The teaching agenda below is from a week and a half ago in my AP Government class. We were early into Unit 3 (Civil Rights and Civil Liberties), which you can detect by the Learning Block (LB) number 3.2. This indicates we are in the second LB of the unit. This particular LB was about freedom of religion, specifically the ‘establishment clause’ and ‘free excercise clause’ of the First Amendment.

AP Gov has a collection of required Supreme Court cases that students need to be familiar with so this learning block was where I was able to introduce Engle v. Vitale and Wisconsin v. Yoder. This agenda ended up being too ambitious and we only got through the first case that day.

To teach the case, I have a published case study that breaks the case down into four parts: Background, Constitutional Issue, Majority Opinion, and Dissenting Opinion. We read it together than I always pair the reading with a short informational video (AP Gov required cases all have several video options available for review on YouTube). After that students work in pairs to answer a set of questions about the case.

The following class, students finished up the LB by looking at the Yoder case then doing some writing in their INBs (Interactive Notebooks) that forces them to synthesize their understanding of both cases.

It is worth noting that I usually start Fridays in all my classes with the one-two punch of a quiz and a self assessment. However, this week was a short week (due to the end of the winter break) so I scratched those two initial activities.