Classroom Activities
Part One - Setting the Stage: National Youth Movements (Lessons 1-5)
Essential Questions: What does it mean to be a “changemaker”? What conditions have pushed young people throughout American history to organize? How do institutions typically respond?
Lesson 1 - Kids Are Not the Threat
Essential Questions: What do we already believe about young people and civic power? Where did those beliefs come from?
Objectives: Students will be able to articulate the unit’s central questions in their own words and generate an initial list of what they already associate with the term “youth activism.”
Hook: Project the phrase, “The Kids Are Not the Threat” with no context and ask students to free-write for 3-5 minutes on what they think it means and why someone might say it. Then share out free-writes while charting recurring ideas on the board without editorializing.
Introduce the unit’s driving questions:
- What does it mean to be a young person who works to improve the place you live?
- How do young people identify the problems and inequities that exist in their communities?
- How have young people effectively advocated for change, historically and currently?
Mini-Lecture: Give a brief overview of what the unit will cover: national youth movements, New Haven’s own history of youth organizing, past and present, and a geographic inquiry into New Haven’s neighborhoods that accompanies a culminating civic design project.
Vocabulary: Introduce key vocabulary and have students record definitions in a running unit glossary: Activism, Institution, Advocacy, Disparity
Partner Activity: Have students interview each other for 5 minutes, answering one or both of these prompts:
- Have you or someone you know ever tried to change something in your neighborhood or school? Describe what happened?
- Can you think of anything you would like to change in your neighborhood or school? What would you want to change and how might you go about making such changes?
Exit Ticket: In two or three sentences, what do you think it means to be a “changemaker”? Name one thing about New Haven that you would want to change if you could.
Lesson 2 - Reading a City: Essential versus Desirable Resources
Essential Questions: How can we tell whether a city is meeting its residents’ needs? Who gets to decide what counts as a “need”?
Objectives: Students will be able to define and distinguish between “essential resources” and “desirable resources”; begin seeing the built environment as shaped by decisions, not by accident.
Callback: Read 3-4 anonymized responses to last class’s exit tickets aloud and ask, “What do these things have in common? Are they needs for survival, or are they things that make it a nicer place to live?”
Introduce the Essential vs. Desirable framework to the class:
- Essential = infrastructure needed for baseline survival and functioning (water, electricity, sanitation, internet, healthcare, transit, emergency services, affordable housing)
- Desirable = amenities that make a neighborhood vibrant (parks, gardens, libraries, museums, quality schools, grocery stores, gathering spaces)
Sorting Activity: Project a list of 20 mixed items on the board and have students sort them into essential vs. desirable categories in pairs/groups of three. They should discuss/debate the items as they sort. Debate any contested items as a class (e.g., Is a grocery store essential or desirable? Is a good school essential or desirable? There is no single right answer for some; the debate is the point.).
Photo Analysis: Project 5 or so photos of different areas in New Haven and have students identify which resources are present and absent.
Mapping Project: Introduce the map students will build together across the entire unit. Starting in Part Two, they will plot historical sites tied to New Haven’s youth organizing; later, in Part Three, they will layer in present-day essential and desirable resource data. Over the course of the unit, students will research and plot both essential and desirable resources across New Haven neighborhoods to build a map together.
Exit Ticket: Choose one essential and one desirable resource. Write one sentence for each to explain why it belongs in that category.
Lesson 3 - From Sit-Ins to the Freedom Movement
Essential Question: What did it mean for the Civil Rights Movement to be led, in large part, by young people?
Objectives: Students will be able to describe the 1950s conditions that set the stage for 1960s activism; describe the sit-in movement (including the Bennett College Belles’ role in planning it), the founding of SNCC, the Freedom Rides, the Birmingham Children’s Crusade, and Freedom Summer as youth-led organizing; explain why young people took the biggest risks.
Homework (assigned for completion before this lesson): Students complete an EdPuzzle video lesson with embedded comprehension questions about the social and political conditions of the 1950s (legal segregation and Brown v. Board; the start of the urban renewal/highway building era; Cold War-era pressure toward conformity and suppression of dissent; the postwar “baby boom” and the emergence of “teenager” as a new, distinct cultural identity with its own music, fashion, and money to spend) that set the stage for the youth movements of the next two decades.
Callback: “You watched a video on the conditions of the 1950s. Today we watch one of these conditions, legal segregation, get challenged directly, by people only slightly older than you.” Review/discuss a couple questions as a quick check of understanding.
Mini-Lecture with Video Clips: Cover the February 1960 Greensboro sit-ins and the rapid spread of the sit-in movement, including the Bennett College Belles’ central role in planning the campaign carried out by the four A&T students; the founding of SNCC, explicitly as a youth-led organization distinct from older civil rights groups; the Freedom Rides of 1961; the May 1963 Birmingham Children’s Crusade, when over a thousand Black schoolchildren marched against segregation and were met with fire hoses and police dogs; and the Freedom Summer of 1964, with emphasis on the age of the participants and the real risks they took.
Class Chart: Build a “Movements & Tactics” chart together as a class with three columns: Movement or Group, Issue, Tactics. Model filling in the chart for the sit-in movement and SNCC, have students work in pairs or groups of three to identify what information belongs in each column in the chart for Freedom Rides, the Birmingham Children’s Crusade, and Freedom Summer. Build the class chart together from their suggestions.
Turn & Talk: Have students consider and share responses to the following prompt before writing their response down on an Exit Ticket.
Exit Ticket: Why might young people specifically have been willing to take these risks?
Lesson 4 - Expanding Fronts: Black Power, Vietnam, and Campus Revolt
Essential Question: Why did the movement diversify and radicalize as the decade went on?
Objectives: Students will be able to explain the turn toward Black Power and the Panthers’ founding; explain campus anti-war organizing and its escalation, including SDS, the Columbia occupation, and the San Francisco State strike; and describe parallel movements, including women’s liberation (New York Radical Women), Latino youth organizing (the East L.A. walkouts and the Young Lords), and gay liberation (Stonewall).
Callback: “We watched the sit-in movement begin with non-violent, integrated action. By the mid-1960s, that one movement had multiplied into many different movements. Today we find out why.”
Mini-Lecture: Cover the turn toward Black Power (1966 on) as some organizers grew frustrated with the pace of nonviolent strategy; the escalating Vietnam draft and growth of campus anti-war organizing, including the 1968 Columbia occupation and the 134-day San Francisco State strike.
Jigsaw Reading Activity: Have students work in small groups, with each group reading a short profile of one of the following movements to report back on: Black Power organizing, anti-war/draft resistance and campus takeovers, women’s liberation, Latino youth organizing (covering both the East L.A. walkouts and the Young Lords as related but distinct examples), and gay liberation.
Class Chart: Add new rows to the Movements & Tactics chart started in Lesson 3, and have students share out from their jigsaw learning to add these new movements/groups to it.
Discussion: Using the chart as evidence, think about what has changed: Does more radical action mean a movement is failing, succeeding, or something else?
Exit Ticket: Name one new movement or tactic from today’s lesson that didn’t exist in 1960. Why do you think it emerged when it did?
Lesson 5 - Institutional Response: “Shut It Down” vs. “Water It Down”
Essential Questions: What’s the real difference between an institution that shuts a movement down and one that waters it down? And which is harder for organizers to fight?
Objectives: Students will be able to define two institutional strategies, “shutting a movement down” (suppression) and “watering a movement down” (co-optation), and analyze how institutions used these strategies in response to 1960s-70s youth organizing.
Callback: In reference to the Movements & Tactics chart, “You’ve spent two lessons filling this chart with the movements and their tactics. Today we are adding another column - Responses - because for every movement up here, someone in power had to decide how to respond.”
Vocabulary: Introduce the two new vocabulary terms with concrete definitions and examples and have students add them to their unit glossary:
- “Shut It Down” (suppression): Direct, forceful action to stop or shut a movement down.
Examples: An administrator responds to a student walkout by suspending the organizers and threatening the same punishment for anyone who joins future protests; a company facing a labor organizing drive fires the employees leading it, then tells the rest of the staff that unionizing puts their jobs at risk; a city facing repeated protests over a policy sends police to break up the demonstrations and arrest organizers, rather than respond to what they’re asking for.
- “Water It Down” (co-optation): Giving a movement just enough to calm it down or defuse it, without giving up real power or making the change that’s actually asked for.
Examples: An administration responds to a student walkout by creating a “student advisory committee” that hardly ever meets and has no actual power; a company facing a boycott runs ads about how much it “cares” about the cause without changing its practices; a city facing protests about a run-down park promises to “look into it,” forms a committee, and nothing changes for years.
Case Study Stations: Pulling directly from the charted examples, students rotate through stations built around the strongest illustrative cases: the assassination of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, and the Kent State shootings (both clear examples of suppression), the school district’s slow non-response to the East L.A. walkouts (a clear example of co-optation), and Stonewall or the San Francisco State strike (cases that resist the framework, resulting in both a real concession and real suppression at once). At each station, students will discuss and decide whether the institutional response was Shut It Down, Water It Down, both, or neither, and justify their reasoning with evidence from the source.
Class Chart: Add a “Response” column to the chart and fill in that column for each movement already listed as a class, rendering a verdict on whether institutions responded by shutting down the movement, watering down the movement, or a combination of both.
Discussion: Why might an institution choose to “water it down” instead of “shut it down”? What does each strategy cost an institution? What does each cost the movement? Preview Part Two of the unit directly: “Every movement we’ve studied so far has been national. Starting next class, we will focus on New Haven, and study the organizing and activism in our own community.”
Exit Ticket: In your own words, explain the difference between “shutting down a movement” and “watering down a movement.” Which do you think would be harder for a movement to fight back against, and why?
Part Two - New Haven’s Own History of Youth Activism (Lessons 6-10)
Essential Questions: How has activism unfolded in New Haven from the 1950s to today? How have institutions there responded to it?
Lesson 6 - Urban Renewal and Fighting Back Against the “Model City”
Essential Questions: Who was New Haven’s urban renewal actually a model for? What can young people do when the existing media won’t tell their story?
Objectives: Students will be able to explain Mayor Lee’s urban renewal program and Route 34’s construction and displacement; describe the Hill Parents Association’s organizing, including the youth-led park petition; describe Fred Harris’s Ram and Sheep as a tool of advocacy.
Callback: Have students review the Movements & Tactics & Responses Chart, “Every movement on this chart was already organized before an institution responded to it. Today’s story is different; it’s about a decision that created a reason to organize in the first place. As we start to focus on New Haven’s own history, listen for what that decision was, and who it was made without.”
Mini-Lecture: Cover Mayor Richard C. Lee’s 1954-1969 urban renewal program, and New Haven’s “Model City” reputation, then the demolition of Oak Street and the Hill to build Route 34, displacing large numbers of poor minority residents. Move directly into the response: how Hill residents formed the Hill Parents Association to challenge City Hall’s power over their neighborhood’s future, including the youth-led 1965 park petition. Introduce Fred Harris and Ram and Sheep, the youth-led community newspaper that directly criticized white city leaders for the neighborhood’s destruction.
Map/Photo Study: Using the Digital Atlas slider showing the difference between aerial photos from 1934 and the present, show students the Oak Street neighborhood from before and after demolition. Discuss what’s visible in “before” that’s gone in “after.”
Small-Group Discussion: What does it mean for young people to build their own media instead of asking existing newspapers to cover their concerns? Is starting your own newspaper a way of working around suppression, controlling your own story before an institution gets the chance to shut it down or water it down?
Exit Ticket: In 2-3 sentences, explain for whom was New Haven’s “Model City” reputation actually a model, and how did the Hill Parents Association respond to being left out of that vision?
Lesson 7 - Rebellion at Hillhouse High: The Black Student Union
Essential Question: What does it mean when a school calls the police on its own students?
Objectives: Students will be able to describe the conditions that resulted in the Hillhouse High School uprisings, explain the district’s decision to bring police into the school, and evaluate the formation of a teachers’ union as an institutional response to student organizing.
Callback: “Last class, we met the Hill Parents Association, which was actually adults and young people organizing together against City Hall. Today’s story is different: it happened inside a New Haven public school, organized entirely by students themselves.”
Mini-Lecture: Cover how during the 1967-68 school year, students at Hillhouse High School organized a series of uprisings in protest of conditions inside the school: overcrowding, disrespect from staff, and the exclusion of Black history and student voice in the curriculum.
Guided Reading: Using excerpts drawn from contemporary news reports, flyers, newsletters, and other such student-created materials, and correspondence with the mayor, students will trace three things in sequence: what students were demanding, how the school and city responded (including the decision to occupy the school with police), and what changed in the following months. This should include the rebellion’s role in the formation of a progressive teachers’ union in New Haven. Students annotate for all three as they read.
Discussion: Discuss the district’s response: was calling the police in to occupy the school a suppression (shutting it down) response or a co-optation (watering it down) response? What made administrators choose that response? What other responses could they have chosen? Discuss the formation of the teacher’s union: does that response fit “Shut It Down,” “Water It Down,” or neither? Push students to notice that this case resists that framework; sometimes an institutional response reshapes an entire institution (in this case the relationship between teachers and the district) in ways that no one involved initially intended.
Small Group Work: Have students compare the Black Student Union’s use of student-created materials and the underground press to the Hill Parents Association’s Ram and Sheep publication or Richard Balzer and Fred Harris’s Street Time (1972).
Exit Ticket: Today we saw two different responses to the Hillhouse rebellion: the police occupation, and the teachers’ union that formed afterward. Which one do you think mattered more to the students who organized the uprising in the first place, and why?
Lesson 8 - The First Wave: Synthesis and Mapping Workshop
Essential Question: Why do so many different stories of organizing cluster in the same New Haven neighborhoods?
Objectives: Students will explain how the Northern Student Movement began in New Haven as a Northern support network for SNCC and shifted toward direct organizing in New Haven; synthesize the 1950s-1960s New Haven organizations studied so far; begin plotting related locations on a unit-long New Haven map.
Homework (assigned for completion before this lesson): Students watch a teacher-recorded EdPuzzle video tracing the Northern Student Movement’s arc, from a student support arm for SNCC’s Southern organizing to a direct-action organization confronting housing discrimination, unequal schools, and economic exclusion in New Haven itself, with embedded questions checking what NSM’s focus was in 1961 versus 1963.
Callback: Call on students to briefly summarize one of the four organizations/movements studied in New Haven so far (urban renewal’s Oak Street neighborhood displacement, the Hill Parents Association, the Northern Student Movement, and Hillhouse’s Black Student Union), including at least one student summarizing the homework video, before today’s work begins.
Synthesis Chart: In small groups, students complete a comparison chart across all four case studies, organized by the same recurring questions: Who organized? What was the issue? What tactics were used? How did institutions respond?
Mapping Workshop: Give students time to work in groups to define the boundaries for one of the groups/movements to create a map overlay for the New Haven wall map. Each group will use provided historical data/addresses to plot one of the following sites: the Oak Street neighborhood renewal area; the Hill neighborhood where the Hill Parents Association was located, the confines of Yale University in 1961, and the neighborhood that drew students to Hillhouse High School in 1968 onto their New Haven map. This will be the first layer of an on-going mapping project.
Discussion: What does it mean that all four movements cluster and have overlap in the same part of the city? What does that tell us about where institutional power was being exercised, and where residents pushed back?
Exit Ticket: Next class we will study the Black Panthers in New Haven and the May Day protests. Based on the pattern you found on the map you created today, make a prediction about where you think these stories will unfold in the city, and explain your thinking.
Lesson 9 - The Black Panthers, the New Haven Nine, and May Day 1970
Essential Question: Is a criminal trial ever “just” a criminal trial? When an institution opens its doors to a protest against itself, is that solidarity, self-protection, or something else?
Objectives: Students will explain the Black Panther Party’s community programs in New Haven and describe the circumstances of the New Haven Nine trials; describe the May Day 1970 rally and Yale’s institutional response to it; evaluate whether the response was solidarity, self-protection, or co-optation; add May Day-related sites to the class map.
Callback: “Last class, you predicted where you thought this story would unfold based on the pattern you found on the map. Let’s find out if you were right.” Have 2-3 students share their predictions before revealing today’s key locations.
Mini-Lecture (20 min): Cover the Black Panther Party’s New Haven community programs, including breakfast and medical clinics, and the 1969 arrest of nine Party members, including national co-founder Bobby Seale and Warren Kimbro (the same former Oak Street resident from Lesson 6), in connection with the killing of a suspected police informant. Cover why many local organizers viewed the prosecution as a targeted attempt to dismantle the Panthers’ community infrastructure rather than a straightforward criminal matter. Mention Yale President Kingman Brewster’s April 1970 leaked statement calling himself “skeptical of the ability of black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States.” Close with the May Day rally itself: the May 1 gathering on the New Haven Green demanding the Panthers’ release and an end to Yale’s expansion, and Yale’s decision to support the student strike and open its facilities to demonstrators rather than treat the rally as a security threat, a deliberate reversal of Harvard’s failed approach two weeks earlier.
Discussion (12-15 min): Yale’s response doesn’t cleanly sort into “Shut It Down” or “Water It Down.” Was this “Water It Down,” a way of neutralizing the protest by absorbing it rather than confronting it? Or does it resist the framework entirely, the way Hillhouse’s teachers’ union did? Push students to notice that Yale’s decision was calculated (informed by watching Harvard’s approach fail) rather than either a simple concession or a real transfer of power, which is exactly what makes it hard to sort.
Mapping Addition (10-12 min): Add the New Haven Green, the courthouse, and relevant Yale campus sites to the ongoing class map. Compare this new layer to the sites plotted in Lesson 8; do these locations fall inside or outside the pattern students identified and predicted?
Exit Ticket: Does Yale’s response to May Day fit “Water It Down,” or does it resist the framework entirely? Defend your choice in 2-3 sentences using specific evidence from today’s lesson.
Lesson 10 - From Radical Protest to Institutional Organizing
Essential Question: How does the work of “changemaking” change once the era of mass protest ends?
Objectives: Students will be able to trace the shift from Kiddie Korner through the Citywide Youth Coalition, New Haven Rising, the 2020 marches, and the Climate Movement; evaluate whether recent institutional concessions (the Climate Emergency Resolution, Yale’s 2021 payment increase) represent real change or containment.
Homework (assigned for completion before this lesson): Students watch a teacher-recorded EdPuzzle video covering New Haven youth organizing from the 1980s to the present: the Kiddie Korner coalition and its role in electing John Daniels; the Citywide Youth Coalition’s 1976 founding and its “We Vote Next” campaign; New Haven Rising and the disparity between Yale’s tax-exempt property and its $40 billion endowment; the 2020 I-95 and Route 34 marches; the New Haven Climate Movement’s Climate Emergency Resolution; and each organization’s present-day activity (CWYC’s Board of Education seats, NHCM’s 2025 Transportation Transformation Resolution, New Haven Rising’s 2025 UNITE HERE march). Embedded questions check basic comprehension of each organization’s founding and goals.
Callback: “In the last class, Yale’s response to May Day was hard to sort into ‘Shut It Down’ or ‘Water It Down.’ Today’s homework video covered six decades of New Haven organizing, from the 1980s all the way to now. As you think back on it, did any of these stories get ‘Shut It Down’? Which felt like a clean ‘Water It Down’? And which felt genuinely unresolved, the way May Day did?”
Timeline-Building Synthesis: In small groups, students build a shared timeline of the organizations and events covered in the video (Kiddie Korner, CWYC, New Haven Rising, the 2020 marches, the Climate Movement, each organization’s present-day activity), noting for each entry: what did they organize around, and what tactics did they use? Groups then compare timelines as a class, identifying the throughline: a shift from single dramatic protests toward sustained, coalition-based strategy.
Discussion: Focus on the two clearest present-day test cases: the Climate Emergency Resolution and Yale’s 2021 payment increase. For each, ask: does this represent real, lasting change, or a quieter form of containment? What evidence would change your mind either way? Push students to notice that both cases remain genuinely contested, even by the people who fought for them.
Exit Ticket: Choose one organization from today’s timeline. In your own words, explain how its strategy differs from the organizations we studied earlier in the unit (Hill Parents Association, the Northern Student Movement, the Black Student Union, or the Panthers). What changed, and why do you think it changed?
Part Three - Geography as History and Civic Design (Lessons 11-17)
Essential Questions: How does New Haven’s built environment reveal decisions about power? How can students use that understanding to advocate for change themselves?
Lesson 11 - Institutions and the Built Environment: Highways and Yale’s Expansion
Essential Questions: Who benefits when a highway cuts through a neighborhood, and who pays the cost? What responsibility does an institution have to the community around it?
Objectives: Students will be able to explain how I-91, I-95, and Route 34 physically divided New Haven’s neighborhoods; analyze Yale’s ongoing expansion and tax-exempt footprint as a related form of institutional power over land.
Callback: “Last class you compared a present-day organization's strategy to one we studied earlier in the unit. Today we look at something different: not a strategy, but the physical shape of the city itself. Roads and land use can exercise power the same way police, courts, and city councils have throughout this unit, just more quietly.”
Mini-Lecture: Review Route 34’s construction (already covered in Lesson 6), then go deeper: the road’s role as “the road to nowhere,” its physical severance of the Hill from downtown, and Warren Kimbro’s framing of it as part of the “encirclement of Yale.” Note that this severance is only now being undone: the city’s Downtown Crossing initiative is currently reconnecting intersections that have been cut off for more than sixty years, converting the connector back into an ordinary city street. Then turn to Yale specifically: its ongoing physical and institutional expansion as part of a national pattern of “eds and meds” institutions reshaping their host cities. In New Haven, roughly 56% of the city’s real estate is tax-exempt, the large majority of it is Yale property assessed above $4.5 billion even as Yale’s endowment exceeds $40 billion, a disparity that fueled the 2020 “Respect Caravan” of 600 vehicles demanding Yale “pay its fair share” and led to a 2021 agreement to nearly double Yale’s voluntary payment to the city.
Discussion: Is Yale’s relationship to New Haven closer to the urban renewal-era City Hall we studied in Lesson 6, or closer to the more recent, contested concessions we saw in Lesson 10 (the Climate Emergency Resolution)? Push students to notice that this is the same “older, longer-running story” framing the unit has used before: urban renewal and May Day are just the most dramatic chapters of a much longer relationship between Yale and the land around it.
Exit Ticket: Choose one: the construction of Route 34, or Yale’s tax-exempt footprint. In 2-3 sentences, explain how that decision used land itself as a tool of institutional power.
Lesson 12 - Mapping Workday: Plotting Essential and Desirable Resources
Essential Question: What does a neighborhood’s mix of resources, and its gaps, reveal about the choices that have shaped it?
Objectives: Students will be able to research and plot the distribution of essential and desirable resources across two or more New Haven neighborhoods.
Callback: “Back in Lesson 2, before we’d studied any of this history, you sorted essential and desirable resources in the abstract. Today, you’re going to find out what that framework actually reveals about real New Haven neighborhoods.”
Research Workday: In pairs or small groups, students are assigned a section of New Haven and use provided data sources (city open-data resources, neighborhood profiles, or teacher-curated packets) to identify what essential and desirable resources are present or missing. Students plot their findings onto the class’s ongoing map, using a color-coded key distinguishing essential from desirable resources.
Mid-Workday Check-In: Pairs briefly share surprising findings with a neighboring group.
Exit Ticket: Name one essential or desirable resource missing from the neighborhood you researched today. What effect might that gap have on residents’ daily lives?
Lesson 13 - What the Map Tells Us: Whole-City Synthesis
Essential Question: Does today’s map of New Haven still reflect decisions made decades ago?
Objectives: Students will be able to synthesize their small-group research into a whole-class map and identify citywide patterns of disparity.
Callback: Ask two or three pairs to briefly restate the resource gap they found last class before combining their work with the rest of the class.
Assembly Activity: Each pair adds their findings to the single, shared class map, creating a citywide view of essential and desirable resource distribution for the first time, layered directly on top of the historical sites plotted in Lessons 8 and 9.
Gallery Walk: Students circulate the completed map with a note-catcher, recording patterns: clusters of missing resources, and any overlap with the historical sites already on the map (Oak Street, the Hill, Hillhouse, the Green, etc.).
Discussion: Do the neighborhoods with the biggest resource gaps today overlap with the neighborhoods most affected by urban renewal, highway construction, or Yale’s expansion? What does that overlap suggest about the relationship between history and present-day inequity?
Exit Ticket: What is the single clearest pattern you noticed on the completed class map? Why do you think that pattern exists?
Lesson 14 - From Inquiry to Action: Choosing a Disparity and Planning Strategy
Essential Questions: What makes a problem specific enough to actually solve? Who has the power to grant the change I’m asking for, and how do I reach them?
Objectives: Students will be able to select a specific, evidence-based disparity or unmet need in New Haven to address in their civic design project; apply lessons about institutional response to anticipate obstacles their proposal might face.
Callback: “Last class you found a pattern on our finished map. Today, that pattern becomes the starting point for your own project.”
Brainstorm: Using the class map and unit notes, students draft a shortlist of 2-3 possible disparities to address, each backed by specific evidence from the map or earlier research.
Strategy Planning: For their top choice, students complete a strategy organizer: Who has the power to grant the change needed? What might make them resistant? Which case study from this unit is most similar to my situation (Hill Parents Association, Hillhouse, May Day, the Climate Movement), and what can I learn from how it played out?
Peer Feedback: In small groups, students pitch their disparity and strategy in 90 seconds each, receiving feedback from peers: identify a strength and a ask a helpful question.
Exit Ticket: State the disparity you plan to focus on, the evidence that supports it as a need, and which historical case study you’re drawing strategic lessons from.
Lesson 15 - Proposal Workshop: Drafting
Essential Question: What separates a proposal from a complaint?
Objectives: Students will be able to produce a complete first draft of their civic design proposal.
Callback: Ask 2-3 students to state the historical lesson they’re applying to their draft today, from last class’s exit ticket.
Mini-Lesson: Review required proposal components: the specific disparity and its evidence; the proposed solution; the intended audience/decision-maker; anticipated obstacles; an explicit connection to a case study from the unit.
Extended Work Time: Students draft independently or in teams, using a provided template. Teacher circulates to support students who are stuck and press students whose drafts lack specific evidence/focus/audience.
Exit Ticket: What part of your proposal is strongest so far? What part are you still unsure about?
Lesson 16 - Proposal Workshop: Feedback and Revision
Essential Question: How do I know if my proposal makes sense to someone who wasn’t in the room when I wrote it?
Objectives: Students will be able to give and receive structured peer feedback and revise their proposals.
Callback: Reference last class’s exit tickets: “Many of you told me exactly what you were unsure about. Today’s feedback protocol is built to help with precisely that.”
Structured Peer Review: In small groups, each student presents their draft while peers use a feedback form focused on: Is the disparity backed by real evidence? Is the historical connection genuine? Has the student seriously considered obstacles?
Revision Time: Students revise using peer feedback; teacher conferences prioritize students with the weakest evidence base or historical connection.
Exit Ticket: What is one specific change you made to your proposal today based on peer feedback?
Lesson 17 - Showcase: Presenting Proposals for Change
Essential Question: What do I believe now about young people and change that I didn’t believe before?
Objectives: Students will be able to present their civic design proposals to an audience and reflect on the unit’s central questions in light of their own project.
Callback: Project the unit’s very first prompt from Lesson 1, “The Kids Are Not the Threat,” and ask students to reflect for one minute on how their understanding of that phrase has changed.
Showcase Presentations: Students present proposals (2-3 minutes each plus questions) to classmates, another class, or invited guests. Audience members use a feedback form noting at least one strength and at least one question per presenter.
Closing Discussion: Return to the unit’s driving questions from Lesson 1. Have students’ answers changed since day one?
Final Reflection (assigned as homework or a final exit ticket): “Young people are not a threat to democracy. They are, and have always been, among its most vital defenders.” Using at least two specific examples from New Haven’s history and one detail from your own project, explain whether or not you agree with this statement and why.
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