Southern States Secede

Day One
Review prior knowledge about the significance of different people’s point of view across the south and north right before the Civil War.   Have the students describe how these points of view could influence the starting of a war or the blocking of a war. 

Anticipatory –Show a 1 minute video clip of a recent presidential debate.  Discuss how the use of a timer and a foundational set of rules at the debate can allow both sides to share their views while maintaining a boundary.  This way, the audience, the citizens, and US voters can hear the answer without the other side yelling over the other.

Direct Instruction: Show a short PowerPoint presentation about the points of view for different groups of Americans including: unionists, cooperationists, secessionists/radicals (fire-eaters), Lincoln, and South Carolina population representatives.  Then describe how a debate will take place within the classroom tomorrow between these five groups.  Students can also choose to dress up like their person in order to bring their character to life during the debate.  

You can make dressing up with extra participation points.

Model for the students how the debate will be set up.  There will be five podiums (if accessible) across the front of the classroom and you will have a 1-2-minute timer for each speaker (you can choose whichever time works best with your classroom) and the other debaters cannot speak until the timer has rung.  The same question will be presented for all of the five speakers which will be created by the reporters who will be the rest of the class members.  Each student in the class will work to develop five questions that they would like answered which relates to slavery, states’ rights, and SC secession.  The student-reporters will not know who will be chosen, so they all have to be prepared.  These questions should be answered based on the role’s point of view in history, so the debater has to research their person’s point of view about these topics.  You can either provide websites and videos that you would like the students to use to research these topics, or you can have the students do it on their own which would be more rigorous.  

Guided practice: For the researching portion (if you would like it to be more regulated), pass out a graphic organizer with the main topics listed including slavery, states’ rights, and SC secession.  Then, the student-reporters can work together to create questions for each subtopic using the resources you provide for the students or you can have them use their own resources.  The debaters can be chosen by you, or the students can volunteer.  Once they are chosen, they will research their person’s point of view on slavery, states’ rights, and SC succession using multiple resources.  ETV videos, a letter from that person or from that era, newspaper articles, and secondary sources such as your social studies textbook.  

Students can be required to document their sources at the bottom of the graphic organizer to prove where they gathered their information.  Some teachers can require two to three sources in order to make it more rigorous, or you can just leave it up to the student.  

These graphic organizers can be collected for an informal assessment grade.  Then they can be passed back next class to be used during the debate.  
Day Two
Independent Practice: The Debate
Before class begins, set up the five podiums.  If you don’t have any, you can have them stand with a desk in front of them so the debaters have a place to lay their notes.  Also, make sure that you have decided if you would like one or two minutes for each debater to answer the question.  

As the students come into class, bring the debaters up to their podium and put all the reporters in the “audience” which are the remaining desks in the class.  Pass back the graphic organizer or notes from yesterday based on the three subtopics: slavery, states’ rights, and SC secession.  Review the rules for the debate including not speaking over each other.  Each debater will have a turn to answer the question.  You will call on one of the reporters in the audience to read their question.  Then the debate will begin.  The reporters must take notes about the response from each of the debaters since they will be required to create a newspaper critique explaining who they felt won the debate with the strongest answers using specific quotes from the debate to support their critique.  The debaters also need to be listening to their opponent since they will also write up a rebuttal that they couldn’t counter during the debate.  

Once the debate gets started, remind the reporters to take notes and remind the debaters to take notes about how they answered the question, but also include information that they wished they would have stated during the debate.  This information will be used during their rebuttal write-up afterwards.  

Once the debate is over, usually five questions are only chosen which is equivalent to 25 minutes, create a discussion with the class by posing questions: What do you feel were the strong elements of the debate?  Which question do you feel created the largest spread of answers and strong feelings?  What could the debaters have done better?  What could the reporters have asked that wasn’t?  

Now, give the students a few minutes to begin their homework which is the critique if you were a reporter, or create a rebuttal if you were a debater.  

• Reporter: Tell who you felt won the debate using evidence from their answers to support your critique.
• Debaters: Option 1: Write up a rebuttal that you couldn’t counter and do it now.
• Option 2: Write who you felt had the strongest rebuttal to a point that you made, recount the point and their rebuttal to show that you were listening to others’ answers, not just your own.    

How will students share their work?
The students will share their work by videotaping the debate and the teacher can put it on Google Drive for all students to access in order to review for future assessments.Their writing can also be displayed by hanging exemplar newspaper articles in the classroom or by having the student read the article out loud to the class.  

Extensions/Differentiation:
Lower: The teacher can create a graphic organizer to guide the research to keep the students all on the same path.  The teacher can also provide the debaters the questions that will be asked once they are made by the reporters.  

Higher: The teacher can provide a website, but not the direct link to the primary and secondary sources in order to have the students work on their researching searching skills.  Take into consideration that the lesson would need to be lengthened if this takes place to allow more time for the researching procedure.  

Additional SC Unionist to research - Henry Middleton, Joel R. Poinsett, Daniel Huger, Hugh Swinton Legare, Benjamin F. Perry, William J. Grayson, John B. O'Neall

Additional SC Cooperationalist to research - James R. Bratton and James L. Orr

Additional SC Nullifiers & Segregationist to research - Robert B. Rhett, Robert J. Turnbull, Francis W. Pickens, Maxcy Gregg, James Hamilton, Jr., George McDuffie, James Hammond 

Students can decide the correct category for John C. Calhoun

Evaluations/Assessments
An informal assessment for the students is for teachers to grade the research notes collected to either create questions for the debaters, or notes from the different points of view from the debaters.  

A summative assessment can be completed by grading the classroom debates. A suggested site with a debate rubric from the University of Illinois is listed below.
www.niu.edu/facdev/_pdf/guide/strategies/classroom_debate_rubric.pdf

Another informal assessment can be the newspaper critique or rebuttal.  

Formative assessments include a quiz over the content from standard 8-4.4 and 8-4.5.