Teaching Habits of Mind with Becky Marchiel

Last year while working at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Mississippi, my colleague Emily Donahoe and I organized a panel of faculty on the topic of alternatives to the traditional essay. One of the panelists that Emily recruited was Becky Marchiel, associate professor of history, who asks students in her United States history survey course to conduct oral histories with people born before 1970. Students can write traditional essays about their oral histories, but Becky gives them the option of presenting their work in any form they choose, essentially making this an "unessay" assignment.

During the panel, I got to hear about Becky's oral history assignment, but my ears really perked up when she mentioned using Top Hat as a classroom response system in her course. I know that classroom response systems can be used effectively in any discipline (I wrote a whole book about that 15 years ago), but these days I most often hear about the use of these systems for active learning in STEM courses. I was very excited to hear about how a historian uses in-class polling for student engagement.

Naturally, I reached out to Becky to invite her on my podcast. In this week's episode, I share that conversation, in which Becky talks about how unessays and Top Hat questions help teach her students to develop the habits of mind of a historian. Her survey course isn't just about time and place, but about thinking like a historian and how that kind of thinking can be useful outside of formal academic environments. We also talk about her alternative approach to grading, which involves labor-based contract grading. This interview is a tour of a modern history survey course!

​You can listen to my conversation with Becky Marchiel here, or just search for "Intentional Teaching" in your favorite podcast app. (And if you do the latter, please also subscribe so you'll automatically get new episodes!)

Future Faculty Professional Development

Hearing Becky Marchiel talk about teaching habits of mind reminded me of an article by historian Lendol Calder I read years ago titled "Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey." Calder's article had a big impact on how I think about teaching and learning, so I asked Becky if she was familiar with the "Uncoverage" piece. She said she read it and loved it years ago while a history PhD student. She noted Calder's work along with that of Sam Wineburg and William Sewell as being significant influences on her approaches to teaching, particularly in the history survey course.

You can hear Becky talk about these influences in the bonus clip from our interview that I posted on Patreon, along with a few thoughts from Becky about why she continues to refine her survey course after having taught it many times. FYI, I usually post a bonus clip or two from my podcast interviews for my Patreon supporters. These are parts of the interviews that I cut for time on the podcast but are still quite interesting for those wanting to go a little deeper.

How Becky came to read Lendol Calder's "Uncoverage" essay caught my attention. As a doctoral student at Northwestern University, she enrolled in a yearlong teaching certificate program offered by Northwestern's center for teaching and learning, the Searle Center for Advancing Learning and Teaching. The Searle Center has an incredible legacy of supporting the development of educators at all stages of their career at Northwestern, and it was in a teaching certificate program there that Becky was encouraged to find and read the scholarship of teaching and learning in her discipline, which resulted in her encounter with "Uncoverage."

This reminded me of the essay by Nicholas Landy, president of San Francisco Bay University, that I mentioned in last week's newsletter, "Behind the Curtain of Higher Education: Faculty Aren't Trained." In that essays, Landy claims, "However, when it comes to teaching itself, most faculty members have never received formal, skills-based training on best practices in teaching and learning." While it's true that most faculty haven't received that kind of training, there are certainly many faculty who have, thanks to programs like the teaching certificate program at Northwestern University.

Becky Marchiel is a talented educator, in part, because of the professional development she received from the teaching center at her doctoral institution. Derek Dube, who was on the podcast earlier this year to talk about inclusive instruction, noted the role of the Tomorrow's Professor Today program offered by the Center for Teaching Excellence (where I now work) at the University of Virginia as helping him see himself as an educator, not just a researcher. Past podcast guests Brielle Harbin, now a political science professor at the United States Naval Academy, and Robert Talbert, who teaches mathematics at Grand Valley State University, were both participants and leaders in similar programming at the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching.

I agree with Nicholas Landy that faculty, in general, need more training and professional development around teaching. He's correct that just possessing deep subject matter expertise doesn't necessarily mean that one can teach that subject well. But I would argue that centers for teaching and learning have been doing this good work for decades, and there are thousands of faculty teaching today who are more thoughtful and effective teachers because of their experiences in graduate school with teaching centers.

All that to say, support your local center for teaching and learning, especially if they have programming for future faculty members!

Thanks for reading!

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