High School Lesson Plans
Explore elections plans geared toward the 2020 presidential election but adaptable for many other elections and presidential history lessons.
We at Classroom Law Project are pleased to offer you a series of lessons targeted to middle and high school level grades to help you and your students sort through this year’s election issues.
All-new digital materials and resources!
The following resources are full lessons that feature C-SPAN video resources to explore a general issue or topic relating to campaigns and elections. These lesson plans can be used in traditional or flipped classrooms. Teachers and students will need to log in to C-SPAN Classroom in order to access C-SPAN Classroom lesson plans.
The approach integrates civic education with social-emotional learning, academic rigor, and attention to equity.
These resources will help you and your students: examine the historical struggle for voting rights and the importance of ensuring that today's elections are free and fair, consider the factors that shape our political decision making and the role of media literacy, and explore the many ways that young people, both current and future voters, make their voices heard and choose to participate.
This is an activity for a Civics, Government/Politics, or perhaps History class. Students are broken into political ideology groups using a Google Form. They create a party platform (try to incorporate SDGs). Following the platform development, students create a campaign poster and campaign commercial. The post is the image for the description and the commercials are videos. The Google Form linked is an electronic ballot. See this topic for an example and links.
The Civics Renewal Network is an alliance of 36 nonprofit, nonpartisan organizations that provide free online classroom resources for civics education
Join educators across the U.S. to empower middle and high school students to share their take on civic issues that matter to them. Learn how your students can create and publish audio or video commentaries for a national audience, addressing real topics from immigration to climate change to the COVID-19 pandemic and more.
The Election 2020 media challenge is a free, standards-aligned program on KQED Learn, co-hosted by the National Writing Project and PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs.
Free virtual and in-class creative activities on voting and elections invite student voice and power to actively take part in the U.S. electoral system.
Produce Campaign Issue Ads
HACK the Spin! Press Room Simulation
Students Conduct Own Election Survey
Design and Budget Candidate Advertising Campaign
Candidate Debate Prep Teams
Produce Mobile Phone Campaign Ads
Common Ground Respectful Listening Activity
Your answers are matched to each candidate’s answers based on a variable percentage scale. These variables include passion factors (How often does the candidate talk about the issue, is it a top priority in their platform, how similar is the "similar" stance to their official stance) and confidence factors (How long has the candidate held this stance, have they changed this stance in the past, does their voting record and history affirm this stance).
These lessons are searchable by grade level and curricular connections.
Election 2020 Choiceboard Hyperdoc
Many of the choices are from OER site edtechbooks.org
