Lesson Plans
Illustrating America
Students explore the stories we tell when illustrating America through primary source analysis, reflection, and creation.
Women’s Rights: Seneca Falls & Beyond
Students investigate a key event in the history of women's rights and the importance of commemorating the struggle for equal rights, then consider possible contributions to help ensure a future with greater equality.
Selma & Voting Rights: Standing Up for Equality
Through inquiry into primary sources, students discover a story of citizens shaping and sustaining our democracy through civic action and will contemplate the import and impact of citizens who strive for equality. This lesson may be used prior to reading a fictional work or poem related to the civil rights movement or in conjunction with a close reading of Lyndon B. Johnson’s March 15, 1965 voting rights address to Congress (in whole or in part).
Gerrymandering: Voting by Numbers
Students learn about the application of ratios and proportions to the real political issue of gerrymandering. In Part I, students conduct a primary-source analysis of the original 1812 political cartoon about Elbridge Gerry’s redistricting in Massachusetts to build background knowledge. In Part II, students analyze a historical map of Massachusetts’s gerrymandered voting districts in 1812 and compare it to the political cartoon to discuss issues of fairness. In Part III, students solve a hypothetical problem about fair representation on a student council, using their knowledge and understanding of gerrymandering and ratios. Finally, students role-play state legislators in a hypothetical state to solve problems of representation, including gerrymandering.
Voting: Rights and Responsibilities
In this three-part lesson students use primary sources to explore voting rights in the United States. In Part I, students analyze two sets of documents to gain a deeper understanding of how suffrage has been both expanded and suppressed, developing claims about how voting rights impact equality. In Part II, students further analyze one of the documents from Day One before taking on the role of a congressional committee charged with amending (or not) the Voting Rights Act to require compulsory voting. In Part III, students write their answer to the Essential Question, informed by class discussion and primary source analysis.
Education and Equality in the Courts
Students analyze primary sources related to equality in education in the United States. In Part I, students analyze two sets of primary sources that illustrate major transformations in American public education following both the Mendez v. Westminster (1947) federal case and the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) Supreme Court case. In Part II, students participate in a moot court activity about expanding equality for undocumented immigrant and legal-resident or citizen students in the historic Supreme Court case of Plyler v. Doe (1982). Students then write their answers to questions about the role of equality in public education.
Does Every Vote Count?
Students analyze primary sources to examine examples of voting, then discuss who votes and how ballots have changed to make voting equitable for all eligible voters.
The Impact of Voting
Students analyze primary sources to review their own understandings of voting rights in the United States, learn how voting rights have changed over time, and gain a better understanding of how the right to vote has impacted equality. After, students use their learning to create a teen voting information campaign.
Equality Under the Law: Problems and Solutions
Students examine how equality under the law has evolved in the United States. Students then use both primary and secondary sources to summarize and report on a problem of equality and its solution under the law, and reflect on how these lessons from history can help them as they consider issues of inequality in contemporary society
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