In this episode and post, we talked to Dr. Luke Perez, an Assistant Professor at the School of Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University. He shares his method for creating a quick summary for anything from Federalist 10 to a 1000-page book! This precis method helps students develop a summary to understand their reading and develop questions. This method is accessible to middle grades and up!
The Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy is organized around an inquiry-based content framework of seven themes. These themes integrate history and civic education through key concepts, broad driving questions, and specific guiding questions. Even though the interplay of history and civics are the crux of the roadmap, the seven themes draw upon the broader social studies to include other tenets like geography, economics, culture and society, and governance.
Jeff attended Arizona State University, majoring in Secondary Education for Social Studies, later adding a Master’s degree in Secondary Education from Northern Arizona University in 2007. While at ASU, he returned to his alma mater, Mountain View High School in Mesa, to be a student teacher and learn from someone he considered the best, his AP US Government teacher from high school. After that, he was hired to teach at Mountain View and taught various Social Studies subjects over 17 years, including US Government, AP European History, AP Comparative Government, and Economics.
Education is based, in large part, on questions. We ask questions to learn things; we ask questions to determine what someone else knows, and we ask questions to infer what someone else understands. And yet, in most classrooms, most questions are generated by the teacher, and student-generated questions are unstructured, based on an individual student’s skill and knowledge, and often asked in pursuit of clarity of instructions or ideas. In short, students are most often cast in the role of answering questions about content rather than generating them.