I was dissatisfied with the way I was teaching graduate seminars. The model for our department was somewhat unstated but dominant: select a number of readings relevant to the topic, bunch those books and articles together in topical groups, sit around and talk about them on the assigned class day, and have students write a 20 to 30-page cumulative paper, usually on how history is written or what the debates are on a current topic—basically a historiography. I went to a file of syllabi that the department maintains to see if my hunch for this model was accurate, and it was. In theory, the end result of this method is to move the students closer to their comprehensive examination.
This idea of re-thinking our approach to learning led me to try to create a seminar that would do different types of things to prepare our graduate students for their professional life. The graduate seminar that I taught Spring 2005 was titled “The Global City,” a course that was offered for the first time. It was broader in scope than most seminars; for instance, few graduate history seminars go across geographical lines to investigate more than one area. Instead, they generally look deeply at only one geographical area, such as Latin America or Russia.
Two Carnegie events helped me consider ways that I could make this seminar more relevant to the diverse needs of students. In readings, a visit, and a workshop, the authors and participants pointed out that students have different methods of learning. This conflicts with our department's current style of teaching through one mode only, a replication of how we have been taught in graduate seminars.
A semester-long seminar at the KU Center for Teaching Excellence led by Dan Bernstein, Director, and including Andi Witczak, a design professor, served as the final catalyst for me to change the seminar content and structure. Prof. Bernstein showed us a particular curriculum design called “backward design.” In this method, the teacher begins by setting enduring goals that the students are to achieve by the term's end. As a teacher, I first needed to decide what it was that I wanted students to get from this class and translate those ideas into goals. Choosing the readings was the last part of the process, not the first part, which was a complete turnaround from the way traditional seminars are planned. That delayed choosing troubled me, but I'm now okay with it.
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