UW-Superior
Professor, Social Inquiry Department
Wisconsin Teaching Fellow, 1999-2000
Having had the good fortune to receive an excellent undergraduate liberal arts education, I embarked upon graduate study in History for the purpose of sharing the benefits of that sort of educational experience with others. While I subscribed to the ideal of the college faculty member as a scholar-teacher, my goal was to find a job and build a career on a campus where undergraduate students came first and ideally where I would be working with students from a variety of backgrounds and life experiences. I was truly fortunate that straight out of graduate school I obtained at tenure-track position at the University of Wisconsin-Superior, which was exactly the sort of campus I was looking for.
From my first day on the job, undergraduate teaching was my main focus, and it absorbed most of my intellectual energy. Though I benefitted from kernels of wisdom about teaching that I had received from experienced colleagues, both at UW-Superior and elsewhere, however, for my first several years in the classroom my approach to course design and pedagogy was largely intuitive and somewhat haphazard.
Then, one day, I stumbled into a session at the UW System’s annual teaching and learning conference on “teaching for understanding” offered by UW-La Crosse Psychology professor Bill Cerbin. It is hard to fully convey the impact that this session had on me. Bill’s main point was that what matters is not what we teach but what students learn and that the true marker of learning is not what students know but what they understand. The power of Bill’s session was that, for the first time, it provided me with both the language and a framework to crystalize ideas about teaching that I had been struggling toward from the beginning of my academic career. I remember the details the session vividly. Bill showed a brief film entitled “A Private Universe” that documented how even the most engaged and academically successful high school and college science students often fundamentally misunderstood basic scientific concepts despite excelling on traditional learning assessments, such as tests and exams. Bill shared research from the field of math education that showed how students could successfully process arithmetic algorithms without truly understanding them. In one example, students were asked to employ division to calculate the number of busses needed to transport a defined number of passengers. In a surprising number of cases students offered answers that included a remainder rather than rounding up the next whole number.
From that moment, I became absolutely obsessed with getting inside my students’ heads to figure out how they understood (and often misunderstood) the act of studying history. This quest (along with the practical question of how to design courses that promote deep understanding of historical study) became and has remained the central intellectual and academic focus of my professional life at UW-Superior. It has shaped both my work as a teacher and as a scholar. While I have engaged in traditional scholarship of discovery, my most significant scholarly work (and that of which I am proudest) lies with the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.
If Bill Cerbin’s session was my “aha” moment, it was my participation in the Wisconsin Teaching Fellows Program during 1999-2000 provided a practical model for investigating how students do or do not understand history. The Teaching Fellows Program introduced me to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and its insistence that student learning can be made an object of systematic study across the range of academic disciplines by employing tools that are particular to each discipline. (Discovering that I could actually study student learning without transforming myself into an educational researcher was quite liberating.) For my teaching fellows project, I posed a question that has frustrated and vexed generations of history professors — why do so many students (including some of the most dedicated and highly engaged students) provide so little actual historical evidence for their claims about the human past? The need to demonstrate claims about the human past with documented evidence lies at the heart of the historical endeavor, and yet our undergraduate courses are full of students who treat their historical claims as if they are matters of mere opinion. What explains that?
This question had received little analytical question from historians, despite generations of professorial grousing about the absence of evidence in undergraduate student work. The most common response among history faculty to the problem of student evidence (and its absence) went something like this:
- Tell students how important it is to provide evidence to make a case for their theses.
- Receive a batch of papers (or essay exams) with virtually no direct evidence.
- Proclaim in frustration, “What is wrong with these students!?”
- Next time explain to students even more clearly what evidence is and why they must provide it. (Maybe even provide a detailed grading rubric that stresses the importance of evidence.)
- Receive a batch of papers (or essay exams) with virtually no direct evidence.
- Proclaim in frustration, “What is wrong with these students!?”
In my teaching fellows project, I resolved to break this cycle of professorial denial by figuring out why students don’t “get” evidence and what we can do about it. Fortunately, at the beginning of my year as a teaching fellow I attended a workshop offered by Craig E. Nelson (a biologist at Indiana University) at the annual UW Faculty College that provided a framework for exploring this question. In the workshop, Nelson shared classic work on the intellectual and academic development of college students from scholars William Perry and Mary Field Belenky. My main takeaways from the session were:
- The ways of thinking characteristic of the various academic thinking are alien to non-practitioners. Learning to think through disciplinary lenses is thus a developmental process.
- While the details vary from discipline to discipline, all disciplinary thinking involves making judgements regarding the merits of rival claims on the basis of criteria particular to the discipline.
- The greatest developmental challenge to disciplinary thinking is recognizing that judgements must be justified on the basis of disciplinary criteria and are not matters of mere opinion.
- To move students from the realm of opinion to the realm of justification, both the process of judgement and the disciplinary criteria must be made plain to students, and students must be required to make judgements among rival claims on the basis of disciplinary criteria.
My teaching fellows project resulted in a publication entitled, “Why Students Don’t Get Evidence and What We Can Do About It” that appeared in the in The History Teacher (May 2004). This article argued for an argument-based model for the introductory college history class that focuses on a small number of “big questions” (the kinds of questions that historians themselves debate), provides students with opposing positions on those big questions, and then asks students to evaluate the merits of these rival positions on the basis of historical evidence.
About this same time, I was exposed to Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe’s concept of “backward design” in which course design begins by defining what we wish students to accomplish and then using these learning goals to design assessments and learning activities. Backward design soon came to occupy a position in my professional life somewhat akin to that of the gospels of Jesus in Christianity or the works of Karl Marx in the modern socialist tradition. Whether at the level of an individual course or a programmatic curriculum I began to obsessively ask myself and others what it was exactly we wanted students to accomplish and how the design of the course or curriculum advanced those goals. In my own classes, I began to ruthlessly purge anything that I could not connect to broader student learning goals.
The ideas, concepts, and methods of inquiry that I became aware via OPID’s programming, in general, and the Wisconsin Teaching Fellows program, in particular, have shaped my work as a teacher fundamentally. And if that was all I had gained from these programs, it would have been more than enough. But there’s more.
A few years after my Wisconsin Teaching Fellows experience, a group of UW faculty (Regan Gurung, Nancy Chick, and Aeron Haynie) issued a call for proposals for a set of collected essays to be called “Exploring Signature Pedagogies.” The book project, which received OPID funding, aimed to bring together a range of essays, each of which would propose a “signature pedagogy” to promote disciplinary thinking within a particular academic field. I submitted a proposal for a chapter presenting an argument-based model as a signature pedagogy in History. As it turned out, David Voelker (History faculty at UW-Green Bay who, at that time, I had never met) had submitted a similar proposal. With the encouragement of the book editors, David and I ended up collaborating on a chapter entitled “From Learning History to Doing History: Beyond the Coverage Model.” This marked the beginning of a remarkably fruitful scholarly partnership.
David and I followed up the book chapter with an award-winning article entitled “The End of the History Survey Course: The Rise and Fall of the Coverage Model” published in the Journal of American History in 2011. We then took our show on the road through a series of workshops and conference presentations (some together and some solo) in which we made the case to our fellow historians for an argument-based approach to the introductory college history course. Following one such session at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, an editor at Oxford University Press approached us and proposed that we co-edit a series of publications designed to support argument-based undergraduate history courses. Thus was born the Debating American History series, which to date has published ten volumes on topics ranging from English-Native relations in colonial Virginia to the social upheavals of the 1960s.
Years ago, when I first stumbled into Bill Cerbin’s conference session on teaching for understanding and then applied to participate in the Wisconsin Teaching Fellows program, I could never have anticipated that I was embarking on a path that would lead to my becoming a significant voice for pedagogical reform within my academic discipline. Years later, as I enter the twilight of my career, I am able look back with some satisfaction on my work as both a teacher and a scholar. Much of the credit for this goes to the UW System’s Office of Professional and Instructional Development and the Wisconsin Teaching Fellows Program.
Biography:
Joel Sipress is a Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Superior where he has worked since 1994. He teaches broadly in U.S., Latin American, and World History. He received his Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In addition to his work in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, he has also published articles focused on the history of the U.S. South.
Publications:
“Why Students Don’t Get Evidence and What We Can Do About It.” The History Teacher 37 (May 2004).
“From Learning History to Doing History: Beyond the Coverage Model,” (with David J. Voelker) in Nancy L. Chick, Aeron Haynie, and Regan A.R. Gurung, eds., Exploring Signature Pedagogies: Approaches to Teaching Disciplinary Habits of Mind (Sterling, Virginia: Stylus Publishing, 2009).
“The End of the History Survey: The Rise and Fall of the Coverage Model.” (with David J. Voelker) Journal of American History 97 (March 2011). Winner of the Maryellen Weimer Scholarly Work on Teaching and Learning Award for 2012 sponsored by Magna Publications.
Co-editor (with David J. Voelker) of Oxford University Press’s Debating American History series. Author of the following volumes:
Fire in the Streets: The Social Crisis of the 1960s. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.
The Causes of the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.
Democracy and US Constitution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.
Emancipation and the End of Slavery. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.
Industrialization and Social Conflict in the Gilded Age. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.