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Brief Description
In these role-plays, students act as elected officials who must vote on five bills that relate to special interests of groups that financed their campaigns. How will they vote?
Objectives
Students will
- act as elected officials who must make decisions that will make someone unhappy.
- consider five bills that are up for vote in light of the contributions that many special-interest groups made to their campaigns.
- justify their vote on each bill.
- write a brief essay in which they share what they learned from doing this role-play activity.
Keywords
vote, campaign, election, law, bill, legislation, representative, senator, governor, contribution, citizenship, government, civics
Materials Needed
Interest Groups: How Would a Legislator Vote? student work sheet
Lesson Plan
In this role-play activity from SocialStudies.com, students act as elected legislators who have accepted significant campaign contributions from a list of companies and special-interest groups. Fourteen of those special interests and their contribution amounts are listed at the start of the activity. The student-legislators must react to five scenarios in which bills have been proposed; all of those bills relate directly to the special interests that supported their campaign. How will student/legislators respond to each bill? How do they justify their responses? This activity puts kids in the place of politicians who must often make these kinds of decisions -- and who are often criticized for the decisions they make. How do they react when the shoe is on the other foot and they must justify their decisions about a bill? Do they go with their conscience? with the prevailing sentiment among their constituents? with the special interests who helped them get elected?
For the complete lesson see the student work sheet, Interest Groups: How Would a Legislator Vote? on the SocialStudies.com Web site.
Assessment The teacher will monitor the discussion/debate over each of the questions. Students will write a brief essay to describe what lessons they learned from this role-play activity.
Lesson Plan Source
Social Studies School Service
National Standards
FINE ARTS: Theatre
- GRADES 5 - 8
NA-T.5-8.2 Acting By Assuming Roles and Interacting In Improvisations
- GRADES 9 - 12
NA-T.9-12.1 Script Writing by Planning and Recording Improvisations Based on Personal Experience and Heritage, Imagination, Literature, and History
LANGUAGE ARTS: English
SOCIAL SCIENCES: Civics
See more election lesson plans from the Education World archive.
Click to return to this week’s Lesson Planning article, Classroom Lessons from Ed World’s Election Collection.
Originally published 10/18/2002
Links last updated 09/19/2008
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