Teaching Habits of Mind with Becky Marchiel

This episode features a conversation with another faculty colleague from my time at the University of Mississippi. Becky Marchiel is an associate professor of history there, and she teaches a very interesting history survey course. In our conversation, Becky shares how she goes about teaching the habits of mind of historians, as well as her use of labor-based grading, unessays, and classroom response systems. 

Episode Resources

·       Becky Marchiel’s faculty page, https://history.olemiss.edu/rebecca-marchiel/

·       Michael Bess on teaching with Wikipedia (from 2007), https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/2007/12/episode-1-an-interview-with-michael-bess/

·       More examples of clickable image questions for classroom response systems, https://derekbruff.ck.page/posts/clickable-image-polling-questions 

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Chapters

• 1:35 Meet the Educator
• 3:46 The Survey Course
• 5:45 Habits of Mind
• 11:59 Teaching Habits of Mind
• 16:42 Labor-Based Contract Grading
• 23:00 Classroom Response Systems
• 31:01 Oral History Assignment
• 38:12 Outro

Transcript

Derek Bruff (00:05):
Welcome to Intentional Teaching, a podcast aimed at educators to help them develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas and teaching. I'm your host, Derek Bruff. I hope this podcast helps you be more intentional in how you teach and in how you develop as a teacher over time. Today I'm excited to share another conversation with a faculty colleague from the University of Mississippi where I worked as part of the Center for Teaching Excellence through this past summer. My CETL colleague, Emily Donahoe, and I organized a panel last year on alternatives to traditional essay assignments. And through that panel, I had the chance to meet someone, Emily, new Becky Marchiel, associate Professor of History at the University of Mississippi. I knew Becky was doing interesting things with the final assignment in her history survey course. That's why she was on the panel. She's been asking students to conduct an oral history and share their work using a medium of their choice.

(01:01):
What I didn't know until the panel was that she was also in the habit of using Top Hat as a classroom response system in her course, and I love learning about how people are using classroom response systems in their teaching. I decided then in there that I wanted to have her on the podcast. Becky and I had a great conversation recently about her history survey course, her unessay, final assignment, her classroom response system use and her alternative grading practices. We cover a lot of ground in this interview. We also talk about cultivating the habits of mind of a historian and very briefly, space turtles.

(01:36):
Becky, thanks for being on the Intentional Teaching Podcast. I'm excited to chat with you today. Yeah, yeah. Welcome to the podcast.

Becky Marchiel (01:42):
Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

Derek Bruff (01:46):
I'm going to ask my usual opening question, which is this. Can you tell us about a time when you realized you wanted to be an educator?

Becky Marchiel (01:55):
Ooh, that's a great question. I think that when I was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, I had a fabulous history professor whose name is Matt Lassiter. I remember just being in his class regularly that never would a lecture go by where I didn't learn something so provocative and transformative that I was really sort of excited about the possibilities of understanding more about the American past. And I'm a first generation college student myself. So being in a classroom space where I was exposed to new ideas and new people and new frameworks, the things I'd never thought about before, I realized that it would be an amazing job to facilitate that same kind of experience for other college students. And so it was really sort of, not a moment, but a whole semester of feeling like I want to do what he does. And I feel very lucky that now I'm in this position.

Derek Bruff (02:59):
Wow, that's great. So did you take a fairly direct route to being a college professor?

Becky Marchiel (03:06):
Yeah. Well, so I guess this is more a testament to Matt Lassiter's amazingness, but I thought that I would just go right from undergrad to graduate school. But he really convinced me that if there was anything else I thought I might want to do, I should take a beat and try that out because it was a really long road once you started the doctoral program. So I worked in nonprofits in Chicago for two years between undergrad and grad school. But I was over there thinking about, I knew I was trying it out to see if I wanted to go back to academia and to try to be a professor. So it was pretty direct.

Derek Bruff (03:44):
Yeah. Okay. Well, now you get to teach, create those experiences for lots of students. Let's talk about your history survey course. What is this course? What are its goals and who are the students that you see in it?

Becky Marchiel (03:59):
Sure. So I teach History 1 31 at the University of Mississippi pretty much every semester and sometimes two sections a semester. So my favorite class to teach. So I raise my hand to do the introduction over and over. So it's an introduction to American History from 1877 to the present. And I think about it not only as an introduction to time and place, but also an introduction to teaching in learning in the discipline of history. So what are the habits of mind that are specific to historians and how can we use what happened from 1877 to the present to really put some of those habits of mind into practice and to develop those. And I tend to get a lot of students who are taking the course as a sort of gen ed requirement. All of the folks in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Mississippi have to take two history classes, and they often take the first half of US history and the second half of US history to get those requirements out of the way. So I know that my target audience is also a bunch of students who are like, I have to be here. It's a requirement. Some of them come in and say, I'm bad at history. They have this, it's not too dissimilar from math. I guess sometimes they have narratives about themselves. It's like, this is not something I'm good at. And so I keep that in mind when I'm putting together a course too. It's like I have this one chance to convince them that history is not terrible and

(05:43):
Work my hardest to do that.

Derek Bruff (05:46):
So you mentioned developing these habits of mind, the kind of ways that historians think and work. Why do you weave that into a survey course for students who are taking it to check a box?

Becky Marchiel (06:00):
Yeah. Well, so I often think that it's actually, there's something kind of working against us as historians that we define our introductions as time and place. There's the first half Europe, the second half year up, but the introduction to African history during the colonial period, et cetera, it suggests to students that what they're going to be doing is just learning about time and place, which they think of as memorizing dates and the facts associated with those dates and the people who did things on those dates. And that's boring. That's really memorizing things to put in a timeline is not really exciting. That's not really what we do. And so if you take an introduction to, I don't know, something like sociology, I'm like, oh, I bet in there you're going to learn race is a social construct, these kinds of concepts. Or maybe you're taking an econ class, you're going to talk about supply and demand and these kinds of things.

(07:02):
And so I was thinking about how to communicate to students that in the discipline of history, we also have concepts that we all share, whether we're studying American history or African history or the history of the Middle East and what have you. And so I thought a way to maybe make the discipline more exciting to students, to convince them that we're not just going to talk about memorizing things for a timeline, was to indicate that there are these sort of habits of mind that are common to the discipline, specific in the discipline. And you can learn those and practice those. And those often are applicable to making sense of the world outside of the class too. So thinking about, one of the things we talk about is the relationship between structure and agency. That's something that historians are really interested in. What kinds of schemas and ideas or access to power and resources are governing a situation? And then how to human beings with their own particularities and their own positions within the universe that they're in, kind of navigate those structures or something like events take place in a sequence. And the sequence matters that historians really think we have to understand how things unfold, paying attention to the way one event might set the stage or close potential trajectories for what comes next. So those kinds of habits of mind are what we're looking at in class and using different material from different time periods to try to put that into practice.

Derek Bruff (08:37):
Wow. I can guarantee my high school history course in the nineties did not talk about structure and agency.

Becky Marchiel (08:46):
I mean, mine didn't either. I always say I feel bad to say it because I had a really kind and delightful human who was the high school teacher that I remember best, but it was a very boring class. We literally filled out timelines. I remember coloring maps. It was not my favorite subject. Yeah.

Derek Bruff (09:09):
And so I think you gestured to this, but for students who were taking a survey course as a general education requirement, I mean, I can imagine part of you wants some of them to become history majors, but it also sounds like you're thinking about them going into other fields and what they might take from this course that would be useful to them. Is that right?

Becky Marchiel (09:29):
Yeah. And so I mean, one of the habits of mine that we practice, where I think that that's really true, is the concept of, I call it multi vocality in the class. And so I think I stole this from the logics of history book. Sewell is the author, but the idea that when once

Derek Bruff (09:49):
You cite the author, you haven't stolen it anymore.

Becky Marchiel (09:52):
Oh, great. Doing my diligence to cite my sources. But so this idea, multi vocality, the idea that different historical actors made sense of particular moments from their own perspectives, and our most sort of complete understanding of the past comes when we can incorporate as many different perspectives as possible. So we might look at World War I and look at how a socialist anarchist and a Filipino independence fighter, and then WB Du Bois, a civil rights activist in the United States, all made different meanings of that war. I think something like that is really transferable, whether we're trying to make sense of why in 10 years from now they're in a work meeting, and you have folks who are talking past each other when they're trying to figure out what the goals of a certain project are. It's like what are they bringing to the table that's a little different? What meaning are they making of this conversation? Or in our current political moment, our sort of hyperpolarized political moment. If we can try to identify the sort of motivations, perspectives, the context where people are coming from, it can help us have more sort of empathy for one another. And I think that's really, really important. So even if they're not going to be history majors as I wish they all would be, these ideas of considering multiple perspectives I think are really transferable

Derek Bruff (11:15):
Or to help see situations as more complex than perhaps they look at first glance once you see it from different perspectives.

Becky Marchiel (11:23):
And it's so easy to, I mean, we all experience the world just from our own positionality. And so that's our sort of default setting is to, it's like, I make sense of this situation in this way, so that must be the truth. And so I think that's one of the things that we really want students to do during college, is to think about different perspectives and to think about the ways in which their own positionality is constructed and shaped by their backgrounds and their own experiences, and that those experiences are not shared by every other person around them. Yeah, absolutely.

Derek Bruff (11:59):
So how do you go about teaching multi-vocality in a US History two course?

Becky Marchiel (12:06):
What does that look like? So some of the habits of mine that I've identified, I'll have students practice more than once since I've learned from the scholarship on teaching and learning that a lot of times to get best mastery and to get learning to be most sticky, we need students to have multiple opportunities to practice the same skill, but in different contexts. So that World War I example, I gave as an actual prompt from my class that we're going to look at how these different folks made sense of World War I. And there's another great opportunity to do it when we get to the Cold War, the sort of 1950s moment in which there's a lot of fear about communism in the United States. So I have students read a source by McCarthy where he's talking about all of the communists that are in the State Department.

(12:58):
They read another document by another Republican legislature who was really nervous about communism, true, but also really nervous about the ways in which McCarthy's scare tactics were undermining the party and also civil discourse within the United States. So that's a really sort of different understanding about what's going on at this moment. And then they also look at a source from Paul Robeson who thought that being labeled a communist was a way to sort of squash dissent or legitimate critique in the United States. And so I asked them to write a paper, and I give them the sort of instructions that said introduction, and then three paragraphs, each paragraph should explore one perspective on the Cold War. And so I asked them to look at the source itself to see the kinds of arguments that the historical actor is making about communism, about World War I. And I also asked them to go to the internet, to Wikipedia to get as much background as possible about who this person was so they can connect their arguments to the sort of person themselves. What's their perspective? How do they fit into their historical moment, what's encouraging them to make the comments that they're making about the war or about communism? And so yeah, that one is kind of a straightforward essay question, but again, one that they practice in two different contexts and with some scaffolding and suggested structure coming from me

Derek Bruff (14:36):
And you tell them to go to Wikipedia. I do. That would've been controversial a while back.

Becky Marchiel (14:40):
I know. We'll see how that goes. I guess one of the other things though, that one of my kind of sneaky learning objectives is that I do want students to recognize that when you're acting as a historian, your job is not just to memorize the facts about the past. It's like if you're like, oh, I forget the date during which this war happened or something. You can go to the internet and find that that's easy. That's not where the historian's value comes from. Where our value comes from is our ability to talk about the context of a moment, identify these different perspectives and put them into conversation. So I'm like, sure, if you just need to know who someone is, Wikipedia is great, but if you want to incorporate their perspective into a multivocal analysis of the Cold War, you need higher order thinking skills for that, and Wikipedia will not help you. Right.

Derek Bruff (15:38):
Although I'm reminded, one of the very first podcast interviews I did for my old podcast years and years ago was with a historian at Vanderbilt who he had a class of history majors. This was a methods course, so a different group of students, but he had them go to the Wikipedia page on the atomic bombings at the end of World War II and switch over to the discussion tab where all the Wikipedia contributors are having very lively conversations about how to represent this historical event. I

Becky Marchiel (16:10):
Love that.

Derek Bruff (16:11):
And he found that while their language was much more casual than what you would find in scholarly discourse, the intellectual moves they were making were basically the same.

Becky Marchiel (16:22):
That's so interesting. I love that. Yeah. I might steal that from one of my assignments.

Derek Bruff (16:28):
I don't know what the discussion page looks like these days, but I feel like there's folks who are doing history when they're editing this Wikipedia pages.

Becky Marchiel (16:37):
Yeah. Yeah. I love that idea. Yeah.

Derek Bruff (16:41):
Well, can we talk about grading in your course? I think you have a different approach to that than is typical, especially for a survey course.

Becky Marchiel (16:50):
Yeah. So I have adopted labor-based contract grading in my survey course. And so by that I mean that students choose the grade path that they would like to venture out upon, that they can choose to get an A, or if they do a little less work, they get a B. And if they do a little less work than that, they get a C. So maybe a better way to say is you could start out with a C if you want to do better, you do more work, you get a B, et cetera. So I have these three different components in the course that determine sort of how much labor that they've done. One is these two page response papers where they practice the historical habits of mind that I've been talking about. Another is a Top Hat score. And so I use Top Hat when I teach in person, I deliver my lectures through Top Hat and build in a few questions for students to answer through their computers or their phones over the course of the lecture as a way to give their brains a moment of activity so they don't sort of get too sleepy as I've drone on for 50 minutes.

(18:06):
And then also as a way to give them credit for attendance and also for being sort of an engaged participant in the class. My classes usually have 60 people, so it's difficult to facilitate a discussion in a way that feels satisfying. So a lot of times these top hat questions where they can answer them, and there's an opening to have a short conversation before we get back to the lecture material. And then the third component in the contract grading is a final project where in students interview someone in their life who's important to them, who was born before 1970, and then they have to identify one historical source, a secondary source that's been peer reviewed. So we get to talk about what does that look like, et cetera, and put that person's life into historical context using that source. So students who want to get an A will do, I'm trying to remember my last version.

(19:04):
I think it was maybe six response papers for an A, four for a B, two for a C, and so on. And the other components too. The final project has a few more components if you want to get an A and the top score is in the higher range if you want to get an A. And then I also use a flagging system, a hypothetical situation wherein students turn in two pages of total rubbish that don't show mastery of multi vocality and say, well, I wrote two pages. It's labor based. I did some labor. So what I do is if the response paper does show mastery of that historical habit of mind, then I count it towards their total. If it does not show mastery, then I'll flag the paper and I'll give the students some advice about what changes would need to be made in order for it to show sufficient mastery of that habit of mind, and then ask them to resubmit the revised version, and then I lift the flag. So that's the way I kind of control for quality in a grading schema that is based on labor.

Derek Bruff (20:14):
The flagging is it's a binary. So either they've achieved mastery to some standard or they haven't, and then they can revise and resubmit.

Becky Marchiel (20:23):
That's right. And so then it also, especially at the introductory level, I've sort of come to terms with this way of grading also because I'm less interested at this level about whether someone has written the perfect response paper and that counts as an A, or if they kind of got it, but they were in a hurry and courses or other parts of their life are more important than my history 1 31 class. And so, oh, one's kind of a B, it's not as good as those other ones. I'm not as invested in those sort of differences between student work at this level. And so yeah, mastery or not mastery has been the way that I'm kind of evaluating this work. And then if someone's got a lot of problems with their prose or something, I might say that in the flagged version where I'm like, I'm actually going to line edit the first paragraph of this paper here, and you can see what I'm doing is changing short sentences and long sentences.

(21:31):
So they're sort of working together, or I've built in some transitions or I flagged a few places for word choice and these kinds of things, you should work on fixing those and the rest of the paper. So sometimes there are moments to work on some of those skills with students as well, but there is something structural about having 60 students. A lot of times I don't have a teaching assistant because we don't have as many sort of available to work with every instructor. And so I figured what I'm being asked to do is teach these historical habits of mine, give students the introduction to the time and place, and they're probably not going to get as much attention about their pros, et cetera in history 1 31 as they might in an upper level class. And I've started to feel okay about that. It took a while to get

Derek Bruff (22:22):
Here, or a course they're taking that is a writing instruction.

Becky Marchiel (22:25):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and I feel like that was something else that I kind of got to think about through working with folks who study the literature and teaching and learning, but the idea that my class is not their only opportunity to learn skills while they're taking classes for four years or more. And so knowing that folks also have two requirements where they take a writing class in our curriculum, I'm kind of like, okay, if they don't get as much feedback from me here, hopefully those instructors in those 15 people classes are paying more attention to those kinds of skills.

Derek Bruff (23:00):
So I'm really curious about your use of Top Hat, because I actually wrote my first book on the use of clickers back when that was the most common method of doing in-class, polling a little bit held devices, and I'm well aware that you can use polling in all kinds of disciplines in very effective ways, but honestly, I hear most about it from the stem fields. And so I'm curious, what functions does polling play in your history class? What types of questions are you asking and how do they generate those little discussions that you were talking about?

Becky Marchiel (23:33):
Yeah. Well sometimes, let's see. Let me think of an example. So I guess one that comes to mind is to have students weigh in on interpreting some evidence that I have shared. So for instance, when we talk about the Gilded Age, the sort of late 19th century, a lot of the sources that we're looking at involve historical actors who have different opinions about the way that industrialization has created enormous inequality within the United States. So you have social Darwinists like William Graham Sumner, we read, and his position is survival of the fittest. It's like this is the natural order of things. Folks are at the top are supposed to be there, folks at the bottom are supposed to be there. And we'll read the populist platform, the Coalition of Farmers and some workers who really wanted the government to be involved in solving some of these problems of inequalities in complex ways.

(24:38):
We talked about this sub treasury, but only for a minute. But so there's also a source that we read by Andrew Carnegie, and this is a great top hat opportunity for me. Andrew Carnegie famously talked about the gospel of wealth. So the idea that the rich who were at the top, they probably deserve to be there, but once they were there, they had a duty to act as a trustee for the poor. So with this reward of climbing to the top comes some sense of obligation. And so then I asked students on Top Hat to tell me whether or not they think Andrew Carnegie is a social Darwinist. He doesn't sound exactly, he doesn't sound exactly like Sumner, who's like, let those people at the bottom just kind of suffer. They're supposed to be there. And so we'll have a kind of yes no maybe options for them to click. And then once that's over, we'll kind of talk through, okay, can someone tell me why they said yes? Can someone tell me why they said no, et cetera? And offering a sort of weighing in on the interpretation of the evidence is one example. I have another Gilded Age example. That's okay. But Top Hat also has this cool heat map option where if you have that

Derek Bruff (25:54):
Before we talk about the heat map. So the Carnegie example, is that a question with a right answer?

Becky Marchiel (26:03):
Well, it is. I mean, not exactly right because there are definitely elements of social Darwinism in what he is saying. He does think that the rich and the poor kind of deserve to be where they are. But I do think that you might say, I guess no is not, no, he is not a social Darwinist is kind of wrong, but yes, or maybe I think are pretty reasonable. So in that moment of sort of debriefing, I might say something along those lines where it's like some of this stuff sounds so close to Sumner that I think would be kind of misrepresenting Carnegie suggest that he's got nothing to do with this guy.

Derek Bruff (26:47):
I think one of the challenges in a question that is students who are expecting the right answer and want something really clear and defined, and that's like, it's not that, but you also don't want students to go the other end and think like, oh, any answer is fine as long as I can make up some evidence that supports it if you want them to be critical in their evaluation. So are there ways that you try to get them there in that conversation?

Becky Marchiel (27:13):
Yeah, I mean, well, there is something at some point, usually early in the semester, I will have a little spiel about how when you're sort of in this space taking classes in college or in the humanity space, we're in the business of making arguments that are based on evidence rather than, we don't want to have a kind of commitment to relativism that devolves into, it's just your opinion, man. But we do need to be weighing the evidence and support of that opinion. And so I'll talk about, I give an example from the eighties where I'll say there are folks who will talk about the ways in which the New Deal Coalition fell apart over the sixties and seventies and the emergence of a different conservative voting block that was going to support the election of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. And we could sort of debate which groups or which people switching allegiances or affiliations were sort of important to understanding that shift. But it would be ludicrous for someone to enter the conversation and say that, oh, space turtles, we're responsible for the election of round Reagan. There are some things that have no evidence and that's not fair game in this space. We need to be thinking about the evidence. I should probably come up with a new example at some point. But the space, I've been going hard with the space turtles for 15 years now or something, but

Derek Bruff (28:51):
It's not stranger than things I've seen online.

Becky Marchiel (28:55):
But so it's like there's a commitment to relativism, but also that needs to include an evaluation of evidence. That's usually how I talk about it. Yeah. I've become a broken record too about telling students that our class is also a safe place for half baked ideas. And so I kind of give them the opportunity to say, it's like you can raise your hand and say, this is half baked, but, and so that's where we know you're not entirely confident, but you're engaging and are sort of willing to take a risk share something that you're not super confident about, to see how it might move the conversation forward.

Derek Bruff (29:36):
Okay. So tell me about the heat map question I'm

(29:39):
Very

(29:39):
Curious about.

Becky Marchiel (29:40):
Yeah, so top hat feature that I really like for teaching history is this heat map option wherein you can put up an image and ask students to click somewhere on the image, and then on the next slide you can move forward in Top Hat and it'll show the class where the cliques were happening with a heat map. So I have another Gilded Age example, but we'll talk about the way that industrialization changed the ways in which all kinds of things were produced. And so I'll show students some images of what it looked like to try to make steel and deal with iron before the industrial revolution. And then we'll show another image of the industrialized version of that same process and ask students to click on something that they noticed was new to the later moment. And so then we'll talk through, okay, what were you thinking about over here? And it might be something like, oh, there's someone who's standing kind of up above the room who appears to be maybe a manager and that makes space.

Derek Bruff (30:53):
So they'll be looking at maybe a photograph of a factory at that time and what's different. Oh, I love that. Well, tell me about this final project that you have in your course now, and maybe a little bit about how it's changed over time. I know you have changed it

Becky Marchiel (31:09):
Recently. I have changed it recently. So I had done a paper where students had to interview someone who is important to them, born before the date keeps changing as we keep marching forward in time. It's like people who are my brother's age or whatever, but born before 1970, I give them some instructions about how to conduct an oral history. So some kind of open-ended questions and encourage them to find an hour or two to sit down with the person they're interviewing and to really ask them to tell their story. And so it's like your grandma doesn't have to have been out on the front lines marching with the women's movement, actually, if what she did was stay home and raise a family, there was a lot of great historical literature on family structures on the cult of domesticity and the way back in the Gilded Age and sort of change in change over time and continuity up through the fifties and the sixties, ideas about wives, ideas about motherhood, et cetera.

(32:14):
So it's like we can historicize almost anything, so get their story. And so I had done it just as a paper. But then working with the excellent, our teaching center on campus at the University of Mississippi, I had a really great conversation with Emily Donahoe who asked me if I had any opportunities in my class for students to mastery of the material that didn't require them to write something. I was like, oh, no, no, I do not write. And so she helped me think through what it would mean to do a project instead of a paper. And so I gave students the option to do a traditional paper if they wanted, but if they instead wanted to create something that might be more meaningful to them or more meaningful to that person that they'd interviewed, maybe a contextualized photo album, a podcast videos, or if there's something else they thought of that I didn't, that they could sort of bring that to me and say, I'm going to go this route instead.

(33:20):
And I was really excited when I made that change to see the kind of work that students were submitting instead. I wish I remembered exactly how many still wrote just a paper it is, is over half are still sort of just sticking with the paper rep. But some of the podcasts and the videos are these artifacts now that I imagine are going to be really special to these people who are involved in the project. And so I've seen, and folks who created their own kind of introductions to their fake podcast and pretended that their grandma was just the next guest and with a pause for an advertiser in the middle of it. And then some videos too where they weren't sort of very complicated. The few that are coming to mind was really just they had situated the camera in front of them and their grandpa, them and their dad or whatever it was.

(34:19):
But now they have this recording where they talk to them about their life story, and then folks would either kind of work in the historical context. I asked them to do at least a paragraph that was based on the research that they did. So some folks chose to kind fold that into the podcast or the video and other folks kind of just added it as sort of addendum to the final product. But yeah, it's been really great. I actually got a note from a student who had just interviewed her grandma for the project, and then she passed away maybe two weeks after she'd done it. So she sent me this really heartfelt note that was like, you have no idea how much this project means now that I know I don't have her anymore. And that was really rare, but it's like, oh, this is a really great option to ask students to create these artifacts that now they still have. So

Derek Bruff (35:25):
There's no good segue here. How do you grade something like that?

Becky Marchiel (35:29):
So the great thing about this sort of labor-based contract grading is that I have built in these sort PREAs assignments. So whatever the final product looks like, I am not going to say, Hey Maggie, you didn't ask your grandma hard hitting questions. And that's, or something like that.

Derek Bruff (35:49):
Right, right. Your adorable photo album is a failure. I'm sorry.

Becky Marchiel (35:51):
Yeah, right. That's so harsh. So I have, for students who want to get an A or a B, they have to write a proposal. I think it's at week nine in this semester. And so just to get them sort of thinking through who are they're going to interview when they plan to do the interview, and a list of a few sources they think might be helpful for folks who want to get an A in addition to that proposal, they also have to submit what I call an evidence sheet, which is basically a set of notes. I give them a sample. I'm like, this can just be kind of bullet points out of order, but things that you know want to put into the final product. And I have that due during the well last week of class. And so that's just kind of an incentive for students to get working on the project rather than waiting to do it during finals week when they have so many other things going on due during the finals week.

(36:51):
And so folks who want to get a C, they just do the final project. I have had a few instances where folks have turned in some pretty rushed or underdeveloped final projects. And so in those cases, my policy with contract grading too is no surprises. So when I'm getting to the end of the semester and I'm seeing what they did in top Hat, how many response papers they did, what the final project looked like, I'll send the student an email to say, dear, so-and-So it looks like you're in the A range for a response paper, B range for top hat. But I see that your final project is pretty thin, especially compared to some of the work I'm seeing from your peers. What do you think is a fair grade? I'm thinking like a B minus for the class. And so then they'll respond to me and be like, I have actually never had anyone respond to me and say, no, I think I should have some different grade. They kind of lay out the logic. But yeah, so I try to get that stuff all done before final grades are due. So I have the consent of the student that they agree with my evaluation that that's kind of where the final grades should probably land.

Derek Bruff (38:01):
Yeah. Well, thank you, Becky. This has been really delightful. Thanks for taking

Becky Marchiel (38:03):
It. Oh my gosh.

Derek Bruff (38:03):
Into your course a little bit and giving us a tour. This has been really interesting. Thank

Becky Marchiel (38:07):
You. Thank you so much for the invitation. This was really fun. It's really fun. I appreciate it.

Derek Bruff (38:13):
That was Becky Marchiel, associate Professor of History at the University of Mississippi. Thanks to Becky for taking the time to talk to me about her history survey course. I was impressed at all the course design work Becky has put into this course from refining her learning objectives around historian habits of mind to engaging the students in her lecture hall and active learning, to updating her assessments to empower more students to show what they have learned in the course. Thanks also to my Mississippi colleague, Emily Donahoe for connecting us. I'd love to hear your thoughts on my conversation with Becky. What teaching moves have you made or seen others make toward a better survey course, either in history or in other disciplines? In the show notes, you'll find a link to send me a text message with your thoughts, and you can always email me at derek@derekruff.org.

(38:58):
Intentional teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the Online and Professional Education Association. In the show notes, you'll find a link to the UPCEA website where you can find out about their research, networking opportunities and professional development offerings. This episode of Intentional Teaching was produced and edited by me, Derek Bruff. See the show notes for links to my website, the Intentional Teaching Newsletter, and my Patreon, where you can help support the show for just a few bucks a month. If you found this or any episode of Intentional Teaching useful, would you consider sharing it with a colleague? That would mean a lot. As always, thanks for listening.