Prompted by Cushman and Grabill's call to "ask and answer the difficult questions" about service learning ("Reflections" 2009), this article addresses the difficult question of "what happens when service learning goes wrong." Authors engaged in family history writing and service learning with a local historical group. When the project was unable…

Literacy skills taught in the elementary grades establish a good foundation but are not adequate for the demands of secondary content curriculum. In history, preservice teachers must be prepared with a solid content base along with the pedagogy for teaching that content. To better teach and enhance student writing, preservice teachers need to…

In his book, "A Whole New Mind", Daniel Pink champions the benefits of right-brained thinking: creativity, flexibility, empathy, and meaning. He stresses the need to not only be logical, but also aware of emotion; to not only be sequential, but also conceptual; and to not only be calculating, but also recognize value. The project described in this…

To address the disparity in the skills of entering students and the goals of the first-year learning community (LC) program, the authors created a series of scaffolded, or tiered, writing assignments around the concept of kingship to move students from summary to analysis to synthesis. For each assignment, the authors incorporate informal…

Recommends using time bonding (finding a role model and researching the process and story behind that individual's accomplishments) as a means to interest students in history. Outlines the instructions covering the objectives of the writing assignments. Students researched a variety of biographies including Jackie Robinson and Lyndon Johnson. (MJP)