If you’ve been following our Election Week posts this week, you know we’ve been publishing sections of a flexible unit, intended to work with any day’s Times, to help students think about the candidates and issues of this year’s presidential race.
The unit is focused around this question “How Would the Presidential Campaigns Change if the Voting Age Were 13?” We invite students to answer it on our blog.
So far the posts have included an overview of the entire unit, mini-units exploring the questions “Who Are the Candidates?” and “What Are the Issues?” and “How Are the Candidates Running Their Campaigns?” Finally, the unit we present below asks students to decide who they think should win the 2012 election.
Mini-Unit 4: What Do You Think?
Essential Question 4: Who Do You Think Should Win the Election?
Projects: Editorial and Mock Election
Overview: For this final mini-unit, students explore what they think about the candidates and why they think that way. They have already researched the candidates and issues, and they have analyzed how the campaigns are being run. They will sort through all of this information to develop a logical argument for why one candidate is better than the other, which they will articulate in an editorial endorsement. Then they will hold a mock election for the grade, school or community using all of the materials they generated during the unit. (For a full list of the Common Core State Standards this unit will address, please see our introductory post.)
One-Question Interview: You might use this exercise (PDF) as a kind of informal assessment tool as the unit comes to a close by having students develop about 15 questions that have come up over the course of this unit that they would now like to interview one another about. The questions can range from “What candidate would you vote for and why?” to “What do you think Mitt Romney’s (or President Obama’s) campaign could do right now to attract youth voters?” to “What aspects of this presidential race are most interesting to you?” or “What aspects of the race are you least interested in?”
Once students have collaborated on creating the questions and each student has been assigned one to ask, students walk around the classroom and ask their classmates “their” question, using our one question interview graphic organizer (PDF) to keep track of responses. Then, have them return to their seats, tally and read over what they learned, and draw conclusions. Students might then share what they learned as a way to self-assess how successful this unit has been in deepening their understanding of what’s at stake in November.
Project | Write an Editorial: Students should imagine that they are writing an editorial for The New York Times answering the question: which candidate should be elected president? In their editorials, they should reference what they learned about the candidates, their positions on the campaign issues and the ways they run their campaigns. Students can read any past Times presidential endorsement from 1860 to 2008 using the interactive “New York Times Endorsements Through the Ages.”
Each weekday we ask a new Student Opinion question, and some time during this election season we plan on asking students who they think should be elected president — so stay tuned, since your students will have a chance to share what they think about the election on the Learning Network.
Culminating Project | Mock Election: This entire unit has placed students front and center in the presidential campaign. With the mock election they now get to run their own campaigns using the ideas they learned and the materials they created to try to sway peers and teachers to vote for “their” candidate. In this unit students already created three important types of materials that they will use to run the mock election:
- Candidate Profiles
- Issues-Based Campaign Materials (for example, brochures, posters, television commercials, campaign buttons)
- Campaign Speeches
With these resources, your only choice is how ambitious to get. Now that students have researched different campaign strategies, they can create additional campaign materials to try to sway voters at the mock election, like TV commercials, banners, posters or leaflets. If they conducted opposition research during the first mini-unit, they can use what they learned to point out why the other candidate is the wrong choice (also known as negative advertising). The class could become a campaign “factory” for a day or two while students prepare for the coming mock election.
As for the mock election itself, some schools create a special class schedule or hold election nights when they invite the entire school community to participate. An alternative is to hold a smaller mock election inside your class with your students and invited guests from other classes or grades.
During the mock election, students can deliver their speeches, hand out pamphlets and engage with voters. If they created TV commercials or candidate Facebook pages, you can show these to the whole group or screen them on laptops around the room. If you are using a gymnasium or other large setting for the mock election, you may want to have students set up issue booths where they can talk to voters about the different issues, like the environment or taxes.
If your mock election will not include any visitors, then you may want your students to share their opinions with one another by reading all or part of their editorial endorsements before they vote. If your timing is right, you can submit your students’ votes to a national mock election so that they are counted along with other schools throughout the country.
Reflection: When the mock election is over, students should have a chance to reflect on the whole unit. What did they learn? About the candidates? About the issues? About how elections are run? Has their opinion changed at all over the course of the unit? How has the unit affected their understanding of our democratic process?
Related: The Learning Network has additional lessons on endorsements and figuring out one’s political viewpoint if you want to teach these topics in more depth:
If you haven’t done so already, tell us how you’re teaching about this election. If we hear from enough readers, we’ll choose our favorite ideas to feature on the blog.