Introduction: Last year Jack Child asked me to join some of my colleagues at this Conference to report on what I was doing in my classes in U.S. History. This year he asked me to return to give a progress report. I came then, as I return now, with some degree of humility.  As someone who has returned to teaching after more than a decade in administration, I'm not entirely sure what I have to say to colleagues who are, if not more deeply experienced, then at least more recently experienced in the classroom. Nevertheless, here I am and here goes. (Outline)

I would like to divide my remarks today into three parts: I'd like to speak briefly about

A.  Some of the basic principles I am trying to incorporate into my classes;
B.  Some of the techniques I have employed to achieve that end; and
C.  Finally, I'd like to offer some very preliminary and unscientific assessments about how it all is working.

1.  Design courses that reflect a mastery of disciplinary content. Neither technique nor technology are substitutes for a strong, intellectual foundation.  I obviously want my students to learn history; but a)  I also want them develop skills that will allow them to continue to learn from the past well after they've left the classroom or university; b)  I want them to learn to better communicate their knowledge, both orally and in writing; and c)  I want them to develop an informed understanding of historical practice -- the interplay of history and memory, the role of evidence, how history is created or "constructed" by historians, museum curators, movie makers and many others.

2.  Create a course plan that is clear  in the (high) expectations that it establishes.

3.  Offer opportunities for what is variously called: authentic learning; constructive research; active learning; active participation; even "learning by doing" (with a tip of the hat to John Dewey, from whom we still have much to learn, even after all these years). There are a lot of reasons for this: one is simply to engage students more actively in their own learning. But it also flows out of what I'm trying to teach about history. As we all know, history is not simply "the record of the past," it doesn't exist in a book or archive, but it is continually constructed as part of an ongoing social process. For me, active learning is one of the ways we can demonstrate and model this point in the classroom.

4.  Recognizing that students learn differently, create a rich learning environment with a broad and diverse menu of learning opportunities.   This has taken some work for me. I'm very text oriented and a member, to boot, of what has until recently been a very text oriented discipline.  One of my sons describes me as graphically challenged. Nevertheless, I have sought to introduce a wide range of multi-media resources into my classes, as well as projects that, I hope, draw on a wide variety of student abilities and talents.

5.  Increase the frequency of faculty-student interactions.   Increase interaction inside class, outside class, in "real," as well as "virtual" settings (via e-mail, discussion groups, etc.). To paraphrase Mark Twain, too much is just about right. This is based in part on research that shows that of all the variables associated with student success in college, the very highest is personal contact with faculty around issues of substantive academic concern. This is not exactly rocket science, but it bears thinking about, especially as we are pressed to divert more time to scholarship and to service.

6.  Increase the frequency of student-student interactions. Create well structured opportunities for students to work together. Here again there is a very strong correlation between personal contact among students over issues of substantive academic concern and student success (as measured by retention and graduation rates).

7.  Increase student responsibility for learning. Make students more publicly accountable for their work. As I reflect on how I have taught in the past, I'm struck by how private and almost invisible so much of the learning process was. While I lectured in public and students "discussed" in public, much of the remaining intellectual process took the form of private communications between students and myself, mainly in papers and  examinations. One of my goals has been to make the learning process more transparent and more public.

8.  Encourage critical review and reflection, and an appreciation of differing viewpoints.

9.  Assess student work earlier, more frequently and by a variety of means.  Provide feedback to assist both students and faculty. As I reflect on how I used to teach, I'm struck by how little effective feedback I provided my students. In a typical undergraduate history class there would be a mid-term, a final and a term paper. All were one shot affairs. The students turned them in. I graded them. That was it. No second chances.  However, I've come to understand learning as a much more iterative process. Early feedback gives students an opportunity to improve learning and performance.

10.  Help students forge connections.   Help students to forge connections and integrate learning a) across time (building on what a student already knows, leading toward a future of continued learning); b) across disciplines; c) across space; and d) across the artificial divisions that divide "class time" from non-class time.

11.  Create a sense of community. The (obvious) principle here is that learning is a social activity and that people learn more and better in social settings.
 

12.  Employ new technologies as means to achieve many of the principles outlined above. To help create a rich range of learning opportunities; to increase interaction among students and between students and faculty, to extend the classroom across time and space, and so on.

B. Turning Good Principles into Good Practices by: 1) Creating a Dynamic Syllabus; 2) Creating Virtual Discussion Groups; 3) Group Projects.
 

1.  It's not about Technology; it's about Learning. The real power of the technology is the way in can facilitate better learning. E-mail, the web, and the Lotus discussion groups are means, not ends. They succeed or fail to the extent that the foster more learning. But they can be powerful tools in doing an even better job of helping students to learn.

2.  The new technologies can facilitate increased contact among students and between students and teachers, both of which we know correlate strongly with student success as measured by retention and graduation rates.

3.  Teaching in this manner is more difficult because you are not as fully in control as in a traditional classroom. You are more dependent on the collaboration of your students, who must actually play the active roles that you are challenging them to assume. You are also more dependent on "environmental" factors: on getting your course scheduled into an appropriate room and on coordinating the variety of support you may need from OIT, AV and others. (I would add, parenthetically, that while AU is doing a much better job in this area than five years ago, it sill has a considerable way to go, both in classroom renovation and in the better organization and delivery of academic support services.)

4.  Not all students are enamored with new information technologies or with group work.  Some students (like some faculty) are technophobic.  Some resist the more interactive format, preferring the structure and predictability of the traditional  format. While some groups bond quickly and synergistically, some (at least one per class, in my experience) become more or less dysfunctional. I've not checked, but I suspect my teaching evaluations were lower in fall of 1998, when I began these efforts, than in the spring of 1998,  when I taught in a more traditional format. They've come back up, though I'm not sure why: maybe I'm getting better at it; maybe my students are self-selecting; maybe our students are becoming more technically literate; maybe a combination of all of the above.

5.  Teaching in this manner is incredibly time-consuming. Learning and managing the technology takes time. So does managing the interaction of students, including the sometimes difficult dynamics of group work. And of course increasing the frequency of student-faculty exchanges obviously increases faculty workload. Anyone who thinks that this kind of teaching is easily scalable and will produce enormous instructional economies should have their her head examined.

6.  Can this approach to teaching  be adapted to distance education? I'm not sure. The answer, I think, is yes; although the result may be a very different course. I would be interested in offering such a course next year in part, at least, as a way to test this  proposition. At a school such as ours, in which coops and internships create so many difficulties for students in planning their schedules,  I can see some immediate advantages. Whether or not this can become a source of increased revenue, I'm less certain.

7.  The real question: does it work? Does it actually improve student learning? Answer: I think so, but I'm not certain. To prove the case, I will need to develop a more sophisticated methodology for assessing what students learn, whether in a new or traditional format.  Stay tuned.
 

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