Of the many different courses I teach, the one I’ve made the fewest changes in over the past decade is my survey of modern Eastern Europe. Every other course I teach has been reconfigured in various ways as a result of my research into the scholarship of teaching and learning, but for some reason, I’ve…
Tag: cognitive research
How Heuristics Make History Hard
What do we really know about how our students generate answers to historical questions? Thanks to Sam Wineberg, Peter Seixas, Bob Bain, Stephane Levesque, and others in their orbits, we know a good bit about how K-12 history students reach their conclusions about the past, but when it comes to higher education, we know far…
I Know…Let’s Blame the Students
Sometimes it seems to me that whenever things go wrong in college teaching, the first impulse of the professor is to blame the students. They aren’t prepared for class. They don’t want to grapple with the hard concepts. They don’t want to read what I assign. They do all their work at the last minute….