CEDo 515 - Post 4

I watched a set of videos on a Congressional Lawmaking simulation with students (http://www.intime.uni.edu/video/028iahs/0/). This lesson is designed for 12th graders, but could be simplified for younger students. This lesson goes through how laws are made in American government. The teacher or students choose a relevant and current topic to debate and attempt to pass a law on. In this simulation, the teacher has two classes and one serves as the House of Representatives and the other the Senate. The simulation goes through many different steps of the process, from committee hearings, questioning, statements, etc. Students also play many different roles, from Representatives to Senators to lobbyists. Students get to grill each other on the large and small parts of the bills that they are trying to pass.

By participating in and completing this activity students gain and improve immeasurable skills, including: democracy in action, tolerance, speaking and thinking skills, collaboration, dialogue skills, compromise, responsibility and civic involvement, research and Internet skills, video taping debates.

I already do a very simplified version of this in my 10th grade U.S. History classes. I have only tried it once and did not plan it out as much as I would have liked, but it worked so well even without the planning that my colleague and I are planning to keep building until we get to something like this video shows. With that in mind, this video will help me beyond what words can say. It already lays out everything that really needs to be done to go through a good Congressional lawmaking simulation. Since my colleague also teaches a video editing class, we are sure at some point to work in video recording and editing skills to broadcast the debates to different classes, etc. This is going to be a very powerful project, and this set of videos is drastically going to help us with setting it up.