Picking Textbooks, Part 2

As a continuation of the previous post…

If anyone is in fact reading this, and doing so with an eye to trying some of these techniques, I will get technical for a moment.  I also have a question for college-level teachers, in terms of content knowledge versus thinking skills, that I will ask at the end of this post.

I started the class with a problem—how to compare and contrast different accounts—and jigsawed each of the three textbook excerpts out.  Each group elected a facilitator who would be responsible for directing the small discussion, and then reporting out to the larger class.

Each group then presented, and then they immediately began to ask each other questions in order to tease out the possible thesis from each excerpt—to answer the question, why did the colonies declare independence.

As a class, they arrived at three potential theses by examining the results—

Independence was driven by elites who used the Declaration of Independence to unify the colonies

Independence was led by the lower orders and then directed by elites to control it

Independence was a fait accompli, inevitable given the turn of events

At the end of the class, we debriefed on the process, talked about Common Sense (the only real commonality between the three excerpts, apart from the Declaration itself.)

I guess I’m excited, because I only got to that sort of depth in graduate school.  These kids are high school juniors.  If any college/university profs read this, I’d be curious to know what you think of this approach.  Is this what you are looking for in the students we send to you? Do you have opinions on content knowledge versus skill for incoming freshmen?