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| This tot is ready to take on the end of the semester-- are you? Photo by Evelyn Chong from Pexels. |
It's fall break for
many of us, but it's also that time of the semester: when our teaching gas
tanks are running low. We've used all of our favorite activities, we feel unprepared to come up with anything
novel in the face of mutual exhaustion and test panic, or we are grasping for
lecture content and images as we run out of pre-prepared presentations. When
all else fails, I fall back most often on these three favorite lifesavers to
prep my teaching plans:
- For any discipline: These active learning activity cards, courtesy of Ava Wolf at the Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning. We use these as part of our programming on active learning and interactive classroom spaces, and participants never fail to show enthusiasm for these straightforward descriptions of activities. It makes quick discussion planning a snap.
- The primary source databases at the University of Illinois library. I, like many others, have spent time fruitlessly Googling for images or primary sources on a particular topic, because I KNOW they exist but I CANNOT be bothered to go back to a book or some obscure folder to find them (or-- my favorite-- they were part of some awful proprietary software package that is now unavailable to me). However, I have had much luck in more recent times using these databases to find things that will be useful to me. If you are outside of UIUC these will likely be less accessible, but there may be similar resources available at public or institutional libraries open to you.
- The Internet Archive. This is good for everything-- student research, lecture prep. Some favorite sources of mine that are available here:
- The Oregon Trail-- I used this in my Fiction and the Historical Imagination class and we had fantastic discussions about settler colonialism, gender, and the gamification of history.
- In the Suburbs-- a 1957 short promo film made by Redbook magazine promoting their ability to successfully target suburban consumers with advertising. Great for discussions of the postwar US, even if you only have time for the first few minutes.
Are there teaching
resources that never fail you? Let me know in comments!
