What's History: In Praise of Extra Credit

Extra credit is the practice of the mission of this blog: connecting teaching history with everyday life. Today I was sending my Fiction and the Historical Imagination class some information about upcoming extra credit when this neat little observation struck me-- the reason that offering extra credit opportunities is so appealing to me, and why it in fact goes perfectly with the kind of history I try to teach. 

I've often been a bit mystified by the takes on extra credit I've seen floating around the Internet's education hubs. It seems that every teacher has a complicated relationship with extra credit, and they express it in a way which seems to go beyond a statement of method directly into a defense of their worthiness to mold inquiring minds.

There is a vocal contingent who find extra credit an exercise in grade inflation, gleefully proclaiming, "No Extra Credit for You." There are those who offer extra credit but seem compelled by this negative faction to argue its rigor, such as Deborah J. Cohan in her post for Inside Higher Ed. Cohan notes that her policy has changed; whereas years ago she did not offer extra credit assignments, she is now a regular user even though "it almost feels embarrassing to admit." Despite the fact that many instructors offer it in one form or another, it's also widely criticized; the general mood of the room is perhaps best summed up by a forum post in the Chronicle of Higher Education forums, which begins a query about what extra credit activities others recommend by saying, "I know that wise professors don't offer extra credit."

Detractors of extra credit suggest that it can encourage some to neglect the central requirements of the course in favor of the seemingly easier task of extra assignments. They point out that extra credit options can be inaccessible to those who have other obligations. And they are inordinately fond of bringing up hypothetical doctors and architects who passed their classes through extra credit and are thereby so lackluster at their job that you will wind up misdiagnosed/crushed by your house/generally, dead.

Each of these critiques have a basis in possibility, of course. Yet I think the benefits of extra credit not only outweigh the disadvantages, but also have positive effects for the class even beyond the people who actually receive the extra points. The way I approach extra credit highlights the values I find in history teaching as a whole-- making connections between what students are learning and the world around them, and using the information and skills of our classroom as tools to understand and approach other media, other people, other stories, other times.  

Permission to Engage

The most common extra credit options are related to attendance at events on or around campus. This makes particular sense, obviously, when the themes of the talk relate to the themes or content of the course-- hence, I will offer extra credit for attending and responding to the upcoming Lincoln's Body lecture (Spurlock, Thursday, 4 pm) as our unit on the Civil War approaches, but not a lecture on the history of dogs, much as I may wish to promote both events (if anyone knows of any upcoming canine-related programming, drop me a line).  I also like to incorporate some sort of written response for these events, both to encourage reflection on what actually happened at the talk and to avoid the awkward methods of establishing proof of attendance at such events.

The pessimistic reading of this sort of practice is that it is solely designed to boot attendance by strongarming grade-grubbing students into filling seats. The more people in attendance at events, the more "successful" events are. Some suggest that encouraging students to attend events should be unnecessary, as they should be doing those things of their own volition anyway. One commenter on Cohan's post claims that students' unwillingness to go to events of their own volition marks the "bankruptcy of education today." Those darn kids!

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I want to offer an alternate reading, one that I've talked about before in thinking about how I structure assignments. In my post on assigning unstructured research time, I noted that doing so  "gives students permission to invest in the course in ways that many of them would like to do, but feel that they shouldn't." If one is duty-bound to work toward grades at the expense of all else, attending events related to course themes might feel like a needless luxury, an intellectual investment that will not pay off. This is not because students don't care about adding to their knowledge but because they are constantly forced to weigh the benefits and disadvantages of decisions that pull them away from other work. Adding some incentive to the event may help students justify their attendance in the face of many pressures pulling them in all directions.

Extending Class Themes 

Buzz Aldrin on the moon with an American flag, 1969. From BBC.com, "First Man flag row: How selective should Hollywood be with history?"

Most of the extra credit opportunities I assign extend what we have done in class and encourage applying familiar ideas in a new situation. Additionally, there's generally an aspect of connection to the world outside the classroom that informs these assignments. It's very similar to the purpose of this blog-- highlighting the connections between what we've talked about in class and what is going on outside of it.

For example, event-related opportunities allow students to explore ideas outside those you have time to cover in class-- ones that are connected, but not central to the core topics. The upcoming free screening of the historical fiction First Man promises to be an interesting extension of why the ideas about history and fiction we've been discussing have some everyday relevance, especially with the heated discussion surrounding its depiction of the American flag. It's an especially appealing choice for an extra-credit opportunity for Fiction and the Historical Imagination because it falls within themes of the course but outside of the time period-- making it truly "extra" in the sense that it encourages students to stretch what they already know into a new area and see what they can make of it. Students don't have to make this analytical leap, but if they want to think about a new application of these ideas, there's an opportunity, and an excuse, to do so. 

In the absence of fortuitously timed events, there are a variety of other ways to encourage connecting class ideas to matters of wider relevance. For example: After several days highlighting the role of maleficium in witchcraft trials in colonial New England, I realized that the Wikipedia entry for maleficium is woefully underdeveloped. I decided to develop an extra credit opportunity about this-- if anyone wanted to edit the page, improving its discussion of the topic and citing our course materials, they could receive points toward their weakest grade. 

What if no one does it?

As with anything else you decide to do in class, there's the danger of not getting buy-in. I don't find this a particularly compelling reason not to incorporate extra credit, though, because announcing extra credit opportunities like the ones I've described can further your goals for the course and benefit students even beyond the few who complete it.  

On the most basic level, announcing an event can inspire attendance even without completion of the assignment associated with it. I anticipate that many of my students will eventually see First Man and consider its relationship to our course whether or not they do so for this assignment. People who aren't sure they need the additional points might check out a suggested lecture just to see what they can make of it.  

Even when people don't attend the event suggested, knowing that it exists and has some connection to course themes encourages students to make connections between the class and broader issues. For example, noting that the author of a book you're reading is doing a local reading may suggest to students that the book has audiences outside of "people forced to read this for class." Non-event assignments, like Wikipedia editing, could have a similar broadening effect-- it encourages students to consider the limitations of Wikipedia and the ways in which they can use even a bit of knowledge to shape others' understanding, even if they ultimately decline to complete the edits.

Finally, like many other parts of my teaching, having extra credit assignments available is an indicator of particular standpoints on teaching and history. It suggests that I as a teacher value taking advantage of the learning opportunities that are around you, and that I have an approach to academic success which values flexibility and multiple chances to do well. It suggests that history is widely relevant and highly connective; that the skills and ideas you're working with can be usefully applied to other times, places, and topics; and that it might even be a decent way to spend a Thursday afternoon or a Monday night. These indicators communicate with all of my students, not just the ones that take me up on the extra points. 

Do you use extra credit, and how? Let me know! 

Related Links:

You know what other Wikipedia page could use some editing? The one for "extra credit." I'll offer extra credit on your blog-reading grade if you improve this. 
Incidentally, ColourPop promises you'll "look like 110% in this vivid orange-red" Extra Credit lipstick. (No, for some reason this is not a paid advertisement.)
Part of the weirdness of extra credit discussions is that everyone seems to have a different interpretation of what extra-credit is. Here, a post making a distinction between in-syllabus and ad-hoc extra credit (my approach is more "adding to the syllabus as I go).

Enough About Me: The Age of Resolutions

Happy New Year, and happy new semester! It's been great to have a little time to reflect on and recuperate from the fall. 

Old-fashioned classroom with wooden desks and attached benches. Teaching goal for a future year: Have a class here.

I'm not teaching this semester, which is a peculiar sort of joy. I love thinking about teaching when I'm not currently doing it, because everything is in the future; I can get any idea or learn about any resource and have the opportunity to put it into a future plan in a way I rarely have time to consider when I'm actually in the midst of a course. It gives me more space to devote to planning and making connections. To fill some part of this space, I have a few teaching-related goals for the year: 

Finish the Graduate Teacher Certificate through the Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning.

For some time I've been slowly working toward pursuing this certificate. The Graduate Teacher Certificate requires two semesters of teaching, as well as an observation and discussion with a CITL representative or a faculty member, some participation in teaching workshops, and conducting and reflecting on student evaluations. After completing the observation with History's Graduate Teaching Mentor Dana Rabin, and receiving both informal early feedback and end of semester ICES forms from students in fall, all I need to do to complete the first certificate is to fine-tune my written reflections on observation and evaluation of my teaching this semester. 

Start on the Teacher Scholar Certificate. 

The Teacher Scholar Certificate is a step above the Graduate Teacher Certificate, and is available to both graduate and faculty instructors. It requires an extra semester of teaching, some form of departmental or disciplinary service, and more extensive written reflections on pedagogy, service, and teaching philosophy. I'm looking forward to working on this-- it's a nice thing to put on a curriculum vitae, but pursuing these certificates has also given me permission to invest time in learning more about teaching. 

Go to two teaching workshops, lectures, or discussion groups.

I think I've mentioned before that when I'm stuck in my writing, going to a lecture or other event, even if unrelated to what I do, can be hugely helpful. It leads me to consider my own evidence or argument in new ways, learn something about structure from the choices the presenter has made, or just spend an hour learning something without trying to fit it into what I'm currently trying to do. Going to teaching related events could be similarly helpful for current writing and future plans; moreover, it may also allow me to make connections with other folks interested in talking about teaching.

Invest time in current teaching conversations and scholarship.

The other goals are pretty specific; this one is a more general intention to realign some habits of thought around what I read and write. Many of the things I find most helpful when teaching is looking backwards at when I was a student. It's no surprise that my dissertation continually comes back to people acting and forming their priorities out of their own lived experience; I'm already interested in the many ways this can be fruitful in everyday life. As one must be a student before one can be a teacher, it's often a helpful way to think about this relationship. Yet there's also a huge world out there about the scholarship of teaching and learning, and writing about ways to grapple with teaching, and it's wasteful to ignore the resources and strategy it can provide. I want to pick up more books about designing assignments, strategizing objectives, and communicating expectations this year. 


Here's my challenge to you-- are there any teaching or learning related goals that you've wanted an excuse to explore? Consider this an offer of permission to value those things enough to try them this year.

What's History: Time Enough at Last

At every progressive academic stage, someone tells you to enjoy the one you're in while it lasts, because things are different in the next and you won't have as much time. This is both true and unhelpful while you're in it, because you can't quite see your way to the next stage and don't know how to implement the advice.

The research year of a PhD, which I am currently in the midst of, is one of those times. You get the blessed freedom to direct your efforts in whatever direction you like, which is lovable in theory and anxiety-producing in practice. This week I've been struck by how hard it can be to just sit and work on something, because you are unprepared to do the creative work of writing, and the unstructured work of research has not yet been completed. To find your best ideas, you have to spend at least some time looking at things without knowing quite what you're looking for. Sure, poking around can be a form of procrastination. But it's also frequently the only way you get to a topic that really needs to be explored, or a question that needs answering. 

As a result, I'm invested in coming up with ways to incorporate this kind of time into the courses I teach: time which students can spend unstructured time wandering around the edges of their projects. I think in the next course I teach, I will assign students to spend a half-hour each week poking around a topic discussed in class or a larger final project topic that they're considering, depending on the structure of the course. I'm also considering opening up a class period or optional weekly blocks of time in which students could gather and perform this research or get individual help with the resources available for this sort of exploration.

Why bother assigning unstructured research time? First, I want students to have a chance to realize the importance of this kind of time through practice. Even if you're aware of this, and sit down to write an entire blog post about it, it can be hard to convince yourself that this time is worthwhile. Years of primary and secondary education can have the effect of making both unstructured and creative thought difficult even as the brain is active and learning. This is partially because assignments in high school and college are so focused on deliverables: Create a poster. Write a five page essay. Introduction with thesis, body, conclusion. And these deliverables must be delivered on time: Due Thursday, by 5 pm, in my box, or by midnight on the 23rd, by email only. Add the pressures of taking four other classes, having a job that pays for your food and housing, and engagement in campus or local groups, and it begins to seem like any poking around without a specific goal is a luxury. Why would I take a stroll through the LibGuide for the class when that won't put words on the page? If I had time to wander around the internet, I'd do it recreationally!

I also want to give students as many opportunities as possible to figure out how to use the research resources available to them. It's often fairly late in the game that students get a handle on the kinds of tools available for academic research, even though in my experience they are told frequently about them. I remember a great number of library field trips in my undergraduate classes, but I didn't truly use and appreciate the resources explained to us until I wrote my master's thesis. I still learn of new resources that make me wonder how I did anything before I knew about them. Also, every institution is different, and their practices can make the problem of knowing how to look for things better or worse. For example, the Proquest newspaper database allows the user to search articles from a wide variety of papers from the past several hundred years. To find this from the homepage of the UIUC library website, there is a circuitous path of clicking through LibGuides and headings, and truthfully I think I find it a different way every time. Without the specific link, it's unlikely for someone to stumble upon it. This is where the optional gathering or consulting research periods I mentioned above are particularly helpful.

I also think the time gives students permission to invest in the course in ways that many of them would like to do, but feel that they shouldn't. In undergrad I was, like many students, locked in a battle between my interests and my obligations; I was glad when an assignment gave me an "excuse" to look further at texts that I wanted to understand better, not because I loved to write papers but because, if I had to write one, I wanted to make it service my interests and my development as a person. I wanted to know what I thought about things that I knew I should have thoughts about, and having an assignment which allowed me to explore that made that goal somehow more legitimate in a college culture focused on deliverables. 

This kind of unstructured exploration of a topic has broader applications than just historical research. A similar process can help with all sorts of writing-- my sporadic attempts at keeping diaries and writing fiction have also often faltered because I sat down to write without bothering to reflect on what I wanted to write about. I hope that students will be able to carry the skills they learn from weekly unstructured research to other parts of their lives. 

I wish I had more links to share on the topic, but unfortunately my attempts to search for people discussing this strategy haven't turned up much. If you have any recommendations of other discussions, or thoughts on your own experiences with unstructured research time, I'd love to hear about them.

Related Links: 

Title Talk-- Time Enough at Last.

Plug and Play: The Handy (Digital) Dandy (Research) Notebook

It's been a challenging month (years from now, I'm sure future historians will marvel at how just about every piece of conversational writing begins with a similar observation; many people on the internet have made similar observations). I've been trying to figure out what I could post here that would be most useful-- more links to more online resources offering more ways to transition classes online? Reflections about historical epidemics and the history of medicine? Cute dog pictures to ease the stress? 

With perhaps the exception of the last, it seems like there are already enough of these to go around, written with more expertise than I have in distance learning, and epidemiology, and dog ownership, respectively. Instead, I wanted to offer up an activity idea I had recently, useful for both in-person and online classes, designed to aid writers of all levels in their research process: The Handy Dandy Notebook.

Okay, maybe one dog picture.
Winking black and brown puppy photo by Dominika Roseclay from Pexels. 

A few caveats: This is not only a fairly straightforward activity to assign to a class; it's also a pretty good reflection of my own research process on projects big and small, which means it's idiosyncratic; it may not be useful for the naturally organized, the meticulous outliner, or the linear thinker. However, it has been a lifesaver for me, and I often wish that someone had suggested this process to me as an undergraduate. Moreover, although I am envisioning it as it would be used in a history course, it could easily function for a lot of disciplines which emphasize finding, analyzing, and evaluating information from a variety of sources.

First, you'll need a shared online (semi-)collaborative space to work in. I like and recommend OneNote for this because it allows you to just absolutely dump things in indiscriminately-- you can type anywhere you like in the work area, handwrite with a tablet and stylus, drop in PDFs either as shortcuts to a download or embedded directly into the page, and highlight, underline, or scribble on any or all of those things with various pens. Those functionalities are fun and helpful; however, you can easily accomplish something similar with a Google Doc or set of Google Docs, a Word document uploaded to a course platform or Box folder, or a variety of other software options. 

Next, each student needs a topic. This could be put to great use as a research paper starter, particularly in the phase in which students have chosen topics but have not yet figured out which sources they will use. It could also work well as a way to give students a taste of a topic that you are about to begin discussing, revealing what mass culture has to offer on the subject before jumping into its academic treatment. For example, before students in my Fiction and the Historical Imagination course began our section on Westerns, I asked them to look online for any source that sparked their interest which purported to define or explain the Western and post it to a Compass discussion board. 

Third, each student needs a space in which to work (their "notebook"), and time in which to do it. If using a collaborative option, give each student a page or section of the shared space. You can outfit this however you like; you may wish to just indicate the name of the student, or you may wish to provide brief reminders, instructions, or suggestions based on their proposed topics. I would offer the following instructions at minimum: 

1. Copy and paste every link you look at into your space, and remind yourself a). what was in it and b). what you thought about it. 
2. This is not formal-- worry about "future you" looking at it, not "present me." That is-- these are designed to be resources for your project; it's not designed for me to evaluate how "well" your initial research is going. 

As far as time goes, I'd suggest giving students a rough, relatively brief amount of time that you'd like them to spend researching to limit stress and maximize the benefits of unstructured research time. 

Next, stand back and wait! Let students chase down their topics. 

Next up is classwide comparisons. When it comes time to discuss (in person, synchronously over Zoom or in a class chat, or asynchronously in a discussion board), they should examine others' notetaking styles and see what stands out to them-- do you see any techniques you'd take for yourself? What did others think was important, and how does that compare to what you noted about your sources? 

In my own work, it's about 50/50 that I return to my notes weeks or months later and think "Oh, right!" versus "Huh?" Optional but useful, depending on your goals: Have students return to these notes two or more weeks later in the semester. Do they still remember these sources? Do their notes make sense to them, or would they need to reread the sources if they wanted to write about them? This could be examined in an individual reflection, a class or small group discussion, or in the context of actually using the notes to craft a paragraph or other short assignment.

What does this activity, as a whole, do for students? At the most basic level, it encourages the beginning of reflection on a writing topic, offering permission for students to get started early. Perhaps more significantly, it offers students the chance to practice and get feedback on something that can be quite mysterious: the research process itself. Frequently when others have tried to introduce notetaking approaches to me, it has failed miserably because my writing (and, really, everything) style is chaotic; I need novelty and mess at the beginning before I can transition anything into order and linearity. This activity offers beginning writers both (to mangle a cliche) roots and wings: enough boundaries to feel secure enough to try; enough freedom to take a chance. Finally, and maybe most practically, by getting into a habit of noting literally every site and piece of information they look at online, a writer is less likely to struggle with both plagiarism and the frustration of tracking things down later that they didn't realize they'd want to use. It's only through trial and error that I've realized that it can be good to elaborate on where I found a document I'm making notes on as well as just the title and the author (was it Google books? An interlibrary loan? An archival document?), because it's never as easy to remember this a year on as I thought it would be at the time. It's also a very helpful tool for writing these blog posts-- where else would I get all the links I end up putting in? 

How do you help students practice good research habits in your discipline? Are you finding it more difficult to do so in the wake of moving instruction online? Let me know! 

NB: I hope you are all doing well in this stressful time. If any of you self-quarantining find yourself with more time at home than usual on your hands, want to share any of your struggles and triumphs of pivoting to remote education, or have questions or topics you'd like me to address, I'd love to feature your guest posts and/or answer your questions. 

Related links: 

Title talk: I'm very skeptical about this, but apparently if you want your own handy dandy notebook, you can buy one at this self-titled online store?

Authors that have talked about the type of writing that involves "making a mess and then cleaning it up," like Anne Lamott and Joan Bolker have helped me (and inspired this activity) immensely.

If you are looking out for resources for online teaching, I suggest UIUC's Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning list of resources for the COVID-19 transition to online instructional delivery. 

If you're lacking in a little light reading material, might I suggest this digital archive of 6000 children's books?