Rationale
Two pieces of evidence in our elementary school have helped me develop this unit: the results of the last two presidencies' mock elections and the staggering, year-after-year observation that students tend to fail dramatically, and increasingly more, when asked to think and reason. From the mock elections, I find that students vote under the same ideologies as their parents and, although not a surprising fact, when discussing their support to a specific candidate, their reasons are mostly superficial: they seem to be either repeating what publicity or advertising presents, or what was overhead in their parents' conversations. Repeating without reasoned support is something that is also, unfortunately, encouraged by education policies relying on standardized tests' data and an array of evaluation instruments which emphasize rote memory or regurgitation.
As a fifth grade teacher, I think it is crucial to help students enter middle school with an understanding of the need to reason, discriminate and discern when giving an opinion or writing an essay. I also find it crucial to challenge students' thinking through arguments and logic in all subjects and, in the context of this unit, in Social Studies and Language Arts.
Several of my lessons are structured around fiction and non-fiction texts. Students do well when answering questions or performing a task at the knowledge (following Bloom's 1956 Taxonomy) or remembering (Anderson and Krathwohl's 2000 Taxonomy) level. However, students are usually puzzled when handed a task designed around the higher–order thinking skills, from the comprehension level and all the way to evaluation or create. This becomes more evident and dramatic when studying history.
In general, students tend to label the study of history as boring, a "thing from the past" and not important. Government and politics are underlined by similar comments. The success usually relies in presenting the historical and political information in a manner that makes it relevant to our students' (and our families') lives today. At times, though, students still find the connections unrelated to their reality of instant gratification, changing channels or getting lost in entertainment. Even war, a constant presence in our contemporary world, has become either another piece of news they hear and forget or the excuse to keep their parents' or peers' ideologies and stereotypes in place… if not, a series of remote incidents trivialized by video games.
This curriculum unit is thus grounded on the need to develop our students' interest towards America's historical past, its politics and the developing role of the presidency. This is especially significant since the nation will be involved in electing, or reelecting, a President in the fall of this year, 2012. My overall goal (more specific Common Core Standards are in the Appendix) is still to help students access, comprehend and analyze historical information and relate it to our current circumstances; an additional bonus would be that, when running our mock election this year, students are more curious about the candidates, their views and policies, and how these may impact them and their own families.
The unit consists of two parts:
A) New Nation, New Government: initially, we will start with a short review of the American Revolution and proceed with the Articles of Confederation to understand the transitional role of this first document in shaping early government in the United States; we will then proceed to see how the creation of the Constitution offered Americans a strong, balanced central government in addition to safeguards against the possibility of a tyrannical leader.
B) Lifeskills and the Presidencies of Washington, Adams and Jefferson: during the second part of the unit, we will study the presidencies of George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. We will examine instances in their presidencies when the possibility of a tyrant government could have risen and how the Constitution, the form of government, and the presidents themselves contributed to keeping democracy in place. The students will also determine how these presidents used Lifeskills in their role as leaders of the nation, especially during the following key events of their administration: the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, and the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.
Throughout the unit we will consider the social and economic conditions of the country and try to understand, as a final conclusion, how these three presidents' leadership styles contributed to their successes, failures or challenges, and whether other factors contributed to those outcomes.
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