The Teaching Strategies Used in Developing this Course:

Know what students have to do to succeed in your course

• Carefully define the basic learning tasks that students must master in order to succeed in the course
• Break these down into their smallest components

Help them learn how to do these tasks

• Explicitly model in class how historians perform each of these learning tasks
• Integrate descriptions of these skills into in-class and web-assignments

Provide students with opportunities to practice these tasks

• Give students the opportunity to practice these skills in teams during class and individually in web assignments
• Give students the opportunity to practice these skills on weekly web assignments that isolate specific tasks and give students the opportunity to make "meaningful mistakes"*

Motivate students to continue with the process

• Integrate work on learning tasks with a series of issues and images that capture students' imaginations and keep them excited about coming to the class
• Start off with relatively simple exercises and gradually increase the complexity
• Provide weekly feedback

Assess Student Progress at mastering these learning tasks

• Use the weekly assignments as a means of assessing the success of the various components of the course at helping students learn the learning tasks
• Come back to the more demanding of these operations several times across the semester to measure whether learning has been retained

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*"Meaningful mistakes" in this context are defined as those which give students the opportunity to recognize that they have not mastered specific tasks required in the field. They are to be contrasted with "global mistakes" which simply informed students that they have not succeeded at some part of a large and complex task.