“Coherence with Conceptual Maps,” Teaching & Resource Center, University of California, Berkeley, March 2003.
Learning combines three levels of engagement: absorbing details, understanding significances, and generating interpretations. Achieving a successful balance between these elements is difficult, especially in an introductory course such as History 5, where students come in with such varying levels of prior coursework and experience. In our weekly GSI meetings, we often brainstormed as to how best to convey the course’s diverse program of learning. We lamented that whatever approach we selected meant compromising at least one component of learning — whether failing to cover the basics of “what happened,” neglecting the “big picture,” or not stimulating personal contributions to the material. Faced with these trade-offs, I usually rotated and combined activities each week (debates, timelines, group work, structured discussion) which complemented the course’s assorted material.
