
Don’t Set Goals, Set Systems: Using Decoding the Disciplines and Students as Partners to Strengthen a History Department and its Teacher Candidates
By Jared McBrady
This article started with a quest to find time for SoTL research. As a tenure-track faculty member, I had to juggle teaching, service, and research alongside the demands of family life (including a toddler). Too often in that balancing act, I would easily drop research and writing in lieu of more pressing demands. If any research was to occur, I would need to put some sort of system into place to make it happen. If I attached that system to my teaching requirements, I would be more likely to follow through with it. It would be even better if my system was communal, incorporating student co-researchers in the work.
As I examined the courses I taught, I thought through ways to embed data collection, analysis, and manuscript preparation into them. But, if I really wanted the scheme I was hatching to take off, I would need to have it benefit more than just me. I needed buy-in from student research partners, student informants, and the faculty partners in whose classes I collected data. My system would need to provide tangible benefits for each of these stakeholders. Thus hatched “the system” (I have been unable to rebrand it with a better moniker). Using both the Decoding the Disciplines research paradigm and a Students as Partners educational philosophy, I created a system that simultaneously refined teaching in undergraduate history courses and provided authentic learning experiences for secondary teacher candidates. I am excited about this system’s potential to improve undergraduate teaching and secondary teacher preparation. I also appreciate how the system has carved out time for my own SoTL research.
Read the TLI article here.