Course Pedagogical & Assessment Approach

Pedagogical Approach: This course builds upon its touchstone text of Sophie’s World through students’ largely independent exploration of vetted and coded multi-media content to form their own working knowledge and opinions about their inheritance of ideas from European history. Students then test and revise their working knowledge and opinions through Socratic seminar-style conversations, in which facilitators ask – or prompt groups of students to ask each other – open-ended questions to which they respond with evidence from the confluence of their reading, curated multi-media content consumption, and life experience. Note the intentional use of the term facilitators as opposed to instructors or teachers; this course should be one of self-discovery— paralleling that of Sophie’s World’s main character—as opposed to passively receiving didactic instruction. To support this self-discovery, students will build from the beginning of the course to its completion a final project that requires them to engage with and master the subject matter through project-based learning. This project is uniform in its template, but will naturally vary in outcome according to each student’s intellectual strengths and challenges, preferred method(s) of communication, and personal philosophy formed over the course of engaging with this material. See this course’s unit descriptions for details.

Assessment Approach: In order to leverage students’ natural curiosity toward the goal of maximizing their potential content mastery, this course’s grading is rigorous with regard to evaluating process and progress but does not emphasize students’ identification of any single set of “right” answers. In short, to say this class is not about the end but the journey is a truism, not a cliche. Consequently, a student should not compare themselves – or feel that they are being compared – to either some absolute standard or to the other students in their class. In other words, a student should only be held accountable to their inherent capabilities and those capabilities’ realization. To further ensure that students suffer from neither fear of failure nor hope for an easy “A”, they should receive timely if not immediate feedback on their efforts throughout the course, but no indication as to specific grades prior to the course’s conclusion. Rather, they should be encouraged to either do better or stay the course, as appropriate. See this course’s grading rubric for details.