{"id":10192,"date":"2016-08-26T07:22:21","date_gmt":"2016-08-26T11:22:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/edtechteacher.org\/?p=10192"},"modified":"2020-01-22T17:35:38","modified_gmt":"2020-01-22T21:35:38","slug":"pbl-and-politics-join-myparty16","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edtechteacher.org\/pbl-and-politics-join-myparty16\/","title":{"rendered":"PBL and Politics – Join #MyParty16"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many thanks to Mike Kaechele, National Faculty member at the Buck Institute and teacher at Kent Innovation High, as well as Sarah Field, Curriculum and Program Manager at the Buck Institute, for sharing the details of this project.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the fall of 2008, I asked my 7th and 8th grade students a single driving question: how do presidential candidates get buy-in from their voters?<\/i><\/p>\n

This question launched a three-month Project-Based Learning (PBL) unit where students explored the concepts of persuasion, propaganda, and policy. \u00a0My 7th graders deeply studied policy issues and then created ad campaigns to educate the \u201cschool constituency\u201d about the Democratic and Republican candidates\u2019 positions. In 8th grade, the two sections voted on who would represent the presidential candidate for their class in a live debate and then the rest of the students served as the policy advisors to prepare \u201cObama\u201d and \u201cMcCain.\u201d Though we acknowledged that some candidates might use negative ads or strategies, the one rule that I gave my students was that they had to situate all arguments in the facts of the issues and policies as stated by the candidates themselves.<\/p>\n

Join #MyParty16<\/h1>\n

As Mike Kaechele writes on the Buck Institute Blog<\/a>:<\/p>\n

This election cycle promises to be one of the more divisive elections that we have witnessed. The nominees from the two major parties are both widely disliked, as this data from FiveThirtyEight.com<\/a> shows. Recent polls show that the majority of people are voting against a candidate that they despise, rather than for a candidate that they believe in. The popularity of \u201coutsider\u201d candidates such as Trump, Sanders, Carson, and Cruz demonstrates that many Americans are fed up with the \u201cbusiness as usual\u201d establishment and want something different. Most of the rhetoric coming out of the two camps focuses on personal attacks, rather than policy.<\/p>\n

What an opportunity for educators to teach students about political activism, important issues, third parties, and civility!<\/p>\n

For this reason, Mike and colleagues have designed the #MyParty16 Election Project<\/a>. In this PBL unit, students study the U.S. election process by creating their own political parties based on a few core issues. To persuade voters, students create a thirty-second campaign ad around one of their core platform beliefs and then hold \u201cPrimary\u201d elections in their school. \u00a0At his school, Mike then invites the top ten parties give two-minute stump-speeches before holding a final election.<\/p>\n

All \u201cprimary\u201d winner from each school are then invited to compete against other schools across the country through themypartyelection.org web site. The top five candidates will ultimately participate in an online debate via Google Hangout with a celebrity moderator and the national winner will be announced Monday, November 7th – the day before the actual election!<\/p>\n

Multi-Subject Connections<\/h1>\n

The #MyParty16 Election Project connects to a number of Common Core standards<\/a> and content areas as Mike describes in his blog post<\/a>:<\/p>\n