Procedure
This mini-unit assumes the students have already been introduced
the factual basics of the Renaissance through a textbook or some
other means (otherwise the primary sources will lack context).
I used it with ninth graders last year and had pretty good results,
but found that some of the readings were a bit too hard for them,
and that some of them had a hard time discussing both their own
ideas and those of the thinkers from the past in the same essay.
I began class by asking the students a very open-ended discussion
question: Why are we here? In other words, why do schools (including
colleges) exist? What are there goals, and what are the major
means they use to achieve those goals?
Out of those answers, a lively discussion ensued and eventually
a few categories emerged. I grouped their answers into two rough
lists that were recorded on the board: "Reasons for schools
to exist" and "Important things students do in schools."
The first list tended to revolve around a few major reasons:
Their list of the important things that happen in schools broke
down, not surprisingly, into a list of academic departments and
a few extra-curricular activities.
I then asked themselves to imagine themselves as President. Would they keep the goals of schools more or less the way they are now? If they changed them, how would they change them? What would be the effects of those changes on society as a whole. We then went back to our list of major school goals and discussed what would happen to society if you based schools on each of those models. I concluded class by asking them what they thought this had to do with the Renaissance. Based on the readings we had already done, they mentioned that this was a time when society changed a lot and when people focussed a lot of knowledge.
The next day I put our list of school functions back on the board and asked them which they thought would have been focussed on the most by Renaissance thinkers. They had a hard time figuring this one out, which, made them curious to look at thinkers of the time. Because the documents are fairly difficult for ninth, I had them try to read and answer questions about them while working in pairs. Then we would discuss them together, and I asked students to read aloud the sentences that supported their answers. This was slow going, but worked fairly well in the end. The Vergerius reading, while crucial to the assignment, was also, the hardest for them to follow.
Here are the questions I created to accompany the primary documents.
It took two forty five minute classes of reading and discussing until I felt confident that they understood the ideas of the thinkers.
I made sure to ask them to continue explaining why the ideas
they were reading fit the historical period we were discussing,
and they did this pretty well. We recorded their main points on
the board. then we created "idea webs" around the four
main possible missions of schools (to get kids ready for jobs,
to help give them values, to help society run better, to help
them get more out of life), recording the thinkers' points about
those missions in bubbles around them. In a different color, I
then recorded the students' own ideas about these various competing
missions for schools.
Their assignment was to write a five paragraph essay in which they argued for or against one or two major purposes for education in the modern world. They had to refer to the ideas of at least two of the thinkers we had read specifically and in detail, but they could choose to agree or disagree with that individual. Although the essays were somewhat varied in quality (not surprising for a challenging assignment early in the year) many of them were fantastic. Many of them were able to clearly see the connections between the different goals that schools could emphasize and the effects that would have on people's lives and on society as a whole. I think it could be a fantastic unit, especially with older students.