TEACH
Students learn best when instruction helps prepare for life beyond classroom walls, explores community problems students deem important, and fosters relationships, both with their peers and adults who care about collaborating with students. This can be fostered in schools across content areas. The gallery above & the 10 instructional initiatives below illustrate the project based learning that has been most engaging and impactful in my work with students within the context of teaching social studies classes and facilitating civics club. You can click on an image to learn more about each of these project based learning experiences.
CAGEBUSTING CIVIC ENGAGEMENT
10 APPROACHES
My students civic engagement was highlighted in Chalkbeat during 2020 while my class lobbied the NY Department of Education to develop alternatives to high stakes standardized testing that foster authentic learning that extends beyond the classroom. In 2024 Education Chancellor Betty Rosa signaled this will begin in 2025 with new pathways for graduation that emphasize civic engagement, global education and Career & Technical Education. Below, I share 10 instructional initiatives to foster students civic engagement and personal finance skills within the context of my own social studies classes & civics club.
1. Action Civics
My students and I develop year long, action civics projects based upon specific issues students identify as most relevant to their communities. Each of my classes spend time interviewing classmates, family members and other community leaders to generate a comprehensive list of issues that students discuss and debate with the goal of consensus building and identifying one focus issue for a specific class project. Then students engage in deep research which involves contacting and collaborating with experts in their issue to helping develop their arguments, rallying support from community and business leaders through organizing using social media campaigns to target the public and lobbying elected officials by calling and emailing elected officials both in and outside of the classroom
Generation Citizen provides resources such as the advocacy hourglass model and a consensus building protocols, shown above, to help students conduct research, initiate proposals, debate the merits of student suggestions and ultimately come to consensus on a focus issue, goals, tactics and targets for their class’ action civics project
MY STUDENTS FOCUS ISSUES & POLICY PLATFORMS FROM THE 2018-2019 SCHOOL YEAR INCLUDE...
1.PUBLIC HEALTH & THE ECONOMY: To safeguard public health and improve the workforce NYS should require pharmacy tech certification and prioritize the most skilled candidates for employment.
2.PUBLIC HEALTH: USA HS should focus on improving the bathrooms and school sanitation to help foster a cleaner and more respectful school environment.
3.HOUSING: City Council should create a landlord report card that analyzes rent increases and infractions to improve housing equality in the city
4.SOCIAL JUSTICE: NY should remove the statute of limitations on sexual harassment claims and ban the use of non disclosure agreements to support victims of sexual harassment and assault
Working within project groups, students create policy plans, communication scripts, which are used to call elected officials and social media campaigns to rally support. These items are complied onto project boards and presented at numerous events.
Students present their work and collaborate with politicians, business leaders, educators and other city students at NYC Civics Day held at The NY Bar Association. In 2018, my students received the Open Mindedness Award for “thoughtfully reflecting on the GC process and connecting their experiences with future implications and possibilities” and in 2019 they received the Action Award for their project on reducing standardized testing to improve authentic learning
Additionally, individual students are honored. Students from my classes have received the GC Change Maker Award and given the opportunity to deliver a keynote speech to attendees at the end of Civics Day
Since Civics Day 2019, our pharmacy students have been invited by local government to write letters of support and collaborate with NYS Legislators on a bill that would require workplace ratio improvements and pharmacy tech lincensure or certification.
CVS has also agreed to improve the ratio of pharmacy techs to pharmacists in their NY stores. In 2020, NY lawmakers voted to repeal 50a making police disciplinary records public, NYPD agreed to stop policing Street Food Vendors & NY cancelled Regents Exams as a response to the pandemic. In 2019-2020 Legislative Season Senate Bill S6517 was signed by Governor Andrew Cuomo into law in New York State
2. Participatory Budgeting for Schools
Students often know best how money should be spent to address the needs of their schools, yet students are often left out of this process. When students have a voice in budgetary decisions, they become positionally and mentally empowered. In 2018, I applied for a grant with the NYC Department of Education for my school to receive $2,000 with the stipulation that students play the lead role in delegating the funds based upon their classmates' proposals and participation in a school-wide vote. My students developed proposals on how to spend the funds and work with student council representatives who help facilitate a school-wide vote to identify the winning student crafted proposal. The proposal to buy and install 2 new water fountains with filters and bottle fillers ultimately received the most votes, was funded, installed and provide access to safe, filtered, environmentally friendly NYC tap water. Below, I will highlight some resources and interdisciplinary experiences that helped elevate this learning experience.
Participatory Budgeting in Schools empowers students and adults to work together to collaborate on developing real solutions and have a voice in how money is spent to address community needs. Additionally teachers are motivated and empowered to make interdisciplinary connections to proposal. Even after the election, teachers evaluate individuals’ access to clean drinking water around the world, the physical effects of lead on the human body and both modern and historical technology such as the underwater aqueduct that moves water from the Ashokan Reservoir in the Catskills to NYC faucets.
Given the prior success of the GC model in helping students generate action civics projects, my students adopt similar instructional tools for our participatory budgeting to help connect proposals to specific school environment issues and root causes. Students use a “because, but, so” model to practice developing a thesis, counterclaim and rebuttal related to proposals during our unit of fiscal policy unit: “How should individuals and governments generate revenue and spending responsibility?”
Similar to political caucusing, students present their proposals to their classmates and debate the merits and pitfalls using the sentence starters in the above picture. Students move to difference areas of the classroom based upon the ideas they most support. Since multiple proposals will exist on the ballot, each class does not need to come to consensus on a single proposal as up to seven are on the ballot for a schoolwide vote.
Students work with student council representatives to help facilitate town halls to discuss proposals and a schoolwide staff and student election. Several students work on creating a paper ballot, as other program create a google form that is emailed out to all students and staff to collect votes. Other students publicized the vote to their classmates via social media, make morning announcements or discuss the proposals to students in other classrooms. The week prior to our election, juniors who lead peer group connections facilitate lessons to freshman on the premise of participatory budgeting along with a discussion the various ballot initiatives. During professional development, our school staff has the opportunity to discuss the proposals, develop strategies to incorporate participatory budgeting into their classrooms and vote themselves. In 2022, we began to implement a Ranked Choice Voting system, as seen above and below, for our school’s participatory budgeting election aligned to NYC municipal elections and allow students deeper insight into alternative voting schemes that maximize voter agency and achieve not just plurality but majority electoral success
3. Sustainability Service Learning Projects
Our sustainability project to improve access to clean drinking water in our school was celebrated by the Goethe Institut as a winner of their International UN Sustainability Contest. During the 2019-2020 school year, we invited a group of students and teachers from the Heinrich Zille School in Radeburg, Germany to visit Union Square Academy and our classroom to learn more about civic engagement and participate in students’ classroom caucuses to discuss new proposals about how to best spend $2,000 to improve our school. The German students and teachers also helped us make the above video and write a report about our work in German, which highlights students’ research, activism, action planning and both the environmental and public health benefits related to the installation of the new fountains. Our students will be presenting and collaborating with schools around the world at the Goethe Institut's international sustainability symposium.
The new fountains reduce the time students spend outside of class attempting to get water from offices with water coolers and will ultimately pay for themselves now that are school no longer needs to purchase water cooler refills that are delivered via trucks with carbon footprints that also add to the congestion of our city streets.
Students and teachers have also been working together to advocate for universal access to safe drinking water by creating this google map using various data points made available to the public to track city schools with elevated lead levels in their water. Since NY enacted legislation mandating new public water tests for lead in 2016, there have been 3 rounds of testing and these data points are fully integrated into our map. Red indicates a school has water that’s been tested above 15 ppb, the EPA’s limit and requirement for remediation. If you click on a school’s post remediation status, you can see the number of faucets that are still elevated along with the school populations’ poverty and economic need index (as made available within the DOE’s data portal). We hope this map, along with our students activism, helps ensure all city residents have nothing but safe, clean, free, environmentally friendly, public drinking water. NYC residents can order a free at home test kit to test for lead in your drinking water. In 2020 during school closures and online learning, students and staff began to test their water quality at home, analyze the results in class and use the findings as a potential springboard for continued political activism.
Since 2017 students have launched other environmental health service learning projects as well obtaining our school's asbestos reports and advocating for changes to EPA legislation, monitoring the air quality of our classrooms and advocating for the SIGH Act. In 2024, NYC Public Schools launched 3 Climate Action Days which has been used to leverage students environmental activism and host community organizations to act as thought partners and collaborators on these initiatives.
4. Participatory Budgeting in Neighborhoods
During the first week in April, City Council Districts across NYC hold their own participatory budgeting process to vote on improvements to specific neighborhoods and millions in city council funding is at stake.
Our staff and students propose, evaluate and vote on various proposals for city council districts and boroughs in which they live and in District 2 in which our school resides. Students also are recruited by The NYC Civic Engagement Commission and The League of Women Voters for canvassing to help get out the Participatory Budgeting vote citywide.
5. Student Led Local History Walking Tours
In the wake of NYC school closures during the 2019-2020 school year, my students in US History created a virtual walking tour of sites in NYC with connections to slavery. When schools reopened, students began to lead in person walking tours in consultation with historian, educator and activist Dr. Alan Singer of Hofstra University to help advance the understanding of NYC's connections to slavery and achieve landmark recognition. Click the thumbtacks on the google map using a computer (custom google maps aren't mobile friendly) to watch student created screencasts about the historical significance of the site. Students work has since been published by The New York Almanac. In 2024, we launched a new historical walking tour focused on NYC centric activists and the specific sites around our school connected to their activism.
To celebrate NYC Homecoming and the reopening of city schools post covid school closures in 2021, students and staff at The Washington Irving Campus launched an interactive exhibition on the history of teaching, learning and student life in the historic Washington Irving Campus Library. Students are leading the research, design, curation, and facilitation of the exhibition, continuing in the great tradition of service learning and activism, similar to students of years ago who first protested for the building's construction in 1909. These amazing educational artifacts focus public schooling on career and technical education, community building, service learning and civic engagement. Students collaborate with me, the campus' librarian and custodial staff to collect, preserve, analyze and curate objects from our school building's history. See the exhibition's online gallery and a student led tour below.
6. Classroom Caucuses
The public entrusts their children to schools not only to be taught basic skills and concepts, but also to facilitate civil discourse and help students become leaders that can take action on issues they deem important to their communities. In his majority opinion in Mahanoy v. B.L, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in 2021 that, “America’s public schools are the nurseries of democracy.” My mission is to make this statement a reality by ensuring my students discuss important and often controversial topics with a sense of inquiry, open mindedness and civility. I encourage students to both academically debate and dialogue about relevant issues through a pedagogical instructional strategy called a classroom caucuses
A classroom caucus is a classroom debate in which students vote with their feet and move to various areas in the classroom to indicate that they either agree, disagree or are undecided because they have questions they still need answered. Students must then collaborate with their classmates to develop and present arguments on the issue. Many students have requested weekly caucuses which I am beginning to implement every Friday during the first semester. I adopted this instructional practice after successfully using Generation Citizen’s consensus building protocol to discuss and select focus issues for selecting a class action civics project. Students' favorite series of classroom caucuses are focused on students' rights within school. This allows students to learn democracy by doing democracy, and also explore the unique linguistic and historical origins to caucusing which go back to the Iroquois Confederacy.
In 2021, David’s lesson: How has The Supreme Court interpreted The Bill of Rights as it applies to schools and students which utilizes classroom caucuses was selected as Constituting America’s lesson plan of the year. You can read about and access the unit plan using the link above.
7. Student Led Voter Registration Drives
Students analyze the strengths and weaknesses of US voting systems, voter participation rates and analyze partisan election law gamesmanship which looks at early voting, absentee voting, felony disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, and the electoral college. Students analyze the New York State voter registration form and discuss its connections to organ donation as well.
Pictured above is Lauren Shields, heart transplant recipient & namesake of Lauren’s Law to link organ donation registration to New York State’s voter registration and DMV forms. Lauren spoke to students about her life story and legislation during Civics Week.
In 2024, students in Civics Club launched an action civics project to improve voter registration at our school by facilitating student lead voter preregistration discussions in classrooms during Civics Week. They succeeded in raising voter preregistration to 5x the rate in Manhattan and their project was honored with the NYC Civics Day Grassroots Change Award.
8. Student Internships in Public Service
Students are presented with various internship opportunities that support civic engagement. Students received support researching and applying for summer and part time jobs activities such as Election Day workers, Census takers and internships that support elected representatives, Community Boards, and government agencies like the Manhattan District Attorney’s office
Our students have received summer internships through Generation Citizen’s Community Change Fellowship program which pairs students with various government offices and departments to develop their leadership and civic engagement
9. Personal Finance Training
When I studied Economics in high school and college, my classes focused on theory and government policy. Those lessons did not prepare me for adulthood or real life challenges such as managing my money, filing a tax return or investing in the stock market. The shortcomings of my own formal financial education shaped my desire to provide my students with a hands on approach to learning about spending, saving, and investing money responsibly. Above and below, you can see various screencast videos that I recorded to support my students in mastering these financial tasks. Year after year, my students number one requested learning focus is personal finance. A combination of collaborative classroom based learning and technology based practice helps make this happen. Students are vocal about their desire to learn these skills and as a result our personal finance work together consistently produces the most overall engagement.
Through students participation in Budget Challenge, students learn to analyze the fine print of financial documents, a human resources employment memo, contracts for various bank accounts, credit cards, insurance and loan policies and make advantageous economic decisions. You can see some of these documents and tasks modeled in the screencast that I created during our transition to remote learning as response to covid19. Students deliver presentations to the class on all the various contract options, points of view on the plans and a thesis related to the specific plan that they believe is most advantageous. After presentations, each student must make his individual vendor selections online.
Once the simulation starts, students must pay bills, save to their 401k and respond to incidents such as damage to their apartment or a car accident using an app or computer to access their accounts. When the simulation first begins, I provide direct instruction and we analyze the bills and pay stubs together, providing time for students to log into their accounts and respond to them accordingly. Throughout the semester, there is a gradual release of support. I am able to measure students' success by monitoring their payments, saving and engagement online while fostering their financial independence. I love to hear from recent graduates about how they successfully invested in an IRA or filed their family member’s tax return after we practice these skills in conjunction with their personal finance simulation. Students learn how to complete a 1040 tax return using their W2s from Budget Challenge, or a W2 from a part time job or paid internship. Part of this activity can be seen above. You can learn more about my students experiences here
Students also use the SIFMA Stock Market Game platform to learn how to engage in responsible, long term, diversified investing in connection to our essential question “To What Extent is Investing Gambling?” and "To what extent do individuals have a responsibility to consume & invest ethically?" Students learn about the risk levels and rates of return associated with different types of investments, the premise of diversification, compounding, capital gains, investor confidence, and the behaviors associated with responsible investing. Additionally, students contemplate ethical investing, contemplate their responsibility to society as a potential investor in a company, government or municipality. Students create diversified portfolios of investments that includes stocks, mutual funds and municipal, corporate and treasury bonds, and track their performance against market indexes using various investment tools they have preinstalled on their beloved cell phones and laptops yet have been readily ignored.
I also invite a financial advisory to collaborate with my students through a free SIFMA subsidiary program called InvestItForward. Throughout this program, adults with real world expertise in finance will collaborate with students and help them research and discuss industries and discuss their professional journey with students helping to extend learning and relationships beyond the classroom. Additionally, teachers can apply to be a part of the Capitol Hill Challenge, which matches Members of Congress in their respective Congressional district with priority consideration given to underserved Title I public schools to engage in the stock market game simulation collaboratively with their elected officials.
10. CommuniTea
Gongfu Cha Chinese tea preparation with gaiwan and 3 sip tasting cups
Public schools in America need tea time for calm, contemplative discourse and social connection. In the often fast paced, bell oriented, compliance driven world of schooling, students and staff are longing for moments of human connection. CommuniTea started in 2014 and first came out of the need for students to have a safe space to congregate before school started. Our school building is collocated with five other high schools, all with limited space and a shared cafeteria in the campus. Students had no place to go before school started. When some of my students started coming into my classroom in the morning before first period and saw me drinking tea, we got to talking about its history, health benefits and tea cultures around the world. When asked if they wanted a cup, their eyes opened wide. Students are rarely treated as equals. It was greatly appreciated. This led to students coming back day after day, yada yada yada, we had an informal tea club.
Participating in Japanese tea ceremony while visiting a school in Japan. The matcha set I acquired during the trip I have used to introduce my students to teach culture
Since then, tea has become more and less formal depending on students interest. This simple morning ritual has inspired me to think deeply about the social emotional support we must provide to students.
Tea has also influenced instruction in my classroom as students in prior years of teaching global history have read and discussed sections of the book The History Of The World In Six Glasses with tea for all to go along with the text. We have also celebrated the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party drinking all the tea varietals dumbed into Boston Harbor and researched the lesser known New York City Tea Party that took place at Murray’s Wharf on the East River.
Brewing tea the traditional gongfu cha style during remote learning to discuss and demonstrate oxidation
Regardless of ever changing educational initiatives and instructional focuses, I will always facilitate tea. I cannot tell you how much students appreciate a cup of tea, especially when they aren’t feeling well or after a long, busy school day. Tea has also served as a way for students to share and appreciate each other's cultures. Students often bring in tea and teaware from their countries of origin, all with a unique cultural and family stories.
Drinking yerba mate, an Argentinian tea beverage consumed from a mate gourds using a bombilla or metal filtered straw with one of my students
