Teaching Strategies
This curriculum unit will take four to five weeks to complete and will continue to serve as a teaching model for students. There are fifty-minute periods, and during a class, there will be adequate time to complete reading, studying, and analysis.
Socratic Seminar
Student’s inquiries, collaborative examination, and cognitive tools will be used to investigate and analyze questions and problems. Reading and writing strategies will be addressed and utilized, while students brainstorm, ask questions, and think critically in Socratic Seminars. Questions will include, how did voting rights transform America and create the cornerstone of today’s Democratic Society? How can the right to vote to continue our democracy in the future? Looking at what if decisions about Jim Crow laws were different, how could that have changed history?
Rap and Song
Students will listen to and research the Hamilton soundtrack and study our history through rap and song.
“As musicals go, “Hamilton” is infinitely listenable, but one of the biggest reasons for the show’s popularity is that Lin-Manuel Miranda managed to uniquely capture the human side of our Founding Fathers in a way that history books or previous movies weren’t quite able to portray them. Hamilton and his colleagues escape the two dimensions of historical writing to be complex, human, and relatable. It’s this relatability that makes them interesting for students.”
Students will discuss our founding fathers, the Constitution, and the Federalist Papers. Students will also read two important chapters from Chernow’s book Hamilton that the musical Hamilton was based on.
Timeline
The unit will proceed chronologically with a color-coded timeline of historical voting rights events in our history. The class will begin by reading and studying the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution to establish the history of voting rights in the United States. Using a color-coded visual timeline to show important dates in history will help students to see the progression of historical events in chronological order. Students will draw and chart a timeline of specific dates to make historical connections. Students will proceed with an excel spread sheet to visually align these events.
Document Based Reading and Questions
Students will read and analyze various primary source documents regarding the Voting Rights Act of 1965. After completing various activities over these sources, students will compose a letter to a local organization or government agency advocating for a proposal the students created to address local voter disenfranchisement. Students will analyze the 2013 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Shelby County v. Holder, that struck down key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, a law often hailed as the single most effective piece of civil rights legislation in history. Students will investigate additional civil rights issues currently in the headlines in order to consider how far we have come and how far we still need to go in addressing civil rights in the U.S. today.
Students will examine the 2006 Act to Amend the Voting Rights Act. They will research the reasons that are given for the necessity of an amendment. Listening to the 2014 US Senate hearing, they will examine the harm done by Shelby v. Holder to the voting rights of minority groups.34
Think, Pair, Share
Another great strategy as, Ian Shapiro, discussed in our Seminar is to pose the question to our students in thinking about how our society has changed so much in the past 240 years and to think about how and why the Constitution is so hard to change. Furthermore, students can create classroom rules and think about how these rules will be relevant in the future. The Think, Pair, Share strategy helps students build confidence, encourages greater participation, and often results in more thoughtful discussions.
Students will answer questions about is there equal voting power in our states. When it comes to our Senators, voting power is very disproportionate to the size of our state populations. Students will be asked, do people want to be bound by the constraints of our forefathers? Will these rules and laws still be applicable 200 years from now?
In each lesson, students will be provided the needed contextual support, reading materials, and an exemplar for each of the activities. As with any classroom, as the unit progresses adjustments will have to be made for pacing and student performance. Each student’s unique perspective will be honored.
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