Quick Thoughts on My Students' Final Projects

So the last set of Daily Shows were presented to the class today. Overall, I'm happy with the way they turned out. All of them contained a solid historical base and were entertaining. Perhaps most importantly for the end of the year, everyone seemed to have fun with them.

The major weakness of my execution of the assignment was my failure to make it more rigorous. There was really no critical thinking involved in this assignment on any level. While my students certainly had fun with it, I'm not sure how much students learned from that. And I'm okay with that for the end of the year. However, if I were to do this assignment again, I would move it earlier in the year, and try to emphasize much more of a critical approach to both history and the process of putting the assignment together. I would mandate a draft and peer review process. I would do a piece analyzing how an actual episode of the Daily Show really works and how it interacts with current history, and include this as part of the assessment.

But all in all, I had a lot of fun with the assignment, and it seemed like my students did too.