A Blast Furnace (1926-1934) Clive Gardiner. Library and Archives Canada, C-109483 CC by 2.0
The latest in blog posts, news, and podcasts from the world of Canadian history.
Tag: syllabus
One of academia’s dirty little secrets is that few professors any receive any kind of educational training. The assumption is that since most professors have PhDs, and are experts in their topics, they are fully equipped to teach this information to others. I’m not entirely sure how this is supposed to work. This harkens back to older models of education where students went to university to hear scholars spout their wisdom. But as countless studies and articles have shown, “telling isn’t teaching.”
If you’re lucky, and you have extra time on your hands (HA!) you might want to take a workshop or a class taught by your institution’s learning and teaching centre. Most universities have them these days, and they provide services to professors (and sometimes to students) who wish to improve upon their teaching. Unfortunately, this isn’t an option for everyone because: workshops are often only offered at certain times of the year; you might not be able to find one that suits your needs; when you’re teaching four courses a semester while trying to finish your doctorate, your “free time” consists of sleep; you simply don’t have the time. Some of us also want to have much more comprehensive training than a workshop can offer, but don’t have the time or the resources to do a certificate in education.
Thankfully, there are options available for such individuals. While I did benefit from the learning and teaching centre at UVic, most of what I’ve learned since I’ve started teaching has come from research that I’ve conducted myself online. Since I’m doing a series of blog posts this month all about going back to school, I thought that it would be well worth the effort to put all of that research together into one convenient package. So in this blog post, I’m going to provide you with a guide to online pedagogical resources. This list is in no way comprehensive, since there are literally thousands of websites and blogs these days devoted to teaching and learning in higher education. Instead, these are some of the resources that I’ve come back to over and over again, and that I believe have helped me to become a better teacher.
It doesn’t matter how many times you teach a particular course or how many years of experience you have – everyone gets nervous on the first day of a new semester. You’ll wonder, will my students like me? Will I sound like I know what I’m talking about? And inevitably, no matter how computer savvy you are, you will end up looking like an idiot within the first ten minutes while you try to get the computer working (I practically live on my computer and this still happens to me). The attention spans of your students might be less than a minute, since many of them are still in vacation mode. All of this could add up to a potential disaster.
But it absolutely doesn’t have to be this way! As the veteran of many first days of classes, I’ve developed some effective strategies to make the day go as smoothly as possible. So in this blog post, I’m going to give you some tips and tricks to make your next first day of class an awesome day of class (was that too corny?)
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…
One of the hardest and most exciting things to do as a young sessional is to create new syllabuses. Finally, you get to decide what your students will learn! Yours will be the most awesome syllabus ever! But as soon as you sit down to actually write the syllabus, selecting which topics you will teach and which readings you will use can quickly make you feel overwhelmed. Did I pick the right one? Will the students find this boring? What about this other reading – which one is better? Which topics do I need to include and which can I leave out? But what about this topic?
While there are lots of resources out there for building syllabuses in general, I’m going to focus on the topics and readings for introductory level Canadian history surveys. There is no escaping them; if you do Canadian history, you will teach at least one survey class. They are often the first courses anyone ever teaches despite being notoriously hard to teach. They are also the bread-and-butter courses for sessionals across the country.
So in this blog post, I’m going to provide a detailed guide to writing syllabuses for Canadian history surveys, from course design, course content, topics and readings, course outlines, and the nuts and bolts of syllabuses. Hopefully, this blog post will make the whole process a little less nerve-wracking.