• 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: This lesson incorporates many different methodologies. I have students doing individual work, writing, and analyzing primary sources. I have cooperative learning [and] oral advocacy skills. A more traditional final skill is taking a final exam.

I chose to use a simulation for this activity, in part because it just lends itself perfectly. There are so many different hypotheticals that you could come up with and it gives a chance for these kids to really play with this material and be creative. It is a law class, so we might as well have a moot court. The students in this class have all participated in a citywide moot court competition, but the kids still need to understand how to brief a case--what's important to look for--so there have been some lectures, some direct teaching, to get kids focused on how you read a Supreme Court decision.

I'd like to think that kids are learning more with the approaches I've used. Not just in test scores but in questions and answers a couple of weeks later because they've done more than just study for a test. They've actually used the material in creating an op-ed piece or drawing a political cartoon. Whatever we've done, their hands were involved in the final outcome.