Students can answer the quiz questions to see how their political beliefs match their political parties and candidates. The survey questions are balanced, and students can learn more about a topic or pick their on response if the ones listed don't match what they think.

Interactive map for do it yourself projections of the electoral college results. Also includes historical results.

This lesson is based on the Annenberg Classroom video âA Call to Act: Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co.,â which tells the law-changing story behind the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009. Students gain insight into law-making process, consider how statutory decisions made by the Supreme Court can prompt better laws, and learn about the rights and responsibilities they will have when they enter the workforce.

The estimated time for this lesson is four days.

Use this lesson as the foundation for the Stamp Act Resistance Narrative, The Boston Massacre Narrative, and The Boston Tea Party Narrative.

Website that has current news that is sorted by political ideology. Good to use for current event research. You can search a specific current political news story and be able to see how news outlets on the Left, Center, Right describe that topic.

The era of the American Founding lasted from the 1770s through either the late 1780s or early 1790s, depending on one’s perspective or school of thought. For the sake of this resource, the Founding is defined as being the period from 1776 through 1789 – that is, from the writing of the Declaration of Independence through George Washington’s inauguration as the country’s first president. This toolkit provides guiding questions and links to essential documents, resources, and lesson plans related to America's founding.

In 1777, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Articles of Confederation. The objectives of this activity are: Students will analyze the provisions of the Articles of Confederation. Students will determine why individuals such as George Washington expressed a growing concern over government’s inadequacies, and why these concerns were expressed by and heightened after events such as Shays’s Rebellion. Students will explain why there was a growing call for creating a strong central government and the rationales for the various arguments.

We've all had that experience, the one where we start arguing with someone and find that we disagree about pretty much everything. When two people have radically different background beliefs (or worldviews), they often have difficulty finding any sort of common ground. In this lesson, students will learn to distinguish between the two different types of background beliefs: beliefs about matters of fact and beliefs about values. They will then go on to consider their most deeply held background beliefs, those that constitute their worldview. Students will work to go beyond specific arguments to consider the worldviews that might underlie different types of arguments.

This lesson builds upon prior knowledge of the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights by asking students to think critically about the issues and philosophies central to both. Through investigation and debate, students are asked to question why certain rights were added to the
Constitution and why others were not. Such a discussion will encourage students to synthesize multiple historical and contemporary perspectives about their rights to decide if, in today’s world, we
need different rights, if our rights are complete the way they are, or if the existing ones need change.

The first ten amendments to the United States Constitution, adopted through ratification, are collectively referred to as the Bill of Rights. As the first nine outline fundamental guarantees to the citizenry and the tenth reserves some governmental powers to the state governments, the Bill of Rights establishes limitations on the scope of the federal government. In this lesson, students will explore the history of the Bill of Rights and the meaning of the amendments included in the document through videos and activities.

In this lesson, students will learn about the individual rights that are included in the Bill of Rights and current issues relating to them. Students will use C-SPAN Classroom's Constitution Clips to explore what each of these rights mean and determine how these rights apply to current events in America. This lesson works well with classes with one-to-one devices or in flipped classrooms.

The Court decided that state laws requiring separate but equal schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. This resource includes teacher materials, guides, and activities for teaching about this Supreme Court case.

In this lesson, students will study the Supreme Court case Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2013). They will examine the facts of the case and analyze the arguments made on both sides through primary source documents and preceding cases. They will then assess the majority and minority decisions for the case.

This lesson features an investigation of a selected member of Congress to determine whether they may have been influenced by campaign contributions. The lesson has various videos about the creation of the FEC, court cases dealing with campaign finance, and a lesson plan that has students discuss how campaign funds may influence voting behavior. There are number of different sections to this lesson plan that could each be used as a single part of a lesson plan developed by a teacher.

The principle of checks and balances prevents one branch of government from becoming too powerful. Examples of checks and balances include vetoing of bill, ratifying treating, judicial review and others. This lesson provides video clips with examples and explanations of checks and balances.

Students will learn what it means to be a U.S. citizen and how citizenship is obtained. They will compare and contrast personal and political rights with social responsibilities and personal duties. Students will explore global citizenship, and the rights and responsibilities of citizens in other countries. They will also learn about community engagement by selecting a problem of their own and creating a plan to solve it.

The purpose of this lesson is to engage students in a discussion of the Constitutional Convention. Students will explore the key disputes that arose during the convention, including most prominently how power would be divided between the federal and state governments and the various branches of government. Furthermore, students with understand the importance of compromise during the Constitutional Convention. They will then apply these observations to other historical examples of debate and compromise to understand the nature of decision-making and civic discourse--discussion rooted in mutual respect for differences and desires for understanding--in the United States.

This lesson will focus on the case Korematsu v. U.S. in comparison with other times in U.S. history when the government was faced with the challenge of how to protect the country during war and, at the same time, protect individual freedoms. Using primary sources, students will examine five events in which U.S. citizens were forced to give up their civil liberties in times of war, highlighting the tension between liberty and security. Students will analyze these events to determine what groups were affected and the reasoning for and against the government action to decide if the government action was justified. Students will be able to form an opinion on the essential question: Is our government ever justified in restricting civil liberties for the security of the nation?

The African-American Civil Rights movement is typically seen as having taken place mostly in the 1950s and 60s, when a confluence of social and economic factors enabled political change. The movement, however, has much deeper roots, and thus our toolkit starts in the 19th Century, some two generations before leaders like King, Parks, and others were born. Viewing the Civil Rights movement as a generational one provides a broader perspective on the ideas and people at the foundation of this work to achieve “a more perfect union” for all Americans. This toolkit provides guiding questions and links to essential documents, resources, and lesson plans related to the Civil Rights movement.

The American Civil War was fought from 1861-1865, and followed by the period of Reconstruction, generally accepted by scholars to have ended in 1877. The following collections include documents essential to gaining and understanding of how the war began, progressed, and ended, and how Reconstruction was conceived and attempted. This toolkit provides guiding questions and links to essential documents, resources, and lesson plans related to the Civil War and reconstruction.