Course: HIST 421/821 Age of Religious Reform
Author: Burnett,
Amy
School: University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Department/Program: History
Sub Area/Speciality: German reformation
Year: 2005
Portfolio Objective/Abstract:
In 1997-98 a fellow historian and I participated in the Peer Review of Teaching Project (PRTP), a year-long program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln that helps faculty document and reflect on the scholarly effort that goes into teaching. As a part of the project, I wrote a course portfolio for a course that I taught during the fall semester, and I engaged in discussions about teaching and student learning with my colleague from history and with faculty from other departments. That year was transformative for my development as a teacher, because it introduced me not only to new ways of thinking about my own teaching practices but also raised the broader question of how to encourage student learning. The portfolio I wrote for my target class, a survey-level course on the history of Christianity, was soon obsolete, because the next time I taught the course I made several significant changes that grew directly out of what I had learned while going through Peer Review. In 1999 I received a College Award for Distinguished Teaching, in part on the basis of a second course portfolio I wrote for the same course that reflected those changes. I found the process of writing a course portfolio to be so helpful as a way of improving my teaching that I wrote an abbreviated portfolio for another survey course, a one-semester world history class, that I taught in the spring of 2000. In the fall of 2000, Dan Bernstein, who initiated the PRTP, asked me to become one of three co-coordinators of the campus-wide project for 2000-1. With the exception of the eighteen months I spent doing research in Germany (academic year 2001-2 and the fall of 2004), I have continued to serve as a co-coordinator of PRTP at UN-L, assisting other UN-L faculty document their teaching and their students' learning. As a result of my involvement with PRTP, reflection on my own teaching practices and their impact on student learning has become an integral part of preparing, conducting, and evaluating the success of every course that I teach. Both my overall teaching philosophy and my awareness of various types of teaching strategies and techniques have continued to evolve, and so my earlier course portfolios are somewhat dated. My efforts to improve my teaching to date have concentrated particularly on how to improve student learning in large survey courses taken by general education students with little or no background in history. As a part of my file for promotion to full professor, I wanted to write a course portfolio that presents my current thinking on how to achieve high levels of student learning. I also wanted to apply the same level of reflection I've used for my survey courses to an upper level/graduate history course.
Type of Portfolio: Benchmark
Evidence of Student Learning in the Portfolio: Examples of Student Work
Size of Class: 30 to 49
Type of Student: Major and Non-Majors
Level of Course: Combined Undergraduate/Graduate
Type of Course: Major/discipline
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