This works best if students have multiple texts to review. Options are: provide a library of various texts in the field for students to compare or, if possible, loan books to students and have them share with other students. Another approach is to have each student outline a different text and then, as a class, discuss the differences in the outlines. The purpose here is to have students ask the question "what's important and how should it be presented?" not simply make an outline of a single text.
To give students sufficient opportunity to learn the content, I also added the following tasks to building the outline:
Interestingly, the justification section resulted in some of the richest discussions between students. I had originally included this as way to make sure students were fully thinking about their outline (rather than just outlining the first book they used). But, this turned out to be one of the most useful methods to engage students in discussions about the best way to organize the material. For example, this lead to numerous discussions about how content from different chapters could be sorted differently than how I had divided the chapters.
One of the challenges with having multiple authors is maintaining consistency. This should be one of the roles of the instructor. In most cases, student comments will self-regulate the matters of consistency. For example, if one of the outlines covers much more (or less) details than the others, students will tend to comment on this. These comments lead to great in-class discussions about the proper level of detail, which helps unify later chapters. But, some of the early chapters will still show large swings in depth or breadth. At each stage of the game, I encourage the instructor to make whatever changes necessary to maintain consistency while still keeping the student voice present.
I do recommend giving students complete autonomy in creating the outline. Some truly fascinating insights result from this autonomy that would not be seen if this part of the process is more directed. If changes need to be made - do so after the semester is over. It is easy to fix errors and pedagogical issues later, but you lose the benefit of the student vision by imposing your voice too early.
In 2014, the Honors Biology class created and outline for the text. The outlining assignment folder includes instructions, a sample document that I created for the students and a grading rubric.
The grading rubric for this assignment should focus on how well students present the rationale for their choices rather than the "accuracy" of the outline. The purpose of this task is to get students to think about how and why information is presented in a certain format and they may have distinctly different preferences than the authors of most texts.
For a faster textbook process - the instructor can write the outline.
Vocabulary: Give Students a list of terms and have them create a mind map, table, graphic, outline, or other demonstration of knowledge. The key here is to give students options in how they demonstrate the relationships between the terms. I use this in my larger (70 student) General Education classes with great success. Students enjoy the freedom to show their knowledge in a modality that best suits their learning preferences. This has also resulted in spontaneous student discussions about the advantages and disadvantages of different choices for the assignment.