Tips for Teachers
This website supports the textbook, A Concise Survey of Western Civilization, now in its Third Edition. But it can be useful to help students with any version of Western Civ or World history.
With this page I offer advice generally drawn from decades of college teaching and specifically for my current courses dealing with Western Civilization.
See my syllabi for syllabusCORE 101 Western Civilization and HNRS 135 Ancient and Medieval History.
Here are my teaching tips to use this book, this website, and about general pedagogy.
1. Encourage students to read "How to Use This Book."
It is so easy for students to skip over the introductory material at the beginning. But the eight points made about features in the book should help students to be aware of and profit from learning materials built into the text.
2. Require students to mark up the book.
From my own time as a college student with textbooks until now with books I own, I've learned that marking them up makes them more useful.
Suggestions in How to Use this Book (#3 and #4) should give them a good start. On the second day of class, I work through a sample page from their first reading with them. Most students come from high schools where they were never allowed to make a mark in the book. It is too easy, while reading, for the eyes to just glide along the page, preventing knowledge from seeping into the brain.
Underlining and marginal notes and answering the questions in the provided spaces after sections and sources (unique to this text), will help make later review easier.
And for students who are renting or want to sell books back, you can re-assure them that marking up the book does not affect those purposes, according to the best authorities I've consulted. (Problems only affect returns or sellbacks if pages get wet, or ripped, or words are blacked out.)
I impose marking up of books by collecting them during exams, skimming through them, and assigning points (usually 15 or 20) depending how well they have underlined, written marginal notes, and answered the study questions and responses. Admittedly, the largest classes I have are around twenty-five students each (one advantage of teaching at a small school) and I can quickly skim that many books and more in the typical fifty-minute class period for an exam. It gets a bit more unwieldy during finals, if sections are combined, but still doable.
From my perspective, the first step in learning is encountering the text and exercising their reading muscles.
3. Emphasize that we all learn through repetition.
Let me repeat that: we all learn through repetition. Thus reading the text is the first step. Going over material again in class is another. Reviewing for exams yet another. Taking exams usually the final step over which teachers have any control.
One way to force repetition is quizzes. I regularly, especially at the beginning of the semester give open book quizzes on that day's reading. I use the Review questions from the text. If students have read the text, answered the review questions, they can easily write, or copy, a good answer in five minutes. And they do not take long to grade, just with some underlining of key terms and explanations that should be included.
4. Explain our mutual responsibilities.
I point out to students that they earn their grade. Teachers and students have a unique economic relationship. In the regular economy, employers pay employees to do work. But in education, students pay tuition which pays me as a professor to make them work. They can choose (and too many do) to waste their tuition money and not work at learning. But taking a college course commits them to work for the professor, showing that they have learned by completing various assignments. In return they get to pass the course, earn college credit, and recieve a grade roughly equivalent to how well they have worked. I think it helps to explain to students this unique economic contract.
5. Make the material relevant.
We also learn more easily when things matter to us. I often point out to students who complain about learning dates and places and terms and names who it would be impossible to, say, describe a football game in any meaningful way without using various specific details of those kinds.
But what about these long-dead people? How can they be relevant? As a supporter of the concept of liberal arts, I try to encourage student to accept the idea that being educated would make them more free citizens in our society. Thus I require them to know current events. I regularly bring them headlines in class. I frequently surprise myself with how events in the news or fiction on television and in movies (and I watch a lot of those) have echoes from the past. The latest political scandal reminds one of Rome, or Versailles ,or the latest war echoes Athenians or Prussians.
6. Encourage students to use this website.
I tell students that the best learners go beyond the minimum and put in extra effort. Reviewing and exploring materials on this website offers an easy path to better learning.
The Study Guides pull out the essential information from each chapter and section.
The Extras offer color versions of pictures, maps, and a whole art history survey (a subject regretfully underdeveloped in the text).
The Links give access to vetted and interesting places on the internet to learn more good history.
And perhaps most of all, the Primary Sources bring onto students's devices the building blocks of historical knowledge. Further links for the primary sources built into the text are supplemented by at least one primary source for every section. This reduces the need for a supplemental primary source collection, saving both time and cost.
They offer teachers quick and convenient short assignments.
7. Use questions provided here and in the textbook.
In the textbook one of the key learning tools is the review question at the end of each section and after each primary source, with blank spaces for students to write in. Maps also now have analysis questions. Studies have shown that writing something about what one has recently read helps improve retention. Require students to answer those questions.
I further encourage that by giving them quizzes based on those questions. Those quizzes are open book, so students can use what they have already written, if they have done the work. The difference between answers of those students who have written something and those who have not is pretty obvious. And such quizzes do not take long to grade. Those questions, of course can also be used on exams.
Other questions I have developed over the years are available on this website. Also, each Study Guides page includes review and other questions. The syllabus for the broader version of Western Civ, from the beginnings to 1914, I frame each class with a "Big Question," also used for exams. On the class schedule there are links to the longer essays as well. I provide the questions to students from the beginning of the semester--no surprises. Students nevertheless always respond with answers of varied quality.
If you wish to use multiple choice questions and fill-in-the-blank map questions matchig the text, they are available to adopters through RESPONDUS on the publisher's website. Go to the publisher's page for this textbook und under the "Resources" tab you can find instructions on how to get access to the Respondus Text Bank Network.
8. Use the provided primary sources.
Primary sources are the best way to learn about history. The latest edition has added more primary sources, both the projects that compare sources with contradictory viewpoints and new sources about the variety of family structures in the past.
More sources are available on this website, on the Primary Sources pages here. There is a link to at least one primary source for each section, with questions to encourage deeper thought. I list many of these sources on the syllabus, requiring students to print and mark them up before class, and perhaps discuss them, work with them, or hand them in during class. The easy availablility of primary sources on this site, or the internet, can save students the cost of buying a primary source collection.
