Name: Civic Literacy Essay for Week 10, Regents US History
SKU: 645784684a656a0019d5a822
Price: 39.99 USD
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About this resource

What's inside this resource

Civic Literacy Essay for Week 10, Regents US History

The Challenge of Creating a Stable Representative Government.

This Civic Literacy essay is based on a set of primary source documents. The question is designed to test a student's ability to work with historical documents. In analyzing the documents, students consider the source of each document and any point of view that may be presented. The language and images used in a document may reflect the historical context of the time in which it was created.

A recommended teaching practice for New York State Regents US History and Government is to train students to write one of these each ten weeks or so through the year. Teachers preparing students for the New York State Regents will find it difficult to train students to write these well if they wait until the end of the year! Each of the civic literacy essays authored by Innovation Assessments LLC are designed for different points in the year such that documents come from historical context usually under study.

Here is a blog article about teaching document-based essays that will be helpful.

Historical Context of this essay prompt: The Challenge of Creating a Stable Representative Government. Throughout United States history, many constitutional and civic issues have been debated by Americans. These debates have resulted in efforts by individuals, groups, and governments to address these issues. These efforts have achieved varying degrees of success. One of these constitutional and civic issues is the challenge of creating a stable representative Government.

The product also includes passcodes to my own virtual classroom at Innovation. Give students the passcodes for access to review videos with embedded, auto-corrected questions.

What's included

A cover page with Name, Date and Class / Section lines
A task page citing NYS Frameworks 11.1 and 11.2, giving the historical context and the three-part essay task
Definitions of the command terms describe, explain and discuss as the Regents uses them
Document 1 — William Bradford, A History of Plymouth Plantation (1650), carrying the text of the Mayflower Compact
Document 2 — the Maryland Toleration Act, 21 September 1649
Document 3 — John Pory's Proceedings of the First General Assembly of Virginia, July 1619
Document 4 — Edmund Burke's speech on conciliation with America, 22 March 1775
Document 5 — Federalist Paper No. 10, Madison writing as Publius, 1787
Document 6 — Madison's Constitutional Convention notes on Randolph and the Virginia Plan, 1787
Numbered short questions beside documents, including "What kinds of issues did the House of Burgesses deal with?" and "What problem was the Virginia Plan intended to resolve?"
A scoring rubric with descriptor bands attached to marks of 100, 94, 85 and 76
Source citations under each document, several with the URL and access date

Resource types: Teacher Tools, Assessments

In the classroom

Teaching tips & learning objectives

Learning objectives

Describe the historical circumstances surrounding the challenge of creating a stable representative government in America
Explain what individuals, groups and governments did about it, from a shipboard compact to a federal constitution
Discuss how far each of those efforts succeeded, rather than only listing them
Read and analyse period spelling and syntax in seventeenth and eighteenth century documents
Weigh a source's point of view, as the task page directs, when the language reflects its own historical context
Bring outside knowledge to a document-based essay, which the rubric's top band explicitly requires

Teaching tips

Documents 1 to 3 are in original spelling — 'Common Weath', 'shalbe', 'voiage' — so students who have not read seventeenth-century English before need a first pass just to decode them
The three command terms are defined on the task page in the Regents' own wording; marking against those definitions rather than a general essay standard is what makes the practice transfer
The rubric's 100 band requires substantial outside information as well as four documents, so a student who only works from the packet cannot reach it — worth saying before they start
The six sources move from 1619 to 1787, so they can also be used as a chronological reading set before any essay is attempted
The contributor's own advice is to run one of these roughly every ten weeks rather than leaving essay training to the end of the year, which is what the week numbering in the title is for

Skills covered

Document-based essay writing — students build one argument from six supplied sources plus their own knowledge, following the Regents three-part task.
Primary source analysis — the packet supplies the Mayflower Compact, a colonial religious statute, an early assembly record, a parliamentary speech and two founding-era American texts, each with its provenance stated.
Reading period English — Documents 1, 2 and 3 retain original spelling and sentence structure from 1619 to 1650.
Sourcing and point of view — the task page directs students to consider the source of each document and any point of view it presents.
Working to a rubric — the scoring guide names what separates the bands, including depth of development, use of at least four documents and outside information.
Answering scaffolded questions — short numbered questions beside documents direct attention before the essay is written, such as what problem Madison says the constitution resolves.

Good to know

Questions teachers ask about this resource

Which documents are supplied with the question?

Six, running chronologically from 1619 to 1787: Bradford's account of the Mayflower Compact, the Maryland Toleration Act of 1649, John Pory's proceedings of the first Virginia General Assembly, Edmund Burke's 1775 conciliation speech, Federalist No. 10, and Madison's Convention notes on the Virginia Plan.

What separates the top rubric band from the one below it?

Depth and reach. The highest band asks for an essay that is both descriptive and analytical, draws on at least four documents, incorporates substantial outside information and richly supports the theme with facts, examples and details, with an introduction and conclusion beyond a restatement of the theme. The band below allows one aspect of the task to be developed more thoroughly than the other and asks for relevant rather than substantial outside information.

Are the documents modernised or left in period spelling?

Left as they were, in the main. The Maryland Toleration Act keeps forms like "Common Weath", "consideracion" and "shalbe"; the Virginia proceedings keep "voiage" and "commaunde". The task page notes only that some documents have been edited for the purpose of the question, which mostly means cut rather than rewritten.