One of the things that I’ve tried to do more and more since I started teaching is to focus on what I think of as the foundations of history education. This includes the habits of mind that develop over the course of our training, which few—if any—of our students will have mastered.
This annotated list of resources includes readings and activities that aim to build students’ foundational skills in the study of history. I’m calling these “first week of class resources” because that’s when I often introduce them, but they work well for any point in the quarter or semester, no matter what kind of history you teach.
Thomas Andrews and Flannery Burke, “What Does It Mean to Think Historically?”
You can assign this as a short reading for the first week of the semester, but I often make the 5 Cs the focus of a mini-lecture in a face-to-face course or a series of videos for a hybrid or online course. As you go throughout the semester, call back to these when your course content illustrates any one of these themes.
W. Caleb McDaniel, “How to Read for History”
This is one that I wish I had been assigned as an undergrad or even in grad school—hey, if I’m being honest, I still have to fight the urge to read every book from cover to cover. McDaniel offers helpful advice for how to read history monographs effectively by skimming for key information and reading in three discrete stages. This works great for an undergraduate course if you’re assigning one or more monographs, and I’ve used it with graduate students as well.
W. Caleb McDaniel, “How to Discuss a Book for History”
Another really useful reading from McDaniel, one that is well-suited for seminars and other discussion-based courses. Just as students often need guidance in how to read monographs, they often need guidance in how to discuss them. This post makes explicit our expectations for doing so.
I’ll confess that this isn’t something that I’ve assigned before, although I have talked quite a bit with students about taking notes in class. It seems to me that a large number of students don’t take notes in my lecture courses, and I suspect that it’s not just me. It may be that note-taking is no longer being taught in lower grades, and so students don’t know how to take notes. In any case, this page explains the Cornell note-taking system, and links to a publicly available Canvas module with exercises, assessments, and reflections.
PAPER Worksheet (Word version | PDF version)
If there’s one skill that is absolutely foundational to history education, it’s primary source analysis. However, most students don’t know quite what we mean when we ask them to analyze a historical document. This simple worksheet, based on Patrick Rael’s “How to Read a Primary Source,” breaks that analysis down into five sets of questions that students can use as a first step toward longer assignments.
THOMAS Worksheet (Word version | PDF version)
I’ll talk more about this in a later post, but this is another worksheet that I developed, this time based on Danna Agmon’s THOMAS framework for analyzing historical scholarship. I will say that I’ve had more success in using this with graduate students than with undergraduates, but with the appropriate support, I think this could work well for advanced undergraduates.
Paul B. Sturtevant, “What Can You Do with That History Degree?”
In a better world, we wouldn’t have to constantly be defending the value of humanities education. Unfortunately, that’s not the world we live in. With that in mind, you might want to spend some time in the first week of the semester talking with students about what comes after a degree in history. This article, which uses federal employment data, shows that history majors are competitive on the job market, which can both reassure anxious history majors and bring more students into our courses. I would especially recommend this if you’re teaching core or introductory courses that have large numbers of non-majors and students who are still deciding on their academic path.
How do you like to teach foundational skills in history? Did you have a teacher at some point who helped you to build your own skills? Feel free to share in the comments!
