Good morning friends and colleagues. If you use Civics360, you likely noticed the following when you try to load a video:
Basically, TeacherTube is now down. We have reached out to them to get an ETA on when it will be back up and find out why this happened. Once it is back up we will let you know.
We apologize for the issues that this causes and are working to get it fixed!
Check out the National Constitution Center’s biographies of the Founding Fathers! https://constitutioncenter.org/learn/educational-resources/founding-fathers
It’s Founders Month here in Florida! According to the Florida Department of Education,
Section (s.) 683.1455, Florida Statutes (F.S.), designates the month of September as American Founders‘ Month and s. 1003.421, F.S., recognizes the last full week of classes in September in public schools as Celebrate Freedom Week.
So what does this mean for our schools and kids and teachers? Basically, it’s time to do some learning about the men and women who have helped shape this state and this country. Here on our Florida Citizens blog, we’ll be doing at least two posts a week with a brief overview of a particular Founder, Framer, thinker, or shaper of this state or this nation and how they made an impact.
American Founders’ Month continues here in Florida. Today, we take a look at one of the most influential of those women who played a role in the establishment and early days of the United States: Mercy Otis Warren.
Mercy Otis Warren was one of the most well-read and literate residents of Massachusetts in her day, man or woman. A playwright and a historian, an eloquent essayist and inveterate letter writer, she was one of the loudest voices speaking out against the failures and perceived tyranny of British government in Massachusetts and the other colonies.
A long time friend to both Abigail and John Adams, she broke with her dear friend over the creation of the U.S. Constitution, which she opposed as a violation of the ideals she and Adams were strong advocates for during the Revolution. Indeed, she was one of those Anti-Federalists who wrote in response to the Federalist Papers; using the nom de plume ‘A Columbian Patriot’, she wrote powerfully on perceived flaws in the new Constitution, and as herself to her dear friend John Adams on how he had so betrayed what they fought for. Sadly, her relationship with the Adams family never truly recovered.
You can learn more about this fascinating woman through the National Woman’s Hall of Fame.
Grab the Powerpoint slide featured in this post: Mercy Otis Warren AFM
Good morning friends! Don’t forget that the 2019 Florida Council for the Social Studies Annual Conference is coming soon (and you can register here!). Not only do we have some excellent sessions planned, but we also have some fine exhibitors joining us. Today, we’ll highlight just a few.
Teaching With Primary Sources
If you aren’t familiar with the work of Dr. Scott Waring and his folks in collaboration with the Library of Congress, you should be! They offer some excellent resources to support the use of primary sources in the classroom, and of course Dr. Waring also has his annual SOURCES conference! Be sure to stop by their table during the FCSS conference.
The Sikh Coalition
The Sikh Coalition have been generous supporters of FCSS over the years, and we are excited to have them joining us this year as well. They do some excellent work sharing educational resources and tools for folks interested in learning about the Sikh community, as well as on the importance of religious liberty, so integral to our lives as Americans. Check out their table during the FCSS conference!
Indiana University Center on Representative Government
The Center on Representative Government, from Indiana University, are strong supporters of FCSS, and offer some excellent resources relating to civic education!
The Center on Representative Government is a non-partisan, educational institution that has developed an extensive array of free civics education resources and activities to improve the public’s understanding of the role of representative government, to strengthen civic engagement, and to teach the skills that are essential to sustaining our form of representative democracy.
At the core of the Center’s work is the belief that our nation’s great experiment of representative democracy has served us well for more than 200 years, but it fundamentally rests on an informed electorate that understands our system of government and participates in our civic life. Be sure to check out their table at the conference!
And More!
We’ll highlight additional exhibitors and sessions over the course of the next few weeks. Be sure to check this space for more! Register for the conference today!
Check out the National Constitution Center’s biographies of the Founding Fathers! https://constitutioncenter.org/learn/educational-resources/founding-fathers
It’s Founders Month here in Florida! According to the Florida Department of Education,
Section (s.) 683.1455, Florida Statutes (F.S.), designates the month of September as American Founders‘ Month and s. 1003.421, F.S., recognizes the last full week of classes in September in public schools as Celebrate Freedom Week.
So what does this mean for our schools and kids and teachers? Basically, it’s time to do some learning about the men and women who have helped shape this state and this country. Here on our Florida Citizens blog, we’ll be doing at least two posts a week with a brief overview of a particular Founder, Framer, thinker, or shaper of this state or this nation and how they made an impact.
George Washington is perhaps the one Founding Father that most people, both here and abroad, may recognize by both name and image. From his placement on the one dollar bill and the quarter, to his name on numerous cities throughout the United States as well as our architecturally rich capital, Washington is everywhere. There is so much we could say about our first president, from his precedent-setting time as our First Citizen to his (varied) success as a military leader to his mixed feelings about slavery. Today, we bring you this link to Mount Vernon, on the life, legacy, and character of our first president.
You can download the PowerPoint slide on Washington here: George Washington.
Our next post will discuss one of the first American feminists and a great patriot, Mercy Otis Warren. Watch this space for more!
And don’t forget to check out the resources provided by the Civics Renewal Network for more wonderful stuff for American Founders’ Month!
Check out the National Constitution Center’s biographies of the Founding Fathers! https://constitutioncenter.org/learn/educational-resources/founding-fathers
It’s Founders Month here in Florida! According to the Florida Department of Education,
Section (s.) 683.1455, Florida Statutes (F.S.), designates the month of September as American Founders‘ Month and s. 1003.421, F.S., recognizes the last full week of classes in September in public schools as Celebrate Freedom Week.
So what does this mean for our schools and kids and teachers? Basically, it’s time to do some learning about the men and women who have helped shape this state and this country. Here on our Florida Citizens blog, we’ll be doing at least two posts a week with a brief overview of a particular Founder, Framer, thinker, or shaper of this state or this nation and how they made an impact.
(This slide is available here: Wheatley FM)
Our first highlight this week is an incredible woman, one of the first great poets of what would become the United States. Phillis Wheatley was a slave, taken from Africa when she was just seven years old and enslaved by a prominent Boston family (a reminder that American slavery was not a uniquely Southern institution) who recognized her literary genius young and encouraged her poetry and writing, and she gained fame and support from significant figures in New England and in the British Isles. Freed at last when she was about 21, she continued to compose beautiful poetry, meditating on questions of life, death, liberty, family, and hope. One of the most important topics, near and dear to her, though, was America. As the Poetry Foundation tells us:
In addition to classical and neoclassical techniques, Wheatley applied biblical symbolism to evangelize and to comment on slavery. For instance, “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” the best-known Wheatley poem, chides the Great Awakening audience to remember that Africans must be included in the Christian stream: “Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, /May be refin’d and join th’ angelic train.” The remainder of Wheatley’s themes can be classified as celebrations of America. She was the first to applaud this nation as glorious “Columbia” and that in a letter to no less than the first president of the United States, George Washington, with whom she had corresponded and whom she was later privileged to meet. Her love of virgin America as well as her religious fervor is further suggested by the names of those colonial leaders who signed the attestation that appeared in some copies of Poems on Various Subjects to authenticate and support her work: Thomas Hutchinson, governor of Massachusetts; John Hancock; Andrew Oliver, lieutenant governor; James Bowdoin; and Reverend Mather Byles. Another fervent Wheatley supporter was Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.
Sadly, one of the greatest poets of the early United States died impoverished and alone. Her poetry, though, and through it the memory of her and her dreams of what the new nation COULD be, lives on. You can learn more about Phillis Wheatley from the Poetry Foundation and from the third activity in this excellent lesson plan provided by the National Park Service.
Our next post will discuss our first and perhaps greatest president, George Washington. Watch this space for more!
And don’t forget to check out the resources provided by the Civics Renewal Network for more wonderful stuff for American Founders’ Month!
A reminder, dear friends and colleagues, that the Florida Council for the Social Studies Annual Conference is fast approaching (and you can register here!). So let’s take a look at some of the sessions on the docket for the conference! We’ll be doing this over the next few weeks, highlighting 3 to 5 interesting sessions that are likely to draw your interest.
Saturday, October 19th
Using Place as a Primary Source
By using location/historical site websites as well as photographs taken by teachers at historic locations, we can use the geography and the structures of a given place to add to student understanding of why these locations (and the events pertaining to them) are significant. We can also use the images/films of the locations to analyze why the site might have been important, what the sites can tell us and how they add to the context of their historical events and eras.
What an interesting approach to thinking about primary sources and exposing our kids to new lenses of disciplinary literacy!
Differentiated Instruction in Social Studies
This workshop will help K-12 instructors plan specific differentiated topics in Social Studies instruction to meet the diverse needs of students in the classroom i.e. students with disabilities, ELL students, and many more.
This is always a useful sort of session, isn’t it? We can always use more support for the work that we do within the diverse classrooms we work with today!
Captain America: More than a Shield!
Captain America is an iconic figure in both comic books and movies. This session will address whether Captain America is simply a tool of wartime propaganda or if he has a greater purpose.
I mean really. It’s CAPTAIN AMERICA! This session aligns well with both state benchmarks and with the Heroes and Villains theme of this year’s conference!
Table Top Escapes: Reinforcing Concepts for Review Through Problem Solving
Create your own table top escape room for reinforcement and review. Strategies can be applied to any discipline, grade level and using everyday materials. Digital escapes are also discussed and outlined. This is a hands-on sesssion! Participants will leave with strategies, tips and examples.
Is there anything hotter with than escape rooms these days? This sounds like a potentially useful and fascinating strategy for a wide variety of social studies content!
We’ll talk about some additional sessions soon! Go ahead and register here!
Florida is, without a doubt, a trendsetter in civics education. Thanks in large part to the Justice Sandra Day O’Connor Civics Education Act passed almost a decade ago, civics has been a huge priority in this state, as the #CivXNow/iCivics video below illustrates:
This recent EdWeek piece builds on that:
The Sunshine state is often lauded for its cohesive push for civics education, thanks to a 2010 law bearing the name of the legendary Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. The law required a new middle school course and an aligned test to measure civics knowledge that makes up nearly a third of each student’s grade in that subject. It covers four main prongs, including the origins and purposes of law and governments; citizens’ rights and responsibilities, the political process, and the organization and function of government.
The state remains one of the few to emphasize civics at the middle school level. In most states, formal civics education begins at high school. Whatever students get before that is taught within a generic social studies or history class—often in a nuts-and-bolts or overly sentimentalized, patriotic way.
In a sense, Florida’s traditional standards-and-assessment approach to civics owes something to the same reform movement that culminated in the federal No Child Left Behind Act—the test-heavy law that many civics experts now blame for reducing time spent on the subject. But there is some truth to the adage that what’s tested gets taught, and scores on the middle school test have risen on the exam across the state since its introduction in 2013-14, and just over 70 percent of students earn passing scores.
A lesser known factor in Florida’s work is the central role played by the Lou Frey Institute at the University of Central Florida. Although not formally part of the state’s K-12 education bureaucracy, the center has become the de facto clearinghouse for materials and teacher training for the course.
Even before the law had been signed, the institute was laying the groundwork. In 2009, it began developing model civics lessons for teachers. In 2010, the state legislature began appropriating funds to support those efforts, and in 2011, the state education department gave the institute a grant to run teacher professional development.
“I will tell you that building the kind of support system we have been for Florida is crucial to success,” said L. Doug Dobson, the Lou Frey Institute’s executive director. “Otherwise you just pass a law and clap your hands and say you’re done, and whatever happens, happens.”
Districts initially struggled to unlearn some of their former practices to cover the much more extensive content requirements: “The pacing was really a hurdle for us,” said Robert Brazofsky, the executive director for social sciences for Miami-Dade county. But now, the district has two staff members devoted to civics who provide in-school supports to teachers, and thanks to the testing data, they’ve been able to target schools with lower passing rates for extra help.
Now that the law is nearly a decade old, some in Florida are trying to get their arms around its impact. The Lou Frey Institute has worked with interested counties to informally survey students at the end of the middle school course on their civic beliefs and attitudes.
In Miami-Dade, Brazofsky said, most students surveyed agree with broad civic notions, like the importance of helping others in need, but there is still work to be done translating knowledge into lifelong behaviors and beliefs. For example, only about half of students surveyed said they thought it was OK for newspapers to publish freely without government approval.
“To really support and improve the civic attitudes of young people in my opinion, a test is a good thing to have, but it doesn’t always lead to the attitudes, beliefs, and dispositions you would want as an engaged citizen,” he said.
Earlier this year, Governor DeSantis signed Florida House Bill 807, which mandates a comprehensive review of the textbooks and the benchmarks for civics in the state. This process has now begun, and you are invited, as stakeholders in civic education, to contribute your feedback. This is a dual track process. The benchmarks are being reviewed simultaneously with the curricular materials, but the process uses two separate reviews within the EdCredible for your input. You are invited to review the benchmarks, the texts (provided online), or both. On 22 August, there will be a webinar to learn more about this review process. See the memo from FLDOE below for more details and for how to register for the webinar!
Public input is encouraged through the online EdCredible® platform accessible at www.floridacivicsreview.org. EdCredible® provides all stakeholders with open access to participate in the review process. Stakeholders are required to open an account using their valid email address before providing input. The review will close on October 15, 2019.
To offer further insight into this opportunity, the department will offer a public webinar to discuss the review on August 22, 2019, at 4:00 pm EDT. This optional public webinar is
intended to provide background on the Civics instructional materials state adoption process and the history of the Civics EOC Assessment, including stakeholder involvement
in determining its content, development and setting of achievement level expectations.
Neither attending the live webinar nor viewing the recorded webinar are required in order for stakeholders to participate in the public review of the Civics instructional materials and EOC assessment test item specifications.If you are interested in attending, please register for the webinar at
https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/3357539475902628619. After registering, a
confirmation email will be sent containing information about joining the webinar. A
recording of the webinar, as well as the presentation and a transcript, will be posted to
http://www.fldoe.org/civicsreview for those who are unable to attend.
We encourage you to share this information with local stakeholders to help maximize the number of Floridians contributing to this critical process.Contact Information:
CivicsReview@fldoe.org
I encourage you to join the process and make your voice heard!
Heroes and villains. Social studies is filled with heroes and villains, and that’s the theme of the upcoming Florida Council for the Social Studies Annual Conference! Today, let’s take a look at a hero! We are excited to announce the keynote speaker for the conference is the wonderful Dr. Susan MacManus (@DrMacManus on twitter!) recently retired star professor from the University of South Florida.
Her topic, ‘So You Think You Know Florida’s Voters’, will dive into registration and voting patterns using a generational approach, with an emphasis on Millennials and GenZers. It will explore a conception of civic engagement from a lens that addresses misconceptions.
A hero’s work indeed, and one that aligns well with our need to understand this generation that we teach!
Over the next couple of weeks, we will highlight potential sessions of interest. Please come join your fellow heroes, make connections, and learn from colleagues about teaching in these difficult times of heroism and villainy!
Civics is not something that should be limited to middle and high school, or post school life. Civics, that is, learning about and understanding the tools and responsibilities and obligations of engaging in the life of a community, is something that should be happening from the very first time a child sets foot in school. We need to be ‘doing civics’ with our elementary kids from day one!
KidCitizen is an exciting and increasingly popular new online tool for introducing concepts of civic engagement and civic learning through primary sources to kids of all ages, including kindergarten.
In KidCitizen’s interactive episodes, children explore civics and government concepts by investigating primary source photographs from the Library of Congress. They also connect what they find with their daily lives.
KidCitizen episodes capitalize on the active and social nature of young children’s learning. They use primary sources for rich demonstrations, interactions, and models of literacy in the course of innovative hands-on activities that make academic content meaningful, build on prior experiences, and foster visual literacy and historical inquiry. Each KidCitizen episode draws on a set of primary source photographs from the Library of Congress.
All KidCitizen episodes run on PCs, Macs, Chromebooks and iOS and Android mobile devices.
The great thing about Kid Citizen is that it focuses on just that: how can kids be engaged in civic life? A cursory glance at the interactive episodes and modules alone provide a good overview of this!
Recently, our friends over at the National Council for the Social Studies interviewed Drs. Ilene and Michael Berson of the University of South Florida about KidCitizen, the fruit of much of their collaborative work. (Disclosure: Dr. Michael Berson is a Senior Fellow of FJCC)
The overview the Drs. Berson provide of KidCitizen, and why it can make a difference, is a really good one:
“Using primary sources in the classroom actively engages students in interpreting the mystery of the past and exploring multiple representations of events. KidCitizen was designed to provide scaffolded instruction for historical inquiry. The focus of the app is to facilitate a developmentally appropriate process of careful looking, historical thinking, and evidence-informed analysis that are at the center of disciplinary literacy. By slowing down the act of looking, children discover new information and construct viewpoints as primary sources are mined. The KidCitizen app provides authentic, age appropriate interaction with primary source materials, based on research-informed practices and evidence-based pedagogy, engaging children in exploring civics and government concepts through historical sources, and connecting what they find with their daily lives.”
We need to be giving our youngest participants in civic life the opportunity to engage, to learn, to think, and as they suggest, to involve themselves in the process of ‘looking’ in order to learn, construct, and think.
Check out KidCitizen here, and be sure to read the whole short interview here!
Friends in Civics, we have some exciting news. The Florida Joint Center for Citizenship at the Lou Frey Institute is now offering a free online Canvas course targeting primarily new and beginning civics teachers in Florida, though it is open to any and all civics educators who are interested.
This program will provide educators new to civics with a supported professional
learning experience while teaching middle school civics. They will learn,
implement and reflect on educational best practices, engage with a cohort of
other educators and network with experienced civic education professionals. You can learn more about the course series here!
For those teachers in Florida seeking points towards certificate renewal, this course series offers that opportunity through the ePDC (electronic Professional Development Connections) system. In the infographic below, you can see the scope and sequence of the course series.
“I just wanted to thank you for offering the online Civics Modules, I learned so much during the first one and can’t wait to implement some of the things I learned.” —A beginning civics teacher “Thank-you also for the course- I learned quite a bit about how to teach Civics in Florida and to especially to 7th graders.” —An experienced teacher new to civics in Florida
In September, we will be starting the next cohort for COURSE ONE: A Prepared Classroom, and enrollment for that is open as of August 09, 2019. For those that finished Course One previously, Course Two will begin enrolling at the end of August!
A Prepared Classroom will focus on understanding the role of course descriptions and the Civics End-of-Course Test Item Specifications, utilizing curriculum and pacing guide resources, strategically planning and preparing for instruction, as well as providing data informed instruction based on formative and summative data. You can view the syllabus for the first course here: FJCC A Prepared Classroom Syllabus
| This course has enabled open enrollment. You can self-enroll in the course once you share with them this URL: https://canvas.instructure.com/enroll/FCC4FH. Alternatively, you can sign up at https://canvas.instructure.com/register and use the following join code: FCC4FH |
Are you more interested in the second or third courses because you feel pretty good about the content in the first one? That is fine! You DO NOT have to take every course; Florida teachers may earn renewal points for EACH course in the series. We will be launching the second course, A Cognitively Complex Classroom, in mid-September!
Each course in the series will be offered through the free version of the Canvas platform. Canvas Free for Teacher accounts are always free, but they do not contain all features available to institutional users of Canvas. For example, no client support beyond access to the Canvas Guides is offered to you as a Free for Teachers user. With a Canvas Free for Teachers account users can access and participate in courses as well as create (and host) their own online courses. Please note that you WILL have to create a new account to use this version of the platform; it is not compatible with the institutional version you may use in your school or district. You can learn more about this version of the platform here.
In order to enroll FOR RENEWAL CREDIT in the course, you will need to be sure that you register through the ePDC system. Let’s walk through the process together. First, go to the PAEC website at PAEC.org.
Once there, click on ePDC and if this is your first time, click on ePDC and then ‘Create an Account.’ Once you confirm your account registration, sign in and then click again on ePDC and select ‘Course Offerings’. You should see a screen like this:
Click on ‘Course Offerings’, and you will see something like this:
In the ‘Search Text’ bar, you can type ‘FJCC’, and the course should appear! BE SURE TO ENROLL IN THE SEPTEMBER 2019 Fall Cohort Course. Course One is ‘The Prepared Classroom’
Click on ‘Register’ and you should be in. The ePDC course is setup to automatically direct the person that registers for the course to the Canvas Course page. You will have to create an account if you do not already have one but the link to the September course is embedded in the ePDC PAEC course.
You can expect a follow up email or two from your course instructor in late August and early September, prior to the start of the course. At this time, registration is limited to the first 25 participants, but it may be possible to make exceptions!
How are in-service points handled?
PAEC extracts in-service records from the ePDC and submits in-service data for member and participating districts to the Florida Department of Education as a service to districts. Teachers from outside of PAEC member or participating districts should print the Certificate of Completion for each course and submit the certificate to the appropriate district professional development office.
We do hope to see you in this online space for learning and the development of a virtual professional learning community. Please share this with anyone you believe might benefit from this course series!
Questions about this entire course series, or the first course in the series (‘A Prepared Classroom‘), can be directed to Dr. Steve Masyada.