Master skills, explore new ideas, and build your teaching toolbox with free live, recorded, and on-demand training.
Learn about services designed to build educator capacity and cultivate dynamic educational experiences for students.
We’ve got answers. Visit our Support Desk to learn how to set-up and use your My iCivics Account.
Explore opportunities we’ve designed to create community and build your expertise.
Still stuck? Our Support team is standing by to help. Submit a request and we’ll be in touch.
Discover the four features of a sovereign state. Graphic organizers and mini-quizzes help reinforce the information, while students create a fictional country to apply what they've…
Students learn about the different forms of government that exist, including democracy, autocracy, oligarchy, and others. They compare and contrast these types of government, and…
Explore the five basic limits on government through the true story of Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori, and other fictional cases of government power gone wild.
Great question! We ask Thomas Hobbes and John Locke to help us find an answer. The thing is, they don't agree. Dig into the philosophers' ideas and see how they've influenced those…
This skit-driven lesson explores the six factors that make up the rule of law and how they protect individual rights and freedoms in our day to day lives. Students then connect the…
In the first of nine steps, students explore two county issues you have chosen. They vote to decide which issue the class will focus on for its “County Solutions” project. This…
Having chosen an issue for the project, students analyze two news articles about the issue. They apply the “5W + H” method in order to learn how to gather information from a news…
To begin thinking about possible solutions for the issue they read about in Step Two, students learn about the difference between individual, group, and government action. They…
To increase their knowledge about both the chosen issue and the three types of actors they studied in Step Three, students examine three websites of governmental and…
Having built a foundation of knowledge about the chosen issue in Steps One through Four, students now learn the term “public policy.” Students identify government action and…
Building on the concepts of public policy, government action, and regulation from Step Five, students analyze real-world examples of government actions and regulations. Students…
Armed with knowledge about the chosen issue and about how public policy works from Steps One through Six, students brainstorm a public policy solution for the issue the class has…
Students summarize their research and their proposed solution in one coherent document that describes what the issue is, what’s being done, and how the proposed public policy will…
Now that the research is done and students have articulated a proposed public policy solution for the chosen issue, they learn how to gather support. Students learn 12 different…
Kick off this project-based unit by asking students to examine what it means to make change in the world. Students think about why people are motivated to advocate for change, what…
Do your students breeze through internet search results, easily weeding out irrelevant results and finding exactly what they need? No? This step offers a detailed look at how to…
In this step, students read and annotate the sources they identified in Step 2. The lesson discusses investigative reading and offers strategies for staying organized when faced…
No issue exists in a vacuum, so in this step, students examine the factors that contribute to the circumstances surrounding their issue to gain a deeper understanding of the issue…
In this step, students figure out who’s got a stake in their issue. They learn what stakeholders are and how to identify them, as well as why the power of numbers is important and…
Armed with information and a deep understanding of their issue, students shift into action mode in this step by writing an action plan for “moving the needle” on their issue.
Lesson Plan