Mr. Gordon Wins Innovative Curriculum Contest
Last week, The Gilder Lehrman Institute announced that our very own history teacher, Mr. Gordon, was one of the ten winners in their inaugural American History in 100 Documents: An Innovative Curriculum Contest. The guidelines of the contest were to create a lesson plan using one or more primary source documents in American History: 1493-1945, which provides K-12 schools, universities, and institutions—including Harvard, Yale, and the Library of Congress—access to tens of thousands of rare letters, artwork, broadsides, and maps spanning six centuries of American history.
Mr. Gordon created a lesson plan based around the question, “How do people react when society as they know it is under attack?” The lesson plan, created for 10th-grade history students, examines four such examples throughout history and looks at how people acted as a result.
Throughout the lesson, students are prompted with different questions such as “What is the biggest threat that the United States is currently facing?”, and the lesson culminates with a short play that compares and contrasts the various reactions of people facing these threats throughout four different eras of U.S. history.
