No More Blue Books! A Strategy for Incremental, not Convulsive, Learning
Joseph C. Miller, T. Cary Johnson, Jr. Professor, Department of History
Daren Ray and Jared Staller, Graduate Teaching Instructors

Tired of pointless panic two or three times every semester, yours and your students’, as you devise, and they stay up all night to cram for, yet another mid-term or final? We know how little students learn from intermittent, convulsive grappling with materials that instructors carefully craft into digestible daily increments. A teaching strategy that I call “take home points” draws learners into immediate, continuing, and ultimately productive engagement with the lectures you present and the readings you assign, building gradually toward a culminating integration that students appreciate—in my experience—as a stimulating and gratifying experience of actually learning how to learn. Two TAs who have worked their side of my courses will contribute their impressions of the strategy. Participants will experience the “take home point” incrementally and consider adapting it to take it “home” to their courses.

Sponsored by the TRC University Teaching Fellows Program.