Today I want to take a deeper dive into the THOMAS worksheet (Word version | PDF version), which I talked a little bit about in my post Teaching History: First Week of Class Resources. This is an assignment that I developed for graduate students based on Danna Agmon’s THOMAS framework for analyzing historical scholarship. THOMAS stands for Topic, Historiography, Organization, Methodology, Argument, and Significance.
I often pair this with Caleb McDaniel’s “How to Read for History” because I think it’s important to not assume that students already know how to be successful in our courses. This is no less true for graduate students, who are generally my target audience for this assignment. While McDaniel gives them key insight into how to read for their seminars, the THOMAS worksheet tells them what to look for. In other words, this assignment teaches them how to do the kind of reading that we sometimes refer to as “gutting” a book.
This is an enormously important skill for students to have. It can make reading for courses more efficient, not to mention preparation for comprehensive exams. I also sometimes frame the THOMAS worksheet as scaffolding for more involved assignments. When students are tasked with a historiographical essay, I encourage them to dissect their list of books using the THOMAS method. Students can then use the completed worksheets to more easily draw out points of comparison, giving them a starting point for analysis.
However, I’ve found that it’s not enough to tell students what they’re looking for; you also have to tell them where and how to look. This is disciplinary knowledge that has become second nature to many of us over time, and there’s no good reason not to share this with our students. To that end, I developed this handout, which describes where to find each of these elements, and what to look for.
I’ve also recorded the following videos—the first gives an overview of this framework, and the others explain each element in detail:
- THOMAS: Introduction
- THOMAS: Topic
- THOMAS: Historiography
- THOMAS: Organization
- THOMAS: Methodology
- THOMAS: Argument
- THOMAS: Significance
After I’ve graded all the worksheets for a given reading, I’ll generally also share my own version as a model. And although I do generally use this assignment with graduate students, it could also work with advanced undergraduates with the right amount of support. For example, you could start by giving students a partially completed handout and having them fill in the rest, or have them complete the worksheet in groups during a single class session.
Have you used something similar to teach reading strategies? Do you have your own method for “gutting” a book? Share them in the comments!
