NEW Florida Citizen Resources for 2023 Civics and Government Benchmarks

Good afternoon, friends! It has been awhile, for sure. Today’s post is to update you on resources for Florida’s new civics and government benchmarks. Good news! We have started the process of uploading all the 7th grade middle school civics lessons to Florida Citizen and expect that most if not all will be up by mid-week next week. As a reminder, you do need to register for Florida Citizen to access the lesson plans! Please email me if you have issues with registration or logging in.

Once you log in, click on ‘Resources’, then select ‘School Resources’.

Once on that page, scroll down.

You will see three relevant lesson plan links. ‘2023-2024 Grade 7 Benchmark Resources’ will take you to the newest lesson plans. ‘2023-2024 Grade 6 and 8 Benchmark Resources’ will take you to lessons for the civics and government benchmarks in middle school US history and world history. (PRE-2023) will obviously take you to what we have done previously.

Click on the ‘Grade 7 Benchmark Resources’ link. Below is what you will see. The first important link is to the new benchmarks and their clarifications. IF the Test Item Specifications are released, we will add them as well. Keep scrolling down.

You will notice a list of the new benchmarks. Click on the one you want. Please note that right now, lessons plans for every benchmark between SS.7.CG.1.1 through SS.7.CG.3.14, and then 4.1 and 4.2, are up, though that could change by the time you read this!

When you click on the one you want, you should see the following.

This is obviously far less than what we have on our old pages. Please note that we will be adding additional materials as we can. We are currently revising practice items and have new Dr. Fine related teacher content materials as well.

You have three options for these materials. As always, we have them in Word (so you can edit and modify!), PDF, and the new option of GoogleDocs. Let’s assume that you want the word version. Click on it. It will download a zip file.

Unzip the file, and you will see ALL lesson materials for that benchmark.

The procedure is the same for middle school US history and world history materials. Please note at this time ONLY THE WORLD HISTORY LESSONS ARE AVAILABLE!!!

For the K-5 Benchmarks, lesson plans for every civics and government benchmark through Grade 4, and Grade 5 2.1 through 2.6 are now available.

Please also be aware that we have not yet updated Civics360, though current materials on that site should be adaptable or useable until we can. We are targeting a mid-October relaunch, and REGISTRATION IS NO LONGER REQUIRED.

Civics Education Resources for Black History Month

Well, apologies, friends, it has been far too long since the last post. I will work on that. Today, I want to share some excellent resources for civic education during Black History Month.

The Plainest Demands of Justice (Bill of Rights Institute)

I encountered this excellent resource during the recent SOURCES conference at UCF. It is a primary source driven collection that, in the words of BRI,

explores the efforts to realize the Founding principles of liberty, equality, and justice by exploring key periods in African American history.”

The entire collection is organized into multiple categories, and each category has a curated selection of primary sources (or playlists, because hey, have to be hip to the kids! :))

You can check out this resource here.

Civics in Real Life (Florida Joint Center for Citizenship at the Lou Frey Institute)

You may be familiar with the work of FJCC at LFI. Besides our extensive lesson plans, however, we have an ongoing weekly series called ‘Civics in Real Life’. This comes out every week and connects current events to civics concepts. We also have extensions of this series, however, and if you simply do a search for ‘black history’, you will find materials specifically developed to support instruction on figures, events, and organizations significant to black history.

To be clear, however, we cover related material throughout the course of the year, not just in February, so please feel free to take advantage of the search bar. If there is a topic not addressed that you would like covered, please feel free to reach out!

You can find the Civics in Real Life resources here.

The National Archives African American History Collection (NARA)

The National Archives has curated a great many primary sources into a strong collection for teachers to use in their classroom, covering a wide variety of cultural, social, economic, and political topics.

One of the things I like is that they have compiled a set of lesson plans that you can adapt for use in your classroom and with state standards and benchmarks.

You can find the excellent NARA resources here.

Black History Month Lesson Plans from The Civics Renewal Network

We here at FJCC/LFI are proud members of the Civics Renewal Network. Our friends there have a FANTASTIC and easy to use searchable database of resources, and of course you can find Black History Month resources there as well, including a curated collection from Share My Lesson.

Be sure to take advantage of the search feature to find some excellent resources that you can use.

Check out the Civics Renewal Network here.

Black History Month Lessons, from iCivics

If you teach civics, you are likely pretty familiar with the resources from iCivics. Naturally, they have an excellent collection of resources for this month.

You can search the iCivics collection here.

Black History Month, from various federal agencies!

What a fantastic collaboration!

The Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum join in paying tribute to the generations of African Americans who struggled with adversity to achieve full citizenship in American society.

A variety of US federal agencies and museums have collaborated on providing a collection of resources for teaching black history, and it is definitely worth a look!

You can find this great collection here.

Black History Month, from the Center for Civic Education

If you teach civics, you are probably familiar too with the great stuff from the Center for Civic Education. I am a big fan of their 60 Second Civics series, personally. Well, they have also compiled a variety of great resources for Black History Month.

Be sure to check out their great stuff here.

Obviously these are just a few of the excellent resources that you can use to teach during Black History Month, and if you are in Florida, be sure to check out what is available on CPALMS. But it’s important to remember that Black history is American history, and these sorts of resources should be integrated into your instruction throughout the course of the year!

New Addition to Civics360: Scripts for More Than 60 Videos

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Civics360 is a resource for civics education that we at the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship are excited to provide to the civics education community in Florida and beyond. It contains readings in multiple languages, more than 60 animated and narrated videos across a variety of topic areas, practice assessments, external resource links, and vocabulary tools. Recently, we began adding short activity resources pulled from our traditional lesson plans that can be used as a supplemental enrichment or instructional tool within some modules (and this process is ongoing!).

We constantly seek to improve this resource, based on your input and requests. Of course we are adding the aforementioned activities, as requested by so many folks. We are currently beginning work on improving the practice assessment, and we have plans to go back and re-record or revise some of the earlier videos to address concerns over pacing and related audio issues. One of the most requested additions is a transcript of each video. Happily, after an extensive review of every video and revisions to scripts that were changed during development, we have now completed and uploaded the scripts for all 60-plus videos on Civics360.

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These can be used as supplements to the video, to assist students in completing the viewing guides, to help kids that might be a bit hard of hearing, or simply as an additional reading resource if you don’t want to show the videos. You can find them right above the video itself.

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We hope you find these useful. If you have questions or comments about this or anything else on Civics360, please feel free to shoot us an email!

An Important Update on FJCC’s Civics360 Resource

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The benchmark pages on the Escambia Civics Review Site will be redirected to Civics360.  This changeover will occur around the Thanksgiving break. This will impact your favorites and bookmarks if you have saved Escambia Civics Review Site benchmark pages in your browser. 

Good afternoon, friends. As you are likely aware, the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship at the Lou Frey Institute launched Civics360 around summer of this year. Civics360 is intended to build on the resources that were provided by the Escambia County Civics Review site, and the response has been tremendous. More than 35,000 student accounts, and thousands of teacher accounts, have been made in Florida and beyond, and we continue to add resources. The following topic areas have been completed in their entirety, meaning that all video, reading, and vocabulary tools are done:

  • Citizen You
  • Florida State and Local Government
  • The Legal System
  • The US and the World

Other topic areas are partially complete, and we have about 13 benchmarks left to complete (for example, I am working on the video(s) for Benchmark SS.7.C.3.3 now!). We have also started compiling the scripts for hard of hearing students and are uploading them as we finish them. Once that all is complete, we will go back and tweak and modify and improve the resources we have. Thank you for all of your input and feedback on Civics360, and remember that you can direct questions to Dr. Steve Masyada, FJCC director.

It is also important that everyone is aware that the benchmark pages on the Escambia Civics Review Site will be redirected to Civics360.  This changeover will occur around the Thanksgiving break. This will impact your favorites and bookmarks if you have saved Escambia Civics Review Site benchmark pages in your browser. 

If you have not yet done so, I encourage you to make sure you register yourself, and have your students register, at Civics360. It is always free and it is easy. 

Thank you for your help and support for the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship! 

Upstanders and Bystanders: Investigating Modern Social Responsibility Using History

In 2015, Cherie Arnette (School District of Escambia County), Maureen Carter (School District of Palm Beach County), and Peggy Renihan (Florida Joint Center for Citizenship at the Lou Frey Institute) collaborated to create materials to support discussions around bystanders and upstanders.

We here at the FJCC, and the wonderful people who developed these resources, believe that these instructional resources are useful for a variety of courses at varying grade levels. We urge you to review the materials and make your own decisions on age and course appropriateness.

During the lesson, an incredibly rich and varied selection of primary source materials from the Holocaust and the Civil Rights Movement are used to examine social responsibility. Participants explore the reality that at different times we could all be upstanders, bystanders, collaborators, victims, and perpetrators depending on the situation.

You can access “Upstanders and Bystanders: Investigating Modern Social Responsibility Using History” using this link – http://bit.ly/UpstandersBystanders


A New Approach for FJCC

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As folks are likely aware at this point, funding for the Lou Frey Institute was vetoed by Governor Scott. The work of the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship falls under the umbrella of LFI, so obviously the loss of funding is, for us, significant. While we continue to work on grants and other opportunities to raise funds (and still seeking some sort of university or legislative solution), this sudden turn of events means some changes in our work.

To be clear, the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship at the Lou Frey Institute will continue to support teachers, schools, and districts to the best of our ability. Our curricular resources will not go away; indeed, we continue to refine and improve and expand what we have. The Florida Citizen website will be getting new materials later this year around action civics, high school government, and, perhaps, Florida’s new legislatively mandated Founders Month. Development and improvement on Civics360 continues; we have just added four new videos around benchmark 4.3 for example. We are working on an update to the Florida’s Civic Health website as well.

As needed and as possible, we will strive to meet face to face PD requests; however, we may not longer be able to respond in the affirmative to all requests, thanks to a vastly reduced travel budget. HOWEVER, we do have some exciting news that has arisen out of that unfortunate circumstance. The Florida Joint Center for Citizenship at the Lou Frey Institute is beginning the transition towards becoming an online professional development provider!

Currently, we are collaborating internally on developing a Canvas-based set of interactive modules (we hesitate to call it a course) targeting new teachers and what they need to know for teaching civics. We will be piloting this effort with a small number of districts for now; lessons learned from this will guide the next iteration and allow us to open it up to more folks. We also plan on offering additional data, content, and pedagogy oriented modules as we move forward. We have also just completed a new online narrated support PowerPoint around interpreting data that we will be posting for you within the next week!

We are incredibly excited by this new direction. Sometimes, what seems like disaster can simply be turned into a challenge. And that is true in this case. We have had to ask the question about how we can do more with even less, and we have high hopes and expectations that offering support online, with the same excellent staff you are used to, is a way to overcome that challenge. This Canvas-based approach will always involve the opportunity for questions, collaboration, and communication with the FJCC team.

Again, we will continue to support you to the best of our ability. The Florida Joint Center for Citizenship at the Lou Frey Institute is not going anywhere in the short term. We are simply going to follow a new path in supporting the work that wonderful teachers do in civic education.

We are always open to questions or suggestions, so please feel free to contact us at any time! 


Civics360: A New Resource for Civic Education

Good morning, friends in Civics. Over the past few years, teachers here in Florida and elsewhere in the United States have made heavy use of the Escambia Civics Review Site. We do believe that the partnership with Escambia County and the willingness of that district to host and share resources for teaching and learning has been beneficial for everyone. Over time, however, requests have been made and ideas contemplated about improvements that could be made to make that site even better. These requests and ideas include more student friendly videos, more helpful assessment tools, and resources for ESOL students and struggling readers. With that in mind, the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship, in partnership with Escambia County Schools,  is excited to announce the launching of a new Civics review site that will, later this summer, replace the currect Escambia Civics Review Site: Civics360. Civics360 is free to all registered users, much like our current Florida Citizen website. This site is now live and available for your use.

civics360 cover

So what are the new features you will find in Civics360? Take a look at the orientation video below, which walks you through the registration process, and read the rest of the post to learn about what we hope will be a useful resource for you and your students.

  • Multiple Student Friendly Readings for each assessed benchmark, available in English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole

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  • English language reading guides for each Student Friendly Reading, developed with all levels of readers in mind

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  • Vocabulary Practice Worksheets that use Concept Circles to assist students with understanding key words from the benchmark

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  • A Quizlet tool for vocabulary practice and remediation

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  • Continually adding more new narrated student-oriented videos for each benchmark; please note that not every module currently has videos.

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  • Video Viewing Guides for each new video to facilitate engagement

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  • Online quiz practice within each module that reflect best practice in learning and assessment tools that facilitate engagement and retention. We have added clearer explanations and suggestions for reflection for every distractor in each question.

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  • Additional civic resources to facilitate learning and review

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  • Organized into 9 Civics Focus Areas that reflect district pacing guides

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The new site also includes a 60 question practice assessment that reflects the actual EOC in structure and format. We also in the process of developing a version of that practice assessment that breaks the test into the 4 Reporting Categories so that teachers, and students, can use the assessment and their time more effectively.

practiceassessment sample

Be sure to check out the overview video, and if you have questions, comments, problems, or suggestions about Civics360 or the FJCC, please feel free to email me


FJCC New Civics Teacher Webinar: What to Expect When You Are Expecting the Civics EOCA now available!

Good morning, friends of FJCC and civics. Our recent webinar, What to Expect When You are Expecting the Civics EOCA, is now available. In it, you will find an overview and discussion of Florida’s Civics EOCA, hosted by our own Peggy Renihan. Materials and resources relevant to the webinar are available here. 

You can access the annotated PowerPoint PDF below. The transcription is available on each slide as notes.
Annotated What to Expect When you are Expecting the EOCA

Should you have issues, please contact me.  Our next webinar will occur on March 29th, 2017 at 4:30 EST. It will cover review and remediation for the Civics EOCA. Registration will be open soon!

 


FJCC Webinar Series for New-to-Civics Teachers in Florida

The Florida Joint Center for Citizenship is excited to announce the first in a series of webinars targeting those who may be new to be teaching Civics here in Florida. In this ongoing series, we will be addressing issues of concern around content, pedagogy, assessment, and related areas as requested by our teachers.

Webinar One: What to Expect When You Are Expecting the Civics EOCA
Did you know that this assessment counts as 30% of a student’s grade, as well as being included in school grade? The webinar will address what exactly you need to know going into the assessment, and we really encourage participants to bring questions they may have about the Civics EOCA!

Date: March 7, 2017
Time: 4:30 PM

Participants are asked to register in advance. You can register for the webinar here.

Questions may be directed to Dr. Steve Masyada. We look forward to your joining us!


Records of Change: NARA Civil Rights Movement Webinar is Now Available!

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So, good news everyone! The recent webinar we co-hosted with the National Archives is now available. You can access the webinar at this link. In this well-attended discussion, Kathleen Munn of NARA discusses primary source tools and resources that can be used to approach the Civil Rights within classroom discussion.

All of the resources used and referenced in the presentation are available here: recordsofchangewebinarresources-1 . Please note that the PDF contains embedded hyperlinks, so you will need to be sure to download it!

We do hope you enjoy the webinar, and we are grateful for our partners at the National Archives. They always do such great work!

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