Best Practices videos and accompanying lesson materials for teachers

The Best Practices resources provide a "how-to" guide for replicating an exemplary civics teaching practice. One click will take teachers to a package of resources including:

Video clips of classroom activities, student and teacher responses to the lesson, and teacher tips.

A comprehensive teacher guide that includes preparation guidelines,

Background resource materials, assessment tools and ideas, and ideas for extending the concept across the curriculum.

The Best Practices resources are designed to give upper elementary, middle school, and high school social studies teachers a valuable resource for teaching about Congress and fostering civic participation among their students. The project is designed to create an ongoing resource for replication in classrooms around the country.

 

Lesson Plan on Appreciating Democracy

Appreciating Representation is a lesson plan on appreciating representation which follows upon an earlier lesson, "Appreciating Democracy," which dealt with: first, the fact that people have different values, interests, and priorities; second, that legislative bodies try to settle these differences by means of deliberation and negotiation, with compromises and majority votes as key elements; and, third, that dealing with differences can be very difficult, indeed. Now the focus is on how, to what degree, and on what issues people's values, interests, and priorities get represented in the legislative process. (The current version was completed in November 2005.)

Appreciating Democracy is a lesson plan for high school teachers of civics, government, and U.S. history designed by Alan Rosenthal and Greer Burroughs as a project of the Eagleton Institute of Politics of Rutgers University, in conjunction with the Center on Congress, the Center for Civic Education, and the National Conference of State Legislatures. The lesson plan provides a set of activities that help students appreciate the most basic practices of democracy in the United States?such as the role of deliberation and compromise.

 

Additional Lesson Plans

Suggestions for how to use Center on Congress materials in the classroom are found throughout this website. Each of the following has links to lesson plans and other teacher materials:

• E-learning modules [requires the Flash plug-in]
• Lee Hamilton Comments on Congress
• Congressional Moment radio series
• Fact of Congress television segments

For each, teachers will find an explanation of the Center’s materials, several suggested lesson plans with tools for assessing student learning, and alignment of the lessons with state curriculum standards for all states with social studies/civics standards for grades 5-12.