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Outline for today:

I. Review

II. About Honeybees

III. Discussion/Active Learning

IV. Reflection & Processing

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Title of the Course

Subtitle of the Course

Week 1

Introduction

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Announcements

Some upcoming due date

Comments on the rough drafts

Field trip itinerary

Etc.

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Outline for today:

I. Review

II. Lecture

III. Discussion/Active Learning

IV. Reflection & Processing

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The Big Question

This should be some sort of question that will be answered by the class meeting.

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I. Review

It’s crucial to loop back to previous material. When students are forced to recall what they learned previously, they consolidate it better in their memories (it’s called the “testing effect” or “retrieval effect”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testing_effect ). See James Lang’s book Small Teaching, specifically the section called “Retrieving” (pages 41-62). What you do here depends on your class. You might use the polling software PollEverywhere to ask short questions using your students’ smartphones; you could ask them to make up a few questions for the mid-term for the material they learned the week before, or have them simply write down three key things from last class. See also James Lang’s excellent essay “The First 5 Minutes of Class,” here: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Small-Changes-in-Teaching-The/234869

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II. Lecture

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Much Less Text

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Historians, since the origins of the discipline in the early nineteenth-century, have used written documents in state archives as their primary sources. These documents are, of course limited to the voices of a certain class of people and are, therefore quite limited.

That said, there is a movement to use counter-archives as a way to broaden the story.

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Historians love old documents.

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Use Color and Size In Text

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Where do disciplines get evidence?

Anthropology: from field interviews

Physics: from experiments in the lab

Comp Literature: from written texts

Sociology: large-scale data (gov’t and surveys)

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I. Lecture: “Silences in the Archives”

In the archives: yelling

inside voices

whispers

silences

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Round Numbers, Cut Text

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How much does a burger cost?A burger in the United States costs on average about $4.97 whereas in Germany a roughly equivalent burger would be, in US dollars $7.98. In Malawi that burger would be far cheaper, costing roughly $1.05.

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Cost of a burger in three countries

Malawi $1

United States $5

Germany $8

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Obscure to Create Focus

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Note the horses.

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Obscure to Create Sequence

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Historians find fragments of the past in archives. They use these primary sources along with secondary sources to make arguments. These arguments take the form of narratives (stories).

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Historians find fragments of the past in archives. They use these primary sources along with secondary sources to make arguments. These arguments take the form of narratives (stories).

They find these primary sources in archives.

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Stages of a Bee’s Life

Egg

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Stages of a Bee’s Life

Larva

Egg

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Stages of a Bee’s Life

Larva

Egg

Pupa

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Stages of a Bee’s Life

Larva

Egg

Pupa

Semi-Adult

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Stages of a Bee’s Life

Larva

Egg

Pupa

Semi-Adult

Adult

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Promote Interaction

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In your course journals (#5):

What are the three most important points of the lecture so far?

It is an understatement to say that I (Zach) love to use course journals as part of my assessment of students. I usually have two or three questions in my slides. I ask the students to write very brief responses to questions. Usually I ask students 1) what the most important points have been, 2) to make a prediction, or 3) to connect the material they have just learned to previous material. You can see my short article here ( https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2019/06/25/how-teach-more-effectively-through-course-journals-opinion ) and see also the section on what James Lang calls “connection notebook” (pages 99-101) in the section “Connecting” in his book Small Teaching. You might also invite students to do what Lang calls a “concept map” (pp. 103-105) or a “minute thesis” (105-107).

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Simplify Data

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Take a second and draw this into your journal, with dates.

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Highlight Things

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Use Sized Images or Icons

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Harvard’s endowment is 6 times bigger than Yale’s and twenty times bigger than Princeton’s.

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Use High-Resolution Images

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Keep Things in the

Same Spot

Every time you put a slide up that has a lot of information arranged in a certain way, your audience has to process it to make sense of it. I remember a presentation I once saw with about a dozen graphs, one after another, illustrating data about climate change. Each graph had far too much information but even worse, each graph was different: different sizes, different fonts, different things on the axes, different color schemes, different widths of lines, etc. As a non-scientist, I was already slow in understanding graphs: for each graph it took me 20-30 seconds just to get oriented and understand how the information was being presented; by that time the speaker was well into her commentary on the graph. I had missed much of it and struggled to understand the rest, my eyes jumping all over the image: the classic two-channel conflict compounded by the change, on every slide, of the basic way of organizing the information.

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$11 billion

$38 billion

$7 billion

Endowments

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18,000

14,000

4,000

# of Students

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Explain Jargon

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What is “SEO”?

Search

Engine

Optimization

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Use A Timer

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III. Discussion/Active Learning

It’s important to have students immediately process the material they have just learned and connect it to the other material they’ve already learned. See James Lang’s section on “Interleaving” (pages 63-90) in his book Small Teaching. There are all kinds of active learning activities you could have the students do, but my personal favoriate is called Think-Pair-Share. See my essay here: https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2021/07/14/instructor-describes-what-he-has-found-be-pedagogical-panacea-opinion

At least 25 minutes of your class meeting should involve you not talking and the students working together to process what they’ve learned and apply it in some way.

I highly recommend the book Student Engagement Techniques. It has lots of these techniques, all of which are easy to implement. Below is a technique called “Stand Where You Stand.”

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The Controversy: Is terroir, often translated into English as the “taste of place,” real?

Jones assures us that place and cultural traditions give food a distinct, unreplicatable taste. Nowak argues that this is both elitist and utter malarkey.

Where do you stand? In your notebook, write down your rationale, supporting it with arguments, quotes, and other evidence.

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Now: Where do you stand?

To what extent do you agree with Jones?, i.e., that terroir is indeed real.

Find a place in the classroom under the signs in each corner:

Strongly Agree

Agree

Disagree

Strongly Disagree

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Defend your position: I’ll now ask each of you (not in order), to present your views, in brief.

After each person presents, everyone can (if they have changed their mind), move to one of the other three corners.

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Debrief

Which arguments or evidence changed your mind?

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IV. Reflection & Processing

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In your course journals (#6):

Based on the images I just passed out, make a prediction: how quickly did Italians adopt tomatoes into their diet?

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For Next Time:

Do the reading

Take the quiz by Monday

Turn in your paper outlines