If you’ve been following our Election Week posts the past few days, you know we’ve been publishing sections of a flexible unit, intended to work with any day’s New York Times, to help students think about the candidates and issues of this year’s presidential race.
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 mini-unit we present below asks students to decide who they think should win the 2016 presidential 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 an evidence-based 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 material they generated during the unit.
One-Question Interview: You might use this exercise as a way to pull together the big ideas that have come up during the unit. To prepare, make a list of relevant opinion questions related to the election that students have asked or thought about. You may want to include questions from the K/W/L activity in the first mini-unit.
Other questions could include: What candidate do you want to win and why? Who do you think will win this election and why? If you could give one of the candidates a piece of advice for running her or his campaign, what would it be? Who do you think young voters will support most in this election and why? You can ask students to brainstorm questions as well.
Assign each student or pair of students a different question (or have them select one that interests them), and then have them walk around the classroom and ask their classmates “their” question, using our one-question interview graphic organizer to keep track of responses. Next, have them return to their seats, tally the responses and draw conclusions. Students can share what they learned with the class.
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 2012 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 prepared students to make an informed choice in this presidential election. Now, students have the opportunity to vote for the candidate they want to be the next president.
Students created candidate profiles and created the multi-issue voter guides, and they can distribute or display these before voting starts. You could even have students play the role of Donald J. Trump or Hillary Clinton in delivering a speech they wrote in Part 3 of this unit.
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.
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?
If you haven’t done so already, tell us how you’re teaching about this election.