Reconstruction: A Video Lecture

In early 2020, when school suddenly closed because of COVID 19 and I found myself an online teacher, I began pondering the best ways to keep my students connected to a piece of “school as usual.” It quickly became apparent that what my students missed was being able to hear my voice explaining important historical concepts.

Within each of my units are a handful of lectures, designed to provide context and connections to the sources we are reading and analyzing in class. My students find these lectures engaging as they are lively affairs, full of questioning, pondering, and more than a little laughter at historical oddities.

While recorded lectures are missing much of the banter and interactive commentary, they do allow students to pause and rewind as needed, where they might otherwise have raised their hands for a quick clarification. Soon after posting my first several lectures, the feedback from my students was clear, they LOVED having my lectures back—to them, it felt a little like being back in class. They were able to sit back, listen to me, follow my slides, and practice their Cornell notes again. Armed with my video, a PDF of my slides, and their notebooks, they were deep in the conceptual study of history.

Embedded above is an example lecture, from my United States History class, created in September 2020 as the first of two lectures addressing the failure of Reconstruction in the American South over the decades following the Civil War. By covering this information in a lecture, I was able to provide a clear background and overview, filling in the details with a secondary source on technical matters, such as the Wade-Davis bill and Military Reconstruction, and more importantly, with many primary sources from Black Americans living during our era of study.