One of my biggest challenges is how to effectively teach the logical process of inductive reasoning so that students can learn how to use specific historical evidence in order to make their own arguments about the past. (The bigger challenge here, of course, is getting them to understand the difference between studying history and doing History.) My students often seem to lose the forest for the trees, because memorizing facts seems like a safer cognitive proposition than analyzing those facts in order to draw general conclusions. These challenges become especially evident in my tenth-grade Modern European History course when we are intensively studying the policies and actions of several different monarchs in order to understand different models of exercising royal power. I’ve found that the construct of a professional résumé is particularly well suited to this kind of reasoning because it distills specific experiences into general skills and qualifications.
Using a combination of lecture, textbook, and a primary source reading from the duc de Saint-Simon’s Memoirs, we establish a basic narrative of Louis XIV’s life and reign. Then, I ask my students to imagine that Louis XIV is applying for a job with the title of “absolute monarch” and write his résumé for him. Their challenge is to take what they learned about his administrative, economic, religious, cultural, and foreign policies as the king of France and turn them into general qualifications for exercising (more or less) unlimited power. (E.g., students learn that Louis XIV revoked religious toleration for Protestants, and should be able to translate that into the absolutist characteristic of secular control over spiritual matters.) Since the vast majority of tenth-graders have never written a resume before, I take some time in class to explain the process and show them some examples so they understand what the finished product should look like. Students then complete this Absolute Monarch Resumé as a formative assessment.
Once we have established the general characteristics of absolutism as exercised in France, I find that students are far more successful with our next task, which is to determine how (and why) Eastern absolutists differed from their western counterparts. Moreover, in thinking about how to market oneself to potential employers, this assignment packs an added bonus of introducing students to the kind of “life skills” that don’t really have a place elsewhere in our curriculum. (I feel confident that we prepare our graduates well for the intellectual rigors of a college classroom, but I am afraid far too many of them don’t know how to balance a checkbook or how to sew on a button.) I think this kind of assignment helps students feel more invested in what we are doing because they see it as having a more practical and immediate value.
The Bridge Project 