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Posted on December 6, 2022
Faculty across fields have been testing out the new ChatGPT website and sharing the surprisingly sophisticated results the site can generate using its machine-learning trained language model. Many are questioning whether this will be the end of take home exams, since students could very easily copy and paste answers from this freely-accessible site. I’m not […]
Posted on August 8, 2022
When I arrived in my teaching position and learned I’d need to teach a course called “Virginia and the Old South,” my heart sank. How was I going to turn that into something that sounded so old fashioned into an engaging course? But as it turned out, I came up with a spin on the […]
Posted on December 23, 2021
Things I never thought could work as well as traditional teaching: teaching online using a flipped classroom model Well, happily, I was wrong. The necessity of moving to online teaching during the pandemic has proved to me that, at least for a lecture-heavy course like the US History survey, both of these can work even […]
Posted on October 13, 2021
Many of my fellow history professor colleagues and I have discussed our struggles to convince students to search the university library instead of Google. I get it–Google is often my first stop when I’m trying to find an answer. But the Google habit is hard to break; even when we or our subject area librarians […]
Posted on April 15, 2021
Several years ago, I designed a lesson as part of a faculty ethics workshop at Marymount University that has now become one of my favorite discussions of the semester in my early U.S. survey course. Whether you want to introduce some formal ethics language or not (and this lesson really just has a small amount), this activity is a great way to get students to connect past and present, think critically about the media, and reflect on the ways they respond to oppression today.
Posted on July 10, 2020 Leave a Comment
I’ve always integrated video clips into my lectures in the US survey–I like bringing other voices and historical visualizations into the classroom and the students enjoy it. For online teaching, some best practice guides suggest that video instruction should be in 6-8 minute segments, so these videos can be interspersed with your own lecture clips. […]
Posted on October 1, 2019
This semester, I’m teaching a museum studies course as part of our public history minor. The course has students majoring in history, interior design, education, communications, and art. We spent the first several weeks talking about the history of museums, with a focus on natural history and historic house museums. To transition into the portion […]
Posted on September 26, 2019
Today in my upper level Colonial America & the American Revolution course, the students voted to pause our regular schedule and talk about impeachment for part of the class. I first answered questions they had about what was happening right now, then explained that we were going to look at the roots of impeachment in […]
Posted on May 10, 2018
This semester in my upper-level early national and Jacksonian US class (1790-1848), I tried out an alternative to a short paper: oral presentations on historical figures which focused in on one primary source by that figure. Students chose from a list of figures I provided that would mesh well with the reading for that week, […]
Posted on August 24, 2017
I’ve spent a good deal of time this summer thinking about how to structure my US history to 1877 survey course–composed almost entirely of non-majors–to address the pressing issues of the moment. Here are a few things I’m planning to do: start out on the first day with an explanation of why they should care […]
Cassandra Good 