Using the Student's Friend

The Student's Friend concise world history textbook is available for free download in pdf or MS Word formats. It can be printed and distributed to students for classroom use. It may also be used online as an electronic or digital textbook.

The chief advantage of using the Student's Friend in place of a standard textbook is that it reduces content to a manageable size without the need to skip units that would result in gaps in the historical narrative. Reducing the narrative leaves time in the curriculum for other learning activities - such as projects, simulations, and seminars - that give students opportunities to focus on particular aspects of a given historical era. In this way, the Student's Friend allows the teacher to combine comprehensive content coverage with in-depth "post-holing" activities.

Getting it to the students
The Student's Friend Part 1, Prehistory to 1500, is meant to be used during the first year of a two-year world history and geography (or global studies) sequence. Part 2, 1500 to the present, is designed to be used during the second year of the sequence. Each part is 26 pages long, 28 including cover pages. Although these total only 52 pages of text on 8-1/2" x 11"paper, they are equivalent to approximately 120 pages in a standard hardcover book - more in a typical textbook with its large headlines, pictures, and other (often distracting) graphic elements.

The Student's Friend may be freely downloaded from this website and copied for non-commercial use by teachers and students. If copied on both sides of the paper, The Students Friend amounts to 13 or 14 sheets per student, not an unreasonable amount of paper to be copied. The copying job may be sent to an outside printer for reproduction at reasonable cost. Because each student may receive a fresh copy of the Student's Friend at the beginning of the course, students are free to mark on their copies, underlining key points, for example. Each year students can receive the latest version of the Student's Friend, so historical scholarship and current issues can remain up to date.

The teacher who uses the Student's Friend in the classroom will want to supplement the text with visual images. I have relied heavily on video segments and overhead transparencies and more recently on images acquired from the Internet and displayed using an Elmo-type projector device. The Elmo is a very handy piece of technology for teachers because it can make its own digital photographs of images, and they can be easily stored on SD memory chips. Images can also be downloaded to an SD chip directly from a computer and then displayed on the Elmo. (Although I am not a lawyer, I believe this is an ethical, non-profit, educational use of Internet images because those who publish images on the Internet have a reasonable expectation that the images will be used by others, and if not, the images are generally protected.) Another alternative would be to use standard textbooks to supply images for classroom discussions.

About the two-year sequence
We believe it is most effective to use the Students Friend in a two-year sequence. Because the Student's Friend integrates world history, Western civilization and geography into one narrative, two years is really needed to do justice to these subjects. Many teachers will find it difficult to follow this sequence, however, because world history and geography are often taught as separate courses. (For a discussion of why it is more effective to integrate the two subjects, see Combining world history and geography.) If this is the situation at your school, here are some suggestions for using the Student's Friend with your curriculum.

1. If your school offers separate world history and geography courses, as many schools do, discuss the curriculum with your colleagues in the social studies department and with your principal. See if you can generate enough support to approach the school board about modifying the high school curriculum to combine the teaching of world history and geography while retaining a two-course sequence. This change should not require additional resources or staff or even changes in the schedule. It merely requires a change in approach to benefit student learning.

2. If a formal change in curriculum is not possible, consider using Part 1 of the Student's Friend as the text for a world geography course. A number of geography concepts are introduced in Part 1, and it focuses on the foundations of major world cultures, a key component of geographic studies. If the teacher were to weight supplemental course activities heavily toward geography, a "Geography" course title would be entirely appropriate.

3. If your only option is to teach all of world history during one course, there are two possible approaches to consider. You could try to squeeze Parts 1 and 2 into that single course. It might work depending on your situation, but I suspect reinforcement activities would be limited, and students might not have enough time to truly assimilate this much varied information.

The other possibility would be to selectively prune topics from the Student's Friend to reduce it to a more manageable size for a one-course rendition. Stand-alone geography topics could be eliminated under the assumption they will be covered in a separate geography course. Perhaps topics relating to U.S. history could be reduced because they may be covered in an American history class. One could eliminate the introductory/prehistory unit of Part 1 and the concluding current issues unit of Part 2, especially if students are likely to take a Current Events class. Downloading the word-processor version of the Student's Friend allows you to cut and paste topics as you see fit.

Covering the material
Identifying the body of knowledge to be taught is undoubtedly easier than effectively conveying that material to students. In other words, deciding what to teach is easier than teaching it (although wise choices regarding the former can facilitate the latter). As a teacher, my foremost concern was the question of how to effectively deliver course content.

In my courses, the Student's Friend provided the framework at the center of the curriculum. I tried to reinforce this essential knowledge with a number of supplemental activities including writing assignments, projects, simulations, student presentations, analytical activities and video materials. Coverage of content always included several basic elements: reading about it, thinking about it, writing about it, discussing it and testing for student knowledge. (See: a sample unit plan.)

Teaching under the block plan, I tried to cover about two pages in the Student's Friend each week. Classes that meet for 45 minutes per day for the entire year might try covering one page per week. This schedule leaves flex time to allow for special activities such as a week-long historical simulation and for the inevitable interruptions like school assemblies, class photos and snow days. (See: developing a course schedule.)

I began each unit with an introductory discussion that solicited student input about the upcoming material. This discussion serves as a preview and overview for the students, and it helps the teacher to gauge their existing knowledge and level of sophistication regarding the material. This is a good time to connect new learning with previously acquired knowledge and to clear up lingering misconceptions.

On the second day of a new unit, I distributed a Unit Study Guide, which we reviewed together in class. These guides included an introduction to the unit, map locations, and open-ended questions meant to stimulate thought and discussion. The guides also featured eight "essential questions" that overlay the entire course of study from Unit 1 through Unit 12. And these Unit Study Guides identified activities used to help students learn the Student's Friend text material (described below). Study Guides to accompany the Student's Friend are available here, where you will also find three basic writing guidelines for students.

In the third day of a new unit, I distributed outline maps, and we identified the unit's map locations, which are listed at the beginning of each unit in the Student's Friend and in the Unit Study Guides.

In my classroom I used several different strategies for covering the Student's Friend text material and often experimented with new approaches. I tried to avoid straight lecture. These reading/writing/comprehension activities tended to emphasizes various intellectual skills such as analyzing content for essential information, finding requested information, note taking, and creating a coherent narrative. Following are some of those strategies.

Key Points
Students read and evaluate all four topics on one page (or perhaps two topics from a half page) of the Student's Friend in an effort to identify key points, which means in practice that students answer two questions "What is it?" (a definition) and "Why is it important?" (historical significance). Students write their key points in complete sentences. This writing can be done in class or as homework.

After the writing assignment has been completed, the class discussion phase begins. Students take turns reading aloud the text from the Student's Friend and share their key points. Divergent findings are encouraged.

It is during this discussion that I present visual material about each topic. I check for student understandings and pronunciations, explain new vocabulary, answer questions and generally encourage discussion and speculation about the topic. After the class has reached consensus on the key points for each topic, the key points are underlined in each student's copy of the Student's Friend, and these underlined passages become a study guide for the unit exam to follow.

I generally began the semester using the Key Points strategy and modeled it in the classroom. After students had become proficient in identifying essential information, Key Points could be assigned as homework. Later I would move on to the other approaches described below, and then I would cycle back to Key Points in later units, mixing various strategies throughout the remainder of the semester.

Study Questions
Students are given prepared questions relating to each topic covered on one page of the Student's Friend. Using their own paper, students write the questions followed by their answers in complete sentences. The questions are included because these papers will become a study guide for the exam to follow. Sets of study questions to accompany the Student's Friend are available in the Teacher Tools area of this website.

Again, this writing assignment can be completed in class or as homework, and student work will be turned in and graded by the teacher. The class discussion phase proceeds much as it does under the Key Points approach described above except that nothing is underlined in the Student's Friend this time.

Notes/Quiz
Because this approach involves the least writing, students tend to like it best. Students take notes on each topic from a page in the Student's Friend. Students may then use their notes when answering questions on a brief quiz that follows the note-taking session. Notes and quizzes constitute a study guide for the exam to follow. The class discussion phase proceeds much as it does under the previous two strategies. Quiz sets to accompany the Student's Friend can be found in the Teacher Tools section.

Written Narrative
Sometimes I would ask my students to write an historical narrative incorporating all of the bold topics and terms found on a page of the Students Friend. Later, two or three of these narratives are read aloud in class, and the class identifies any important additions.

Variations
Many variations on these strategies are possible. Students can work alone, as partners, or in groups. Each group may take one topic to consider and then come together with other groups to share information.

More info
For a further discussion of learning activities to accompany the Student's Friend, click here.

Your input welcome
If you have developed successful strategies for covering historical or geographic text material, please contact us so we can share your ideas with other teachers. See Feedback and collaboration.

© 2001 - 2011 michael g. maxwell - maxwell learning l.l.c.