Teaching Resources

Teaching materials I have written or curated. Everything listed here is free to download and free to adapt for your own classroom. If something is useful to you, or if you try it and it does not work, I would like to hear about it.

Curricula

I have written a teaching guide for incorporating EU simulations into small high school or college classrooms, developed through work with the Mid-Atlantic Model European Union and related EU-simulation research collaborations. Download the guide (PDF).

The impromptu policy brief. A single class session in which students are handed a policy problem cold and have to produce a usable one-page recommendation before they leave the room. The instructor plays a supervisor who has forgotten a deadline and needs something within the hour; students are staff. It simulates the conditions under which policy writing actually happens after graduation, and it isolates the skills a take-home assignment hides — scoping a problem to something answerable in an hour, judging sources quickly, and committing to a recommendation on incomplete information. The guide covers where the exercise sits in the course, how to run the session, both prompts I use, the rubric, how to adapt it to other courses, and what tends to go wrong. Download the guide (Word).

Coursebots

A coursebot is a chat assistant that knows one course. It holds the syllabus, the assignment rubrics, and the material I would otherwise answer by email forty times a semester, and it is available at two in the morning when a student is staring at a draft. I run two. Each lives at its own web address behind a class password, so students need no account and install nothing, and the course material stays on the server rather than in the browser.

Finn — Introduction to Public Policy

Finn answers questions about the syllabus, helps students study for exams, explains what the policy brief rubric is actually asking for, and gives feedback on drafts students upload. Its knowledge includes a set of anonymized patterns drawn from my own comments and scores on briefs from previous sections, so its feedback reflects what has actually separated strong work from weak work in this course rather than generic advice.

Bean — European Union

Bean does the same for the European Union course, working from the rubrics for the country profile and alter ego papers and the same kind of anonymized feedback material. It also carries the roster for the Mid-Atlantic European Union Simulation, so a student can ask which figure they are playing and get help preparing for that role.

Both refuse the same three things, and the refusals matter more than the features. Neither will predict a grade — they may say a rubric criterion looks weak, developing, solid or strong and say what would move it up one band, but never a number, letter or percentage. Neither will write a paper; they ask questions about a draft and name what is missing. And neither will guess at a date it has not been given, because a bot that says it does not know is far better than one that reconstructs a plausible deadline.

Building your own. The guide below is the whole process in the order the decisions have to be made: how students will reach it, what you need before you start, writing the instructions, assembling the knowledge (including how to use your own past graded work without violating student privacy), building and deploying the page, putting it in front of students, and logging what they ask. It also covers what it costs, which is less than people expect, and the four things that went wrong for me. It assumes no programming background. Download the guide (Word).

Multimedia Content

Pop Culture Politics — A curated library of film and television clips for teaching American and comparative politics, developed with Janice Clark Duchene and Matt Rousu. Every clip carries a description, the concepts it connects to, discussion questions, and an assignment; many also carry a separate section written against the AP Government course frameworks.