In the fall of 2004, I began my third year of teaching U.S. history at the University of Wisconsin-Marathon County, and as I looked back on my teaching, I had much to take pride in. My classes had good enrollment, my student evaluations and colleague observation letters were overwhelmingly positive, and I had become much more at ease in the classroom. My lectures seemed to keep students’ attention, and my classroom had a comfortable, relaxed environment that I believe allows students a safe space in which to learn. But something was terribly wrong.
Though my students attended regularly, spoke in class, and did at least some of the assigned reading, too many of them were failing to grasp some of the most critical concepts of the course . . . in the end they hadn’t mastered several key concepts of early American history.
I had begun to notice it in some of the students’ short papers, but the finals of the previous May had really set me to wondering about my observations of student performance that I couldn’t ignore any longer. Though my students attended regularly, spoke in class, and did at least some of the assigned reading, too many of them were failing to grasp some of the most critical concepts of the course. They had taken my class, listened to my lectures, and enjoyed the experience, and yet in the end they hadn’t mastered several key concepts of early American history. This was most obvious to me in History 101: American History through the Civil War, the course I taught most often, and the one I thought was the most sound pedagogically. That really troubled me. I had chosen the text and supplementary readings carefully, blending the seamlessly—at least in my own mind—to create a coherent narrative and analysis.
Colleague Advice About Student Performance
When I spoke to colleagues about my concerns, I received such divergence of opinions that I found their advice more confusing than helpful. Later, I decided that these responses revealed a great deal about my colleagues’ teaching styles, and almost nothing about my students and their learning, and that summer I was left to sort out the implications of my fellow professors’ explanations for poor student performance.
I had learned quite successfully as a student in just such a classroom (lecture), and it seemed reasonable to expect the same of my students . . . Many of the students who had failed to perform well were demonstrably smart, engaged, and hard working. It seemed a betrayal on my part to dismiss them as ne’er-do-wells unworthy of taking my course.
Explanations ranged from one extreme to another. From one side came a simple explanation: it was the students’ fault. In what might be termed the “pearls before swine” hypothesis, some assured me that my course and teaching style were sound, but that my students were just not sophisticated, or motivated, or smart enough to take advantage of what my course offered them. I must admit, on the surface this explanation was very appealing. After all, when confronted with such a problem, it might be all too easy to disavow personal responsibility for what was going on in my course. All I would have had to do was point to my high evaluations and cry, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Further, when I was a student I had learned quite successfully in just such a classroom, and it seemed reasonable to expect the same of my students. Yet, I just couldn’t accept this explanation. Many of the students who had failed to perform well were demonstrably smart, engaged, and hard working. It seemed a betrayal on my part to dismiss them as ne’er-do-wells unworthy of taking my course.
From the other side were colleagues who assured me that lecturing, to any extent and for any purpose, was outmoded and likely to permanently injure my student’s brains. They told me to cease and desist as soon as possible, and create a student-directed classroom where they were responsible for moving us through the material. This approach seemed too extreme for three reasons. First, I knew learning could take place during lectures, as my own undergraduate education had proved. When Paul Bowers and Merton Dillon had lectured on early American history, their insights, and the power of their narratives and analysis had opened up new worlds to me, and their teaching, which had consisted primarily of lectures, had helped lead me into a career as a history professor. Secondly, there was so much to cover in a survey of U.S. history that I knew a student-led course could never even make a dent in the sheer volume of material dictated by the course description. Finally, one of the skills students are expected to develop in a history course is to combine analysis and synthesis to create coherent narratives about the past. Even the best students struggle with this, and a lecture is a place where the professor can model this skill. Students need to witness such a lecture, which, based on the choices the instructor has made, presents a compelling narrative of the American past. Through this modeling, students come to see that a lecture is not the only interpretation of the past, but also only one interpretation of the subject matter.
To be fair, most of the advice I received was somewhere in between these two poles. Many suggested that I make my classroom more “interactive,” though their advice was often short on details, and offered such platitudes as “get your students to talk more.” Great, I thought, but how exactly do you do that?
Women in Science and FACETS—Support for change
It was at this point that opportunities to think and learn about teaching began to find me. In the fall of 2004, the UW-Colleges had the chance to send four faculty members to the UW-System program on Women in Science. When not enough science and math faculty signed up, I was invited. Really more about good teaching and creating a comfortable classroom environment, this program proved invaluable to me. One session introduced me to the concept of collaborative learning. The presenter had been using these techniques in his classroom for some time, and his session included experienced advice on how to use group work in a college course. He had solid quantitative evidence that showed this approach resulted in better learning outcomes by his students. He also relieved my fears that group learning merely shifted the burden onto the overachieving student while letting the less motivated members of the group share in the credit. He also related that he continued to introduce each class with a “mini-lecture” and conclude with a brief talk that pulled the ideas of the day together. The alternative classroom model, professor direction and student collaboration, seemed to strike a reasonable balance for what I hoped to achieve. I left the conference convinced that collaborative learning was part of the answer to the problems I wanted to address.
While Women in Science had offered techniques to create a more interactive classroom, FACETS explained why such interaction would improve student learning. I was particularly taken by the session on learning styles, which argued that different students learn in different ways, and that this variety helped explain why a technique that worked for me as a student—the lecture—proved less successful for others.
During that year, I also became a participant in the FACETS Program, a joint teaching venture by UW-Stevens Point and UW-Marathon County. While Women in Science had offered techniques to create a more interactive classroom, FACETS explained why such interaction would improve student learning. I was particularly taken by the session on learning styles, which argued that different students learn in different ways, and that this variety helped explain why a technique that worked for me as a student—the lecture—proved less successful for others. Indeed, I found that I was a multimodal learner with a strong preference for aural and reading/writing, and those were exactly the skills I had employed, and had enjoyed, as an undergraduate in a lecture. Unfortunately, the lecture format works much less well for students with other learning styles. FACETS also proved invaluable by providing a forum where I could speak with educators from other disciplines and share ideas and experiences about teaching.
FACETS also offered me a stipend with which to purchase books on teaching. One of these, Collaborative Learning Techniques1, proved impossible to put down. It offered me exactly what I needed: specific techniques to create a more interactive classroom, concrete examples from a variety of disciplines, and discussions of potential benefits and drawbacks to each technique. I immediately saw how several of these techniques, including role-playing, fishbowl, and group investigation could be useful in my history survey.
Student Learning—The Point of Teaching
After being exposed to all of these ideas about good teaching during the 2004-2005 academic year, I began to be more reflective about my teaching, and more importantly, I came to see that the central point is not my teaching, but is instead student learning. In the end, I realized that while other constraints might make it difficult or unwise to make my survey course student-directed it could still be much more student-centered. Armed with the tools and rationale behind making significant changes to my survey, I prepared for the Fall 2005 semester.
My initial plan had been to completely revamp one of my three sections of History 101, instituting all the changes I contemplated in one fell swoop. Oddly, it was my campus Promotion and Tenure Committee that suggested I institute these changes more slowly. Pointing to my high evaluations, the committee encouraged me to explore whether the changes I proposed would actually improve student learning before revising my entire survey course. At first I was disappointed that they discouraged my innovation, but in retrospect I think a gradual transformation will prove less traumatic for my students and for me.
The Fall 2005 semester I implemented the first significant changes to the structure of my survey course since I began teaching.
I used groups almost weekly, but my big experiment came in Week 9 of the semester. I decided to ask the groups to represent the different elements of Jacksonian America—investors in the Transportation Revolution; investors in industry; industrial workers; preachers and converts of churches participating in the Second Great Awakening; commercial and traditional farmers; and transcendentalists. The textbook discussed the experience of each of these historical entities, and I handed out additional short readings to groups I thought might need more information to play their role successfully. In the assignment, I also asked them to be prepared to explain how their group saw the world and the other groups in the room.
In trying something so radically different, I had three goals: 1) by Week 9, many students do little or no reading, and come to class poorly-prepared; 2) the week’s topic, Social and Economic Change in Jacksonian America, was a topic I considered critical, but one that many students failed to find engaging or important; and 3) groups had worked together and knew each other, and I hoped that this exercise would test how well the collaborative learning model could work. To add to my personal anxiety, my teaching was observed that day by a colleague for a tenure-track visitation letter.
On the day of class, I was understandably nervous. Though I would help channel discussion, I had truly given students control of class. Success or failure hung largely on whether they had done the reading and whether they would “buy in” to the role-playing. At first, they appeared somewhat nervous and quiet, but once they began to explain their characters and engage in debate, and student interaction took over. Most student comments were directed at their fellow students, not me, and I became more of a facilitator, asking questions of groups, and in one instance actually calming down an exchange between “factory owners” and “workers” that was becoming overheated!
My First Teaching Experience of Working “Without a Net”
And yet, one question plagued me--what had the students thought? Many had participated, but it had also required a great deal of energy and time from them, and I knew from fellow teachers who used these techniques that students sometimes complained that the professor “wasn’t teaching,” and was abdicating responsibility for the course. While every student may not have been satisfied by class that day, later that afternoon I received this e-mail from a class member:
I would like to say thank you for the in-class activity today! It was an amazing one at that. I can't really explain how much better I learned from it as opposed to the normal lessons. Mainly, I just wanted to say thank you for it and that you really helped me.
This student chose to write an essay on this topic on the final, and it showed a level of content knowledge and analytical rigor superior to any of the rest of his work in the class. For one student at least, it had worked.
Lessons to Sustain Career-long Enthusiasm
So what does the future hold? I am committed to continuing this journey, and incorporating more collaborative learning techniques into my history survey. In addition to group work, I am also developing a pre-test and post-test for the course. By giving this to students each semester, I hope to identify problem areas, and institute more active learning strategies in an attempt to produce better learning outcomes. Eventually, I would like my survey course to be simultaneously challenging and rewarding for students. By insisting that they take more responsibility for their own learning, I also expect them to leave the class having learned more.
Two years ago, I wondered whether I could sustain my enthusiasm and commitment for thirty years. Now, I sense that when it comes time to retire, I will still have ideas and schemes for making my courses “just a bit better.”
Afterthoughts—Looking Backwards
As I look back over the last year-and-a-half, the changes I’ve experienced make sense, though at the outset I had no idea where they all might lead. In graduate school, the focus was always on mastery of content, so for me that was a natural place to start. Early in my teaching career, I wanted to ensure that my students received accurate information and analysis, and the new experience of teaching courses led me to attempt to control exactly what happened in my classroom, always seeing the problems as ones of “teaching” not “learning.”But now I feel much more comfortable with the material, and the next step for me is to begin “working without a net”—daring to give up control, letting students and their needs become a bigger factor in what happens in our classroom. The process has been both frightening and liberating, and I look forward to the voyages of discovery ahead for my future students and me.
Brief Bio: Brett is an assistant professor of history at UW-Marathon County in Wausau. He received his Ph.D. in U.S. History from UW-Madison in 2001. He has been at UW-Marathon County since 2002, where he teaches U.S. survey, American Indian history, Wisconsin history, and Civil War history. He is also currently teaching upper-level courses in U.S. history for UW-SP through the Collaborative Degree Program. He works with K-8 teachers, and is director of the Marathon County K-8 History Teaching Alliance. Contact Brett at: bbarker@uwc. edu
1 Elizabeth Barkley, K. Patricia Cross, and Claire Major, Collaborative Learning Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty (Jossey-Bass, 2005).