Justin Cerenzia teaches history at St George’s School in Middletown, Rhode Island. We don’t usually have guests from high schools on the show, but Justin is no ordinary high school teacher. He’s also the director of the school’s teaching center and someone who pays keen attention to research on pedagogy across the board. In this episode we talk to Justin about how teaching methods and ideas being popularized in STEM fields can translate to the humanities.

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Show Notes

0:00 ⏯ A big day for a superfan as he shares a couple of his favorite recent episodes:

• TBP Episode #75: Classroom Observation with Marilyne Stains
• TBP Episode #74: Engaged Learning with Monroe Weber-Shirk

2:11 ⏯ Getting going. Welcoming Justin Cerenzia. St. George’s School has a yacht where students can go to sea and take courses remotely.

7:32 ⏯ Learning from K-12 education: ‘Stations’ in the classroom to promote interdisciplinarity.

• TBP Episode #11: Teaching Unergraduates and Preschoolers with Carla Horwitz
• TBP Episode #73: Teaching Physics Teachers with Mac Stetzer
• The Teach Better blog: Going Back to Third Grade

11:08 ⏯ Historians learning from chemists about teaching. At St. George’s, the classrooms aren’t all that different from each other. How Justin got there: his education and teaching experience.

14:59 ⏯ Some ideas work across across disciplines: the micro/macro distinction in economics and history. How the scope of the time frame helps make different thing significant. The History Manifesto by Armitage and Guldi.

18:47 ⏯ Is flipping the classroom a big deal in the humanities? Justin thinks about how best to help his students learn.

21:25 ⏯ Stanford’s Sam Wineberg and history education is critical of the sage-on-the-stage approach. Do Edward and Justin actually use learning objectives in the humanities? Oh yes.

26:52 ⏯ Can humanists use multiple choice questions? The AP History exam does–so Justin does. And a USC law school professor (Tom Lyon) uses clickers in a law school course to help skills practice legal thinking live in-class.

35:12 ⏯ Think-pair-share in the high school history classroom and digital tools: Quizzoodle and Backchannel Chat and the Digital Learning Farm concept. Laptops and cellphones in the classroom

40:43 ⏯ How Justin teaches metacognition. Using non-digital games in the classroom to help students define concepts. When a student fails to learn is a good opportunity to think about metacognition. Humanity and teaching.

48:50 ⏯ Teaching and motivation. The ABC’s of How We Learn. Intrinsic motivation vs. self-efficacy. Some up’s and down’s of students collaborating with peers.

54:59 ⏯ Justin’s teaching mistake: personalized final exam questions.

58:07 ⏯ Thanks. Faculty development at St. George’s. Evaluating Professional Development by Thomas R. Guskey.