Teaching Civics in the Sunshine State

Posted on August 25, 2015 by stevemasy

Another link for you as we head into the new school year. Recently, Dr. Elizabeth Washington (director of the social studies Proteach program at UF and Senior Fellow here at the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship) and I had the chance to sit down with Dr. Emma Humphries of iCivics and the Bob Graham Center to discuss teaching civics in the Sunshine State. For me, two big things to remember: civics is NOT history and should not be taught as such, and always always always use the Civics Benchmarks Item Specifications in your planning, teaching, and assessment! Also, I need to lose weight.

I enjoyed the opportunity to sit down with Emma and Elizabeth and just talk civics, and I hope that you find some of what you see and hear in the video useful. Feel free to address any questions or comments my way!

Welcome Back! Resources for Civics Teachers

Posted on August 24, 2015 by stevemasy

As we go into the new school year, I just want to take a few minutes and welcome folks back, and to welcome those that might be new to teaching civics here in Florida. This post will share with you some of the resources that are available for teaching civics in this state. Some of these might help those of you teaching civics and social studies in other states as well. An overview of some excellent primary sources for social studies and civics education is also available! Certainly, this is only a very small list; throughout the year, we will continue sharing new resources, spotlighting excellent resources, and discussing ways in which they may be used in your classroom.

The Florida Joint Center for Citizenship
For obvious reasons, we start with the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship. As an organization, the FJCC offers free resources and professional development to teachers, schools, and districts, centered around civic education. Most recently, we worked in collaboration with Miami-Dade county teachers to create elementary civics lessons (‘Civics in a Snap’), which will be shared with you as soon as our NEW site goes live later this week! Our most accessed resource, the 7th grade Applied Civics Resources, provides lesson plans, content background videos, benchmark specifications, and assessment items that teachers can use to teach the benchmarks. Please note that in order to access most resources on the site, a free registration is required.

iCivics

iCivics is perhaps one of the most well known and loved civics resources in the nation. The site provides games, writing tools such as Drafting Board, lesson plans, and other resources for teachers to better teach that next generation of citizens. The FJCC has worked closely with iCivics in developing resources aligned with the Florida Benchmarks, which we have integrated into our lesson plans, though their curriculum and resources are intended for a national audience. Free registration is required, but it is well with your time, and I have never known a teacher to say a negative word about iCivics. Just be sure that you make sure whatever resource you are using fits your state’s standards! Here in Florida, folks from the Florida Law Related Education Association lead the iCivics effort across the state, and are themselves worth a look.

The Center for Civic Education
The Center for Civic Education is perhaps one of the most well known and important national civic education organizations. Their ‘We the People’ and ‘Project Citizen‘ materials are incredibly popular, and they do an excellent job in helping students understand the foundations of citizenship and to start them on the path toward civic engagement.

The United States Youth Senate Program
The United States Youth Senate Program is a unique educational experience for outstanding high school students interested in pursuing careers in public service. The 54th annual program will be held in Washington, D.C., from March 5 – 12, 2016. Two student leaders from each state, the District of Columbia and the Department of Defense Education Activity will spend a week in Washington experiencing their national government in action. Student delegates will hear major policy addresses by Senators, cabinet members, officials from the Departments of State and Defense and directors of other federal agencies, as well as participate in a meeting with a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. All transportation, hotel and meal expenses will be provided by The Hearst Foundations. In addition, each delegate will also be awarded a $5,000 College Scholarship for undergraduate studies, with encouragement to pursue coursework in history and political science.To apply, please contact your state selection contact. Here in Florida, the contact is Annette Boyd-Pitts of FLREA.

The Ashbrook Center
The Ashbrook Center is an excellent resource for both primary sources and teacher professional development. Perhaps more well known for the materials it provides through TeachingAmericanHistory.Org, Ashbrook has some nice resources for civic education as well, and their seminars on aspects of American government, civics, and history are excellent. I had the opportunity to attend one myself, and it was very well done, though reading-intensive. They are expanding more into Florida. Please keep an eye on this blog for information on upcoming seminar opportunities with Ashbrook.

The Bill of Rights Institute
Putting aside, for now at least, the somewhat controversial background of the Bill of Rights Institute , the resources provided by the BORI are worth taking a look at, especially the primary sources that are provided.

The National Archives and the Library of Congress
The National Archives and the Library of Congress have a wonderful collection of resources that any and every social studies and civics teacher should want to use. We have written about the new mobile app before, and the FJCC has worked closely with the National Archives in providing professional development to teachers at all levels of education.

Mock Elections

The FJCC/Lou Frey Institute Student Voting Election Simulation, while aligned with Florida’s Civic Benchmarks SS.7.C.2.9 and SS.7.C.2.7, can be used by anyone in any state as a way to have students engage in the process of voting. It is easy to use and pretty flexible in how you choose to use it. Registration IS required, but is as always free.

Civics Tutorials

This Civics Tutorial site is aligned with the Florida Civics Benchmarks, and provides some excellent guided tutorial pieces for students to use within a flipped classroom model, as a remediation tool, or in preparation for 7th grade Civics EOC. An overview of the site can be found here.

Escambia Civics Review Site

The Escambia Civics Review site is just what the name implies: a review site intended to prepare students for success on Florida’s Civics EOCA. However, it contains additional resources that can be used throughout the year. These resources include vocabulary games, connections to Discovery Ed (if you have an account with that specific resource), assessment items, a practice test, and, most significantly, student friendly readings. These readings are about a page long and are intended to be used by teachers to supplement instruction in the benchmarks. They have been rewritten recently to ensure consistency in the vocabulary and that all of the readings are appropriate for middle school students!

The C3 Framework
The C3 Framework is a relatively new resource provided by the National Council for the Social Studies (and you should be a member; talk about resources!). It’s Four Dimensions lend themselves well to civics, especially the focus on asking questions and taking action. An overview of the C3 can be found here, and I encourage you to check it out, even if your state is not using it.

Florida Civic Health
The Lou Frey Institute’s Florida Civic Health site allows you to compare Florida to every other state in a number of measures of civic health. While it is obviously using Florida as a starting point, you CAN use it to compare your own state to Florida, or to compare metropolitan areas within the state of Florida. Simply select your state on the map, as you see in the screenshot below.

Countable

Countable is a FANTASTIC new resource for teachers in social studies, and especially civics. It would be an injustice to summarize it in just a few words, so please take a look at the post we did on it here, or simply visit it yourself to explore it! The current topic for discussion? Birthright citizenship. Check it out!

The Civil Debate Wall
From the site: The Bob Graham Center’s Civil Debate Wall is a unique, innovative social media tool created by Local Projects for The Bob Graham Center for Public Service at the University of Florida and funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation. The Wall creates constructive dialogue by providing a physical social media tool that connects large touch screens, a texting system, and a website. These three synchronized components create a single, seamless interactive experience for the broader University of Florida community to actively engage in local, national and international issues. The website component of the Wall closely mirrors the physical Wall. The website attracts users who are not physically on campus. Providing the same features, the website gathers users from a broader population and allows users to keep track of debates.

These are just a few of the resources that are available for civic education in Florida and across the nation. If you have additional ones, please feel free to share them with me at stephen.masyada@ucf.edu, or leave a comment on this post. Please do the same if you would like professional development or any other help or support! Don’t forget to take a look at the overview of primary resource tools here, and be sure to check out the Florida Civics Teacher’s Facebook Page and the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship Facebook Page! Good luck in the new year, and thank you for the work that you do!

Justifying Our Existence: Does Our Work Matter?

Posted on July 30, 2015 by stevemasy

As readers of this blog and supporters of the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship are no doubt aware, the past few months here at the FJCC/Lou Frey Institute have been a bit stressful. The Florida Legislature seems to have essentially decided that the state should not be in the business of funding professional development organizations, tools, or resources, and that anything of value can and should be paid for by the districts.

“It’s only valuable if it doesn’t cost anything, is the message,” Gaetz told the Times/Herald. “If yours is so valuable, why isn’t anybody interested in paying any money for it?”

While our own funding was saved at the last minute, thanks no doubt to the efforts of folks like you, we remain in a precarious position. In order to continue to be supported by the state, and not have to charge districts a great deal of money to support us, we have to start providing data to the legislature and to the governor’s office. Now, we do have some excellent data that we have provided them before. We know, for example, that usage of both our own site and the Escambia civics site, for which we provide a great deal of resources and support, is incredibly high. Figure 1 illustrates usage of the FJCC online resources. Figure 3 illustrates usage of the Escambia site. (Click on each image to enlarge it if you need to).

The usage of these resources is also spread across the state, as the two figures below illustrate:

So what does the data we have say?

More than 5,600 Florida teachers and district personnel, from every district in the state, maintain active accounts on the Institute’s website, providing them with access to professional development, instructional and assessment resources.

In FY 2014-15 to-date, more than 59,000 users of the Institute’s civics resources website have generated more than 170,000 work sessions as teachers have come to the site for support materials (Figure 1).
- Monthly utilization rates have grown exponentially in FY 2014-15 following the first administration of the Civics EOC in the spring of 2014. Further growth is anticipated in advance of the 2015 test administration date.

The Institute’s daily impact on teachers touches virtually all Florida school districts. Figure 2 shows the distribution of usage sessions by school districts to-date for the current fiscal year. Heaviest use is from the state’s more urban districts.
- Four of the state’s most rural districts are not making use of LFI/FJCC resources. We are currently coordinating with FLDOE’s outreach to lowest performing districts to address this issue.

In the five month period from September, 2014 through January, 2015, almost 40,000 student users accessed materials on the Civics Review Site in just under 120,000 sessions. (Figure 3). The general trend line is up and student access is expected to grow further in advance of the 2015 EOC administration.
The Student Review Site is serving the needs of students from virtually every district in the state (Figure 4). Use is most intense in the more urban areas of the state.
- Five of the most rural districts are not making use of the Student Review Sites. LFI/FJCC is currently coordinating with FLDOE’s outreach to lowest performing districts to address this issue.

This is good data, data that we are excited by and that we believe is making a difference. Civics scores increased this year, and we believe that we may have played a role in that increase. HOWEVER, the data that we have is not data that will impress the state legislature and the governor’s office. We need to directly connect our work to student EOC achievement scores, and in this we face a challenge. The state leadership does not want stories, though we have so many good stories that we can share and will share. They want hard numbers, or the stories that we do have will be nothing more than melancholy reminiscing. It is difficult, however. How do we separate out the noise that is inherent in this sort of data collection effort? After all, we are not the only civic education organization in Florida, nor are we the only resource that is being used. At the same time, we don’t always know just HOW the resources and PD we provided is being implemented in classrooms, schools, and districts. And, of course, the biggest problem we face is actually getting those numbers that we need. We must, essentially, be able to match student test scores to specific teachers, and that requires a great deal of finesse with the system. Most significantly, we must rely on the Education Data Warehouse to share with us this data, and that can sometimes be difficult. We must also convince teachers to allow us to match them up with those student scores. If we are unable to do this, well, despite the good work that we believe that we do, the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship will most likely cease to exist.

Of course we recognize the need to demonstrate our impact; it’s getting access to the data that we need in order to do this that is the difficult process, and it is a bit of a frustration that the impressive usage data is not adequate for the task. To facilitate this effort, as we relaunch a revised version of our website in the fall, we are going to ask that all users re-register on the site, and we humbly request that you provide us with enough registration data so that we may match users to scores. Please keep in mind that we will not be publishing individual scores or personally and publicly identifying teachers and scores; rather, this will simply be for justifying our continued existence to the legislature and the governor (assuming, of course, that the data is positive, which we believe it will be).

We believe, deeply, in the mission of the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship. We believe that the work that we do here does help teachers, schools, and districts in helping to develop that next generation of Florida, American, and global citizens. We hope that we may be allowed to continue that work, and that you might be willing to help us do so. We thank you for the support that you have provided in the past and in any support you choose to offer, and for your understanding as we work to collect the data that we so desperately need.

For now, if you have used our resources or attended our PDs, we would love for you to complete this survey that may help us.

TeachingAmericanHistory.org Webinar on 14th and 15th Amendments

Posted on July 9, 2015 by stevemasy

We do not often share information about a PD opportunity that would cost you money, but I thought that perhaps this might be of interest and use, especially since it can be connected to Florida’s civics and history benchmarks in multiple grades. TeachingAmericanHistory.org, one of my own favorite sites for resources, is hosting a series of webinars on the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. The 13th Amendment one was done recently, but the 14th and 15th Amendments webinars are later this month. From our friends at TeachingAmericanHistory.org:

TAH.org and NCSS have partnered to provide a series of three webinars concerning the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and the change in the Constitution that they represented and did not represent. We will seek to understand these amendments within the Constitution’s basic structure to see how they fix problems endemic to the Constitution, while also understanding these amendments in their immediate context as vehicles to bring peace and protection for freedmen at the end of the Civil War. We will look at the layers of context and the immediate effects of these amendments-and also why they failed to secure their goals in the years immediately following the Civil War.

Even though you may have missed the first webinar this past Tuesday there’s still time to register for the remaining two installments now.

Tuesday, July 14: Completing the Constitution with the 14th Amendment
This webinar focuses on how states would be re-integrated into the Union in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War and the powers Congress assumed in that extraordinary time. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery in all states of the Union, holding states to consistent standards for free labor and giving enforcement of this provision to the national Congress. Yet problems arose about the unequal treatment of freedmen after the war ended, giving rise to the need for a more radical limit on state power if the Union’s goals in the Civil War were to be accomplished.

Tuesday, July 21: The 15th Amendment and the Failure of Reconstruction
Reconstruction presents a dual-edged dilemma, as Republicans tried to re-integrate the Southerners back into the Union while providing protection for freedmen. The easier the terms of re-integration for the Southerners, the more difficult it would be to secure rights for the freedmen. The formula Republicans hit upon was to secure freedmen through the vote, so that they could, in effect, protect themselves. This strategy, adopted by the Grant Administration, required a huge effort on behalf of the Union army and law enforcement and was ultimately abandoned as requiring too much of an abridgment on Southern self-government.

Time: 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm ET / 3:30 pm – 5:00 pm PT

Presenter: Scott Yenor, Associate Professor and Department Chair of Political Science, Boise State University, Idaho; partner faculty member, Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs, Ashland University, Ohio.

Register Now

Please keep in mind that THIS DOES COST MONEY! NCSS members can attend the webinar for sixty dollars, while non-members may attend for 150 dollars. If you have any questions, please contact Jeremy Gypton, Teacher Programs Manager, at jgypton@tah.org

New FJCC Resource for Florida Elementary Civics!

Posted on July 9, 2015 by stevemasy

Friends in civics, I mentioned previously that I had spent a week in Miami last month, prior to my two weeks in Boston, working with our Val McVey and teachers and staff from Miami Dade schools. This work involved creating curricular materials for third through fifth grade that are aligned with the grade level Civics and Florida Standards for ELA. While we already have entire extended lessons for these, the new materials are actually intended to be 15 to 20 minute mini-lessons that we believe effectively get to the civics benchmarks without requiring a significant investment of time. Elementary social studies is the curricular equivalent of the Ottoman Empire in 1914: it exists, everybody likes to pretend it matters, but no one wants anything to really do with it until they absolutely have to. I’ve discussed this briefly before:

We know that both nationally and in Florida, social studies education is often lacking at the elementary level. This is NOT a new thing; generally speaking, social studies has been on the decline for decades, especially at the elementary level. The reasons for this are many and varied, but one can assume, rightly I think, that a decline in general social studies instruction could also result in a decline in civics instruction in the elementary grades.

The most pressing problem for elementary teachers is, most often, time. In our observations, and in the research, we just don’t see hard-pressed elementary teachers finding the time to do extensive work with social studies in general and civics in particular. To address this, we teamed with folks from Miami, with the support of their fantastic Social Studies director, Bob Brazofsky. The result of this partnership is our new collection of mini-lessons for elementary teachers, which we have termed

Civics in a Snap! For when you have just enough time to help your kids learn about being good citizens!

These mini-lessons will be shared with you once we get our new website up and running this fall. Miami-Dade is in the process of integrating them into their planning guides, and we will be hosting them on a new section of our website devoted to elementary civics. For now, I am sharing with you a sample of that work, in this case, the Civics in a Snap lesson for SS.3.C.2.1:Identify group and individual actions of citizens that demonstrate
civility, cooperation, volunteerism, and other civic virtues. Click on the images to embiggen them (embiggen is, of course, a perfectly cromulent word)!

If you have questions about these new resources, feel free to shoot me an email! We are so excited about what we hope will be a useful, and used, civics resource for elementary teachers!

Ashbrook Weekend Colloquia

Posted on May 28, 2015 by stevemasy

Just wanted to take this opportunity to remind friends and colleagues that the deadline to apply to attend Ashbrook’s excellent on-location weekend colloquia is around the corner. I had the opportunity to attend one at Mt. Vernon very recently, and it was incredible. If you have the chance to go, I encourage it. Plus, they give you a nice stipend to help defray costs! The message from our friends at Ashbrook is below. I would LOVE to attend a couple more of these! (You may be more familiar with Ashbrook through their Teaching American History website).

If you have not yet applied, or are waiting to apply, now is your last chance! Apply today for elite Ashbrook Weekend Colloquia on American History and Government at Historic Sites during the summer of 2015. The application deadline is this Sunday, May 31st.

You and teachers like you from across the country will have the opportunity to:

Visit historic sites, like Independence Hall or Monticello
Experience Ashbrook’s unique discussion-based format
Engage in thoughtful conversation with fellow teachers, guided by a historian/political scientist
Explore primary source documents
Increase your expertise and develop content knowledge
Reignite your passion for your subject area
Take ideas back to your classroom that inspire your students
Earn up to 8 contact hours, with the option to earn 1 graduate credit
Receive a stipend of $425 to defray the cost of travel, plus have your program accommodations for the weekend provided by Ashbrook
Be treated to complimentary continental breakfast, lunch, dinner and refreshments during the program

Summer 2015 Ashbrook Weekend Colloquia at Historic Sites:

Abraham Lincoln’s Political Choices and the Necessity of Eloquence

July 17-19, 2015

Springfield, IL

Thomas Jefferson and Education

July 24-26, 2015

Charlottesville, VA

The Jefferson Enigma: Founder and Statesman

July 24-26, 2015

Charlottesville, VA

Creating a Constitution

July 24-26, 2015

Philadelphia, PA

Creating a Constitution

July 31 – August 2, 2015

Philadelphia, PA

Security, Self-Determination, and Empire: The Grand Alliance, 1941-1945

July 31 – August 2, 2015

New Orleans, LA

Calvin Coolidge: Silent Cal Speaks

August 14-16, 2015

Killington, VT

Alexander Hamilton: Treasury Secretary and Indispensable Presidential Advisor

August 21-23, 2015

Philadelphia, PA

Apply Now

We look forward to meeting you at one of our programs. Please direct any questions to:

Monica Moser

Teacher Programs Coordinator

MMoser@ashbrook.org

(419) 289-5411

Civic Studies

An intellectual community of researchers and practitioners dedicated to building the emerging field of civic studies

Category Archives: Online Resources

Teaching Civics in the Sunshine State

Justifying Our Existence: Does Our Work Matter?

TeachingAmericanHistory.org Webinar on 14th and 15th Amendments

New FJCC Resource for Florida Elementary Civics!

Ashbrook Weekend Colloquia