Boredom is a pretty familiar feeling in more lecture-based classes. Up to 60% of students find lectures boring according to Sandi Mann who wrote Why do 60% of students find their lectures boring? While I am not entirely sure how they got to this percentage I feel it is a believable number. Lectures can be […]
In my time as a history student I had very few student centered classrooms and I think that is a real loss for not only me as a learner but everyone without a very active classroom. In all my history classes growing up I honestly feel like even the best of them weren’t really trying […]
Week 8 focuses on maintaining student engagement in class. The Hardison article about setting the stage and creating a hook for students talked about the importance of student interaction and direction in the learning process. Hardison stresses the importance of the “lure” to get students acquainted with a particular topic or subject. While I like […]
During my high school years, I had two history classes that particularly stand out in my memory. The first class was an Honors American History class that I took my sophomore year of high school. That teacher had a very strict and rigid way of teaching: we had to take Cornell notes. We had to […]
The point of making students come to class is to get them to learn. Even if they are physically present, it doesn’t matter much if they aren’t also mentally present. If it’s an elective class, the students have chosen it from a variety of options and probably have at least some amount of interest in […]
What is the best way to teach history? Educators have wrestled with this question for many years. They have experimented with many different techniques, some more successful than others. Most of my experience in high school history classes involved heavy lectures, lots of notes, and A LOT of reading from the textbook. I was constantly […]
There are many different types of teachers who can get the same point across regarding history, but there are only a select amount of history teachers who teach their students how to read/analyze historical sources, make historical claims, etc. This reading discussed the difference between two teachers; Bob Brinton and Nancy Todd. Brinton is a […]
PowerPoint is one of the most typical ways to present any topic. It has been used for many teachers over the last couple of decades. In this piece, Tufte brings up how the best way for people to retrieve information is not necessarily through lecture. Someone standing at the front of the room spilling out […]
