undergraduate courses in several disciplines. Three of the six groups in attendance were historians (US, European, World) and it was very interesting to watch the way the three groups approached their charge. Each group received a list of criteria that were to serve as a starting point for discussing the characteristics of some idealized best practices course. These characteristics fell into three general categories—content, teaching methods, and what are best called “historical thinking skills.” We were then to decide which items on this starter list ought to be included, which out to be excluded, and how those that remained out to be considered more (or less) important.

The World Historians immediately threw out the starting point document they’d been given and rewrote the entire thing from top to bottom. The Americanists decided that they really needed to start with historical thinking skills, then go on to teaching methods, and then and only then get to the content. The Europeanists (my group) proved either the most compliant or the most agreeable (depending on one’s perspective I suppose). We started on page one of our document and worked our way through to the end in a more linear fashion.

I might be tempted to conclude that these three approaches to the same task were somehow indicative of the characteristics of our sub-disciplines, except that there were only a half dozen or so historians in each group and so we were anything but representative of our peers and how they might approach such a task.

What was more interesting than our style, however, was the substance we all arrived at. In each case, regardless of method, the groups seemed to have arrived at about the same place. The starter documents we received seemed to present a best practices course as one that efficiently “covers” some generally agreed upon body of content while exposing students to various historical thinking skills. All three groups of historians saw things the other way ‘round. That is, that a best practices course was one that uncovered various ways of knowing about the past as part of an investigation of central concerns in the discipline. Content thus became secondary to what might make a course an exemplar of “best practices” or not. This is not to say that we didn’t care about content—we did and passionately I might add. But we all (or at least most) seemed to see content as the way to teach larger concerns.

This might seem revolutionary to some in the historical community. Alas, I’m sorry to report that in 1905 the American Historical Association issued a report arguing for much the same approach in the first year of the college course in history.

Will it work this time? Stay tuned…