- #Sandra day o connor icivics how to#
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Each unit engages students in a contemporary civics topic, such as the electoral college, voting age, and military intervention. The iCivics website describes Drafting Board as a supplemental instructional tool for middle and high school students “that is most effective with teacher direction as a three-to-five-day persuasive-writing intervention.” The site currently contains seven civics units, but there are plans to expand the site to offer seventeen. The third tool-and our focus here-is the iCivics Drafting Board, an interactive writing tool that helps students to develop strong argumentative writing skills while exposing them to important social-studies content.
The first is DBQuest, which currently contains just a single unit on civil rights but requires students “to tackle important civic questions using primary source documents and analytical skill.” The second is WebQuests, which includes guided web searches that help students “connect civics topics to the real world” by directing them to other online resources on similar topics. ICivics also includes three supplemental instructional tools designed to develop specific skills and knowledge. Additional mini-lessons include brief readings and activities on specific historical figures, events, and court cases that have influenced American government (such as John Locke, the debates between Federalists and Anti-Federalists, and Brown vs. Each unit includes an assortment of lesson plans and interactive games that help students learn about and participate in civic life.
#Sandra day o connor icivics full#
The full site provides classroom practitioners with curriculum units, lesson plans, games, and other resources centered on various civic-engagement topics such as the constitution, civil rights, and the three branches of government.
Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor to enhance civics education across the nation, iCivics is a website that has grown from five thousand registered teacher users in 2012 to over 110,000 today.
#Sandra day o connor icivics how to#
Absent such strategies, students may be assigned writing yet not know how to get better at it.įortunately, tools such as iCivics Drafting Board can help with writing instruction across subjects, particularly when it comes to the important “argumentative essay.” If you teach social studies at the secondary level, we find Drafting Board well worth a look.įounded by retired U.S. Then we must help teachers recognize that their pupils need strategies for learning how to write well within specific subject areas. First, teachers need to appreciate that writing well is essential to the study of any subject. We are keenly aware of the challenge in encouraging teachers to work on writing instruction in subject areas other than English language arts (after all, one of us is curriculum director for a midsized K–12 school district).
#Sandra day o connor icivics series#
Editor’s note: This article is part of the series The Right Tool for the Job: Improving Reading and Writing in the Classroom, which provides in-depth reviews of promising digital tools for English language arts classrooms.
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