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UNT’s Department of History is embracing the flipped classroom model, increasing student engagement and promoting active learning.

“The underlying motivation of the way we’ve designed this classroom flip is to use this as a way to cultivate students’ intellectual development in relation to matters concerning the past and our relation to the past,” department chair Michael Wise said. “It isn’t just designed to funnel information to students, but to focus on the skills and techniques of historical thinking.”

The department worked together to develop flipped-classroom U.S. history survey courses.

Senior lecturer Kerry Goldmann led the development of online class content, while clinical associate professor Danielle Dumaine headed the in-person recitation activities.

Face-to-face recitations are intentionally planned to support both student and educator success. The department developed a playbook with a variety of high-impact lessons that can be used during the sessions.

“The recitation is well thought out, meets our learning objectives, and designed around student engagement and activity rather than just reviewing what the listened to in the lecture,” Dumaine said. “It’s an opportunity for students to do the work of being a historian.”

Recitation activities include searching for specific student files from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, screening silent films and discussing movies as primary historical sources, playing a game where students assume different roles in a rural town during the Great Depression, and more.

“It’s been really exciting seeing what everyone comes up with and what people have been doing in their classrooms, because we don’t always get an opportunity to see what every instructor is doing,” Dumaine said.

Goldmann created a scaffolding in the asynchronous, pre-class portion to prepare students to apply what they learn to the active educational experiences in the recitation. She helped around 20 faculty record approximately 30 hours of high-quality, engaging lecture videos with a uniform look.

“It’s meant to be a step-by-step to get students to the recitation, where they can actually apply what they’re learning about U.S. history into active, skill-based learning,” Goldmann said.

Faculty interested in filming similar lecture videos can utilize the recording space in the Lab for Engaged, Applied, and Public Humanities.

Graduate teaching fellows are excited and engaged with the initiative, Wise said. Because of the interactive nature of the recitations, instructors can adjust their teaching methods and lesson plans in real time to respond to student needs.

“Rather than the sage on the stage telling people what they need to learn, students take ownership over their educations,” Wise said. “We’re trying to create an introductory sequence of U.S. history survey courses that provide students with opportunities to take the learning into their own hands.”

Dumaine said student response has been positive, with engaged classrooms that promote educator-student and peer-to-peer interactions not possible in a traditional lecture setting.

For educators attempting the flipped course model, Goldmann recommended embracing the unknowns and recognizing the instructor is learning, too. The mode “allows us to be more creative and empowered in our teaching,” she said.

“The flipped classroom model was an opportunity for us to create some kind of singular product that brought in all of our combined expertise that not only maintains consistency for the students but also sparked lots of conversations among us as we were introduced to one another’s contributions,” Wise said.