Political Science Educator: volume 27, issue 2
Reflections
By Diana Owen (owend@georgetown.edu), Donna P. Phillips (phillips@civiced.org), and Alissa Irion-Groth (irion@civiced.org)
The civic mission of schools—providing students with “the skills, knowledge, and attitudes that will prepare them to be competent and responsible citizens through their lives” (Carnegie Corporation of New York and CIRCLE 2003, 4)—has become more challenging in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the increasingly fraught political environment. The disparities in civic education between high-need middle and high school students and their more advantaged counterparts have widened significantly (Kuhfeld, et al. 2020). High-need students are at risk of educational failure, underserved, and in need of special assistance and support. They often receive substandard civic education or are denied opportunities for civic learning entirely.
The James Madison Legacy Project Expansion (JMLPE) is a multi-year (2022-2026) innovative educator professional development (PD) program and curriculum intervention aimed at mitigating these educational disparities. It is funded by a grant from the Education Innovation and Research Program of the U.S. Department of Education. The core goals of the JMLPE are to impart civic and related social and emotional learning (SEL) competencies to multilingual learners (MLs), students with disabilities (SWDs), and students of color (SOC). MLs are students whose native language is not English or who lack proficiency in English (U.S. Department of Education, 2016). Among their ranks are refugees, migrants, students with interrupted education, internationally adopted students, and unaccompanied minors. SWDs, as defined under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, are students with “a disability that adversely affects academic performance and are in need of special education and related services” (IDEA, 2018). Students with disabilities have unique learning needs and require specially designed instruction. The range of disabilities that can affect students’ learning ability includes intellectual disabilities, speech or language impairment, hearing impairment, visual impairment, serious emotional disturbance, traumatic brain injury, orthopedic impairments, autism spectrum disorder, and developmental delay. SOC are defined as students who identify as Black or African American, Latine, Chicanx, Asian, South Asian, Pacific Islander (AAPI), Middle Eastern, Native American, and multiracial (Institute of Education Sciences, 2023).
The Center for Civic Education[1] implements the JMLPE, and the Civic Education Research Lab at Georgetown University is the project evaluator. The Center and its partners have been innovating and disseminating teacher PD and instructional resources for the Center’s longstanding We the People: The Citizen and the Constitution (WTP) curricular program to address the needs of MLs, SWDs, and SOC. The WTP program was developed in 1987 and adopted as the principal education program on the U.S. Constitution by the Commission on the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution. WTP is grounded in the foundations and institutions of American government and is distinctive for its emphasis on Constitutional principles, the Bill of Rights, and Supreme Court cases, and their relevance to current issues and debates. Over 30 million students and 75,000 educators have participated in WTP. Students take part in a range of learning activities, such as primary document analysis, group projects, debates, democratic simulations, and student speeches. The culminating experience is a series of simulated congressional hearings where student teams testify before a panel of judges who are typically community leaders, government officials, academics, lawyers, judges, and distinguished civic educators. Students research and prepare sets of questions where they demonstrate their knowledge and understanding of constitutional principles and defend their positions on historical and contemporary issues. Middle and high school classes can participate in district, statewide, and national competitions.
It is challenging to design, execute, sustain, and scale powerful and effective learning opportunities for high-need students. Often educators’ focus on curriculum innovation and researchers’ analyses of what works are siloed when working in tandem would enhance the benefits to teachers and students. The JMLPE offers a blueprint for the development, implementation, and assessment of civic education programs through a cooperative, systematic process. The project employs design-based implementation research (DBIR) where program developers and evaluators work in partnership to solve problems of practice. Four common elements shared by DBIR projects are: “1) a focus on persistent problems of practice from multiple stakeholders’ perspectives; 2) a commitment to iterative, collaborative design; 3) a concern with developing theory and knowledge related to both classroom learning and implementation through systematic inquiry; and 4) a concern with developing capacity for sustaining change in systems (Fishman, et al., 143). DBIR reconceptualizes the relationship between research and practice to be a multi-way, recursive experience between innovators who design curriculum and PD programs, implementers who teach the curriculum, and researchers who conduct assessments.
The JMLPE is guided by a theory of change positing that the PD program and adapted WTP curriculum will significantly improve learning outcomes, especially civic knowledge, dispositions, skills, and SEL competencies, among the three student populations. The Center and CERL work collaboratively with educator-experts to develop and assess a curricular model based on WTP. CERL simultaneously conducts research that informs the design and implementation of the PD program and adapted curriculum. The iterative development process incorporates regular feedback from participants and data from CERL’s research studies. A central goal of DBIR is to instruct the development of programs that can be scaled up to improve outcomes in a variety of settings. This type of scalability is consistent with the JMLPE’s objective of advancing civic outcomes for MLs, SWDs, and SOC by adjusting the WTP curriculum.
During the first phase of the project, the Center and CERL consulted with teacher-experts to identify priorities, educational objectives, pressing needs, best instructional practices, and barriers to curriculum implementation, including pandemic-related obstacles. CERL collected data from 33 middle and high school educators from fourteen states who had experience designing civics curricula and instructing students in the target populations. Teachers responded to an online survey, the results of which were shared during a JMLPE Curriculum Workshop that took place in June of 2022. The teacher-experts identified adapting teaching practices and protocols for student-centered, active learning as a particular challenge. They felt that teachers should make the curriculum accessible and relevant by connecting students’ experiences and cultural background to the content and showing the relationship to their daily lives. They recommended providing content knowledge to teachers so that WTP can be accessible to students who have limited prior awareness of the U.S. Constitution, American government, and history. Classroom implementation of WTP should be consistent with Universal Design for Learning (UDL), a flexible approach to teaching and learning that provides all students with an equal opportunity to succeed by finding ways to keep individual students motivate (Stapelton-Corcoran, 2022; Owen and Phillips, 2023).
Informed by the teacher-expert study, Center staff worked closely with classroom teachers and experts in SEL, UDL, culturally responsive pedagogy, and ML instructional best practices on an initial draft of the fifty JMLPE lesson plans. The JMLPE lessons employ inquiry-based learning, a “student-centered teaching method that encourages students to ask questions and investigate real-world problems” (Scholl, 2023). The use of inquiry is an equity strategy where students can have greater agency, voice, and choice. Students can explore sources beyond the text, bring their own perspectives, and consider the views of others. They ask and answer questions to actively engage the curriculum and experience more cultural relevance. The lessons were piloted in classes with teachers instructing high concentrations of the target population students who implemented the adapted WTP materials in their classrooms.
CERL conducted a pilot study in spring of the 2022-23 academic year to assess student outcomes using a quasi-experimental, pretest-posttest survey design. The pilot study indicated that the WTP curriculum intervention resulted in large knowledge increases, especially for SOC and SWDs. The gains were somewhat less pronounced for MLs, suggesting the need to further develop the curriculum to meet their needs, including translated materials. The intentional integration of SEL competencies into the WTP curriculum is an innovation of the JMLPE. The pilot study revealed a need to strongly emphasize SEL competencies and related pedagogies in the lesson plans and PD program. Finally, one-third of students reported that they did not learn about other races and cultures in their WTP class. This finding pointed to a need to integrate more civics content that is historically and culturally relevant to students in the target populations into the curriculum, lesson plans, and pedagogy.
The Center used the evidence from the pilot study to design the teacher PD program that was launched in the summer of 2023 and revise the adapted WTP curriculum which was then taught by the first cohort of JMLPE teachers. CERL has been conducting research on the effectiveness of the PD program for teachers and student outcomes that will inform the Center’s implementation of the PD program and curriculum intervention in the next academic year when the next iteration of the DBIR will take place. The JMLPE was instituted in seven states in the 2023-2024 academic year and will expand to a total of twelve states in 2024-2025. The project ultimately will provide fifty-two hours of PD to 400 teachers and reach more than 28,000 students in schools with substantial concentrations of high-need students.
For further information about how to implement this project in your own class or understand its basic utility, please see the WTP overview document[2] or our APSA Annual Meeting paper: Owen, Diana, Donna P. Phillips, and Alissa Irion-Groth. 2023. “Transforming Civics for High-Need Students,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Los Angeles, CA, August 31. DOI: 10.33774/apsa-2023-j8n39[3]
Endnotes
[2] https://civiced.org/pdfs/WethePeopleOverview.pdf
[3] https://preprints.apsanet.org/engage/apsa/article-details/64ee5b213fdae147fa1888d5
References
Carnegie Corporation of New York and CIRCLE. 2003. The Civic Mission of Schools.
Research Report. New York: Carnegie Corporation. https://media.carnegie.org/filer_public/9d/0a/9d0af9f4-06af-4cc6-ae7d-71a2ae2b93d7/ccny_report_2003_civicmission.pdf
Fishman, Barry J., William R. Penuel, Anna-Ruth Allen, Britte Haugan Cheng, and Nora Sabelli. 2013. “Design-Based Implementation Research: An Emerging Model for Transforming the Relationship of Research and Practice,” National Society for the Study of Education 112(2): 136-156.
Institute for Education Science (IES). 2023. “Racial/Ethnic Enrollment in Public Schools.” Research Report. U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cge
Kuhfeld, Megan, Jim Soland, Beth Tarasawa, Angela Johnson, Erik Ruzek, and Karyn Lewis. 2020. “How Is COVID-19 Affecting Student Learning?” Brookings, December 3. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-is-covid-19-affecting-student-learning/
Owen, Diana, and Donna P. Phillips. 2023. “Toward an Accessible Civics Curriculum: Adapting We the People for High-Need Students,” Paper prepared for Presentation at the American Political Science Association Teaching and Learning Conference on the panel on Inclusive Curriculum and Institutional Change, February 11, 2023, Baltimore, MD. DOI: 10.33774/apsa-2023-gqdb0
Owen, Diana, and M. Bradlee Sutherland. 2023. James Madison Legacy Project Expansion: Pilot Study. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/373040957_James_Madison_Legacy_Project_Expansion_Pilot_Study
Scholl, Andrew. 2023. “What is Inquiry-Based Learning? Types, Benefits, Examples,” SplashLearn, January 3. https://splashlearn.com
Stapleton-Corcoran, Erin. 2022. “University Design for Learning (UDL),” Center for the Advancement of Teaching Excellent, University of Illinois Chicago. https://teaching.uic.edu/cate-teaching-guides/inclusive-equity-minded-teaching-practices/universal-design-for-learning-udl/
U.S. Department of Education. 2016. Our Nation’s English Learners: What Are Their Characteristics. Washington, D.C. https://www2.ed.gov/datastory/el-characteristics/index.html
Diana Owen is Professor of Political Science in the Communication, Culture, and Technology Graduate Program and Director of the Civic Education Research Lab at Georgetown University.
Donna P. Phillips is Vice President & Chief Program Officer at the Center for Civic Education.
Alissa Irion-Groth is Director of Program Grants and Innovation at the Center for Civic Education.
Published since 2005, The Political Science Educator is the newsletter of the Political Science Education Section of the American Political Science Association. All issues of The Political Science Educator can be viewed on APSA Connects Civic Education page.
Editors: Colin Brown (Northeastern University), Matt Evans (Northwest Arkansas Community College)
Submissions: editor.PSE.newsletter@gmail.com
APSA Educate has republished The Political Science Educator since 2021. Any questions or corrections to how the newsletter appears on Educate should be addressed to educate@apsanet.org
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