The purpose of the HTLP Workshop & Discussions is to learn from expert guests’ research and experiences with developing student learning objectives, refining teaching practices, and determining the best assessments for measuring student learning in history.
Dr. Laura Westhoff
In September 2019, the History Department will welcome Dr. Laura Westhoff (Chair of the History Department, Associate Professor of History and Education at the University of Missouri-St. Louis) as our Workshop & Discussion guest. In addition to studying the past, Dr. Westhoff is a leading scholar in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in History, and has won two teaching awards—one of which was the American Historical Association’s Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award in 2017—for the important work she has done in history education. During her visit to CU-Boulder this coming fall, Dr. Westhoff will discuss her article, “Historiographic Mapping: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the Methods Course" (The Journal of American History, March 2012), with the History Department.
Workshop & Discussion
In our final Workshop & Discussion of the year, the 2018-2019 HTLP Working Group led the History Department in a discussion on Scholarly Teaching, or approaching teaching as intellectual inquiry. Working Group members shared their experience with scholarly teaching in their own courses last fall 2018, using a Scholarly Teaching Memo to give faculty and grad students a snapshot of a specific bottleneck they encountered in their course, how they attempted to address it, and their next steps for refining their teaching practices.
Dr. Lendol Calder
In F
ebruary 2019, Dr. Lendol Calder (Professor of History at Augustana College) was our second Workshop & Discussion guest of the academic year. Dr. Calder is a leading scholar in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in History, having written several articles on teaching history at the college level. His 2006 article, “Uncoverage: Towards a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey" (The Journal of American History, March 2006), remains a foundational piece in the literature, and has served as the basis for his current work on re-imagining the introductory survey course. Dr. Calder's talk title and description:
A Signature Pedagogy for Introductory History Courses: Rethinking what it means to be “introduced” to history at the post-secondary level
Introductory history courses, like those in chemistry, math, biology, and psychology, unfortunately are directly linked with a significant rate of attrition among "first generation" college students. Remedial courses help, but research suggests that they don't stimulate greater student success than implementing better pedagogies in high-failure rate courses. This makes the redesign of introductory courses critical to higher education’s larger goals of achieving equity and social justice. In his presentation, Dr. Calder invited us to think about what it means to “introduce” undergraduate students to history. He described how he repurposed and redesigned his introductory courses with a signature pedagogy for history that contributes to the formation of educated citizens, workers, and human beings.
Dr. Leah Shopkow
In November 2018, the History Department welcomed Dr. Leah Shopkow, Professor of History at Indiana University and eminent scholar in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in History, as our first Workshop & Discussion guest this academic year. Her recent SoTL in History publications include Overcoming Student Learning Bottlenecks (Stylus Publishing, 2018), co-authored with Joan Middendorf, and her award-winning article, “How Many Sources Do I Need?” (The History Teacher, February 2017). Dr. Shopkow’s talk title and description:
What do we want to teach, how, to whom, and how can we know if they learned it? Materials for a conversation.
Many of the competencies we want to teach our students are complex and the thinking we want them to do is an “unnatural” act. We mostly have learned to teach as we’ve been taught, which doesn’t necessarily get our students where we want them to be. Furthermore, traditional teaching methods privilege the students most like us and create barriers for others. Finally, we’re not always clear on what our students learned and how well they learned it. In this talk Dr. Shopkow discussed her approach to these questions, offering some tools to help faculty make their way through the challenges of shifting their teaching.
K-12 History Educators Roundtable
In April 2018, the CU-Boulder History Department welcomed a roundtable of K-16 history educators to consider the pedagogical and curricular differences between high school and college history classes. “Bridging the Gap in History Education: A Conversation on How to Align High School and College History Teaching” was driven by two overarching questions based on these differences: How can we help undergraduates make the transition from high school history to college history? In particular, what changes can history instructors at CU-Boulder make in their curriculum to facilitate this transition?
Our esteemed guests, Dr. Stephanie Hartman (Colorado Department of Education), Joan Jahelka (Colorado Springs District 11), Kathleen King (Skyline High School in Longmont), and Dr. Rachel Reinhard (UC Berkeley History-Social Science Project), led an insightful discussion on the differing goals and challenges in bridging the gap in the K-16 history education continuum.
Dr. David Pace
On December 8th, 2017, Dr. David Pace (Professor Emeritus of History at Indiana University) visited the CU-Boulder History Department to talk about how the Indiana University History Department pursued some of HTLP’s same goals with its History Learning Project (HLP). In particular, Dr. Pace talked with us about his book, The Decoding the Disciplines Paradigm: Seven Steps to Increased Student Learning (Indiana Press University, 2017), he developed and used to pursue HLP goals.
Dr. Anne Hyde
Dr. Anne Hyde (Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma) visited the CU-Boulder History Department on September 8th, 2017, to discuss her work with the American Historical Association’s Tuning History Project. Dr. Hyde shared the multi-departmental, cross-institutional process involved in developing what came to be known as the History Discipline Core, a document that reflects the common skills, knowledge, and habits of mind particular to the discipline of history. Following Dr. Hyde’s presentation, the History Discipline Core document provided a jumpstart to a robust conversation among the history faculty, leading us to identify issues and generate questions for future consideration.