• Lesson value
• Curriculum context
• Using various methodologies
• Teaching challenges
• Worksheets
• Questioning
• Learning challenges
• Signs of success for the lesson
• Cooperative learning
• Groups
• Lessons learned
• Hands-on learning and civic engagement
• His response to the lesson
• Salient legal issues
• Teaching about controversial topics
• His background
• Using textbooks
• Professional development
• Modeling democratic principles
• Challenges to civic education
• Signs of success for civics

Matt Johnson: The textbook for this class, We the Students, which comes out of American University Law School, is a nice collection. It is the cutting edge Supreme Court cases that deal with students' rights. It covers the First, Fourth, [and] Eighth Amendments to the Constitution and their incorporation into our public schools. [It] digests the cases and abridges them.

I use the textbook throughout the year as the source for a lot of the Supreme Court cases. I will assign a case to read. Usually I will give them a quiz on what they've read. I find if I don't, and the kids know there's not a quiz, they may not read it. The questions are taken directly from the book. Once the quiz is over, we start talking about the real issues in the case. We relate it to previous cases. I may throw a newspaper article at them from an issue on students' rights related to [the case]. It's really the starting point and it's a great textbook for that purpose. For the assignment they had to do for the first day of the lesson, they had to go beyond what was in the textbook because it's not full text.