The first thing I do is “take it slow.” Essentially, I give my students a list of all the court cases we are going to cover about a month ahead of time. And I assign the students to research four court cases every class period. They should write down how the vote went (5-4, etc); what decision was reached; and the general facts of the case. (The Institute’s landmark cases page and www.oyez.org are a good resources.) Then each class, usually during the warm up activity, I go over the legal briefs of the case that they should have written down.

The second thing I do is get them to “know the people” the court case is about. So many people studying court cases seem to overlook that all the defendants and plaintiffs are people with real problems. What I do is tell the students the stories about these people: what their problem was; how they believe they were wronged; what they did about it; and how the case ended up at the Supreme Court. This approach really personalizes the cases for the students because they begin to take an impersonal phrase like “Tinker vs. Des Moines” and link it to students protesting a war. It is amazing how much retention improves when students link names and titles to personal stories. I usually relate these stories after we’ve gone over the 4 Supreme Court cases that day. And I make sure the students write these stories down. I also have the visual learners draw pictures next to each description.

The third technique I employ is “dissenting opinions.” To truly understand Supreme Court decisions, we must focus on not only what the courts decided, but what they argued about. I do this in several ways depending on the ability level of the class: 1) I have a ready list of dissenting opinions for each court case that I allow the students access to; 2) I have them research the dissenting opinions as a way to “refresh” their memory on the court cases they’ve previously researched; 3) I break the students into groups of majority and dissenting and have them role play the different sides of the argument, indicating at the end the winner (majority opinion).

And, beyond these techniques, for each court case I link the constitutional question that they are arguing about (i.e. eminent domain, a claimed right to privacy, etc) Now, I understand that some teachers might feel reticent focusing on the dissenting opinions. They may feel like time constraints, ability level of students, or any of a number of reasons justify skipping dissenting opinions. That is your call; teachers are masters of their classroom and know what is best for their students. I would, however, urge you to try teaching about dissenting opinions, even if you boil it down to one or two sentences. My experience has been that when you cover dissenting opinions, a light bulb goes off in student’s heads and they realize that the decisions of our highest court are not pulled out of the air, but have a basis in constitutional interpretation. The cases are decided by real people with different ideas arguing about what they believe is the right interpretation of the law. And when students see that, they seem to understand that the Supreme Court cases are important to learn because, just like our Congress, and our elections, the group with the most votes wins.

Well, you aren’t alone! One of the most common questions I’m asked at Bill of Rights Institute’s professional development seminars is “how do I modify this reading for my students?”

Whatever modification strategy you choose, keep in mind the importance of  linking that modification with the original text. It is imperative that any time we make modifications, we link them to the original text and have the lesson demonstrate to the students how the modified reading is the same as the original source, just with different words. In this way struggling readers improve their skills not only through increased vocabulary, but word association as well.

I’d like to share some creative strategies from my classroom experience and I hope you are able to use all or some of them in your classroom.

The first strategy to improve reading skills is “texting.”

• Take a challenging reading and highlight the most important passages. Then take those segments and translate them into “texting language.”
• Cut up the original passages and the texting passages.
• Organize the students into groups and have them match up the texting passages with the original passages. Then put the correct pairings up on the board or overhead and discuss.

Next, distribute the entire original reading.

• Have the each group of students popcorn read the passage in their groups.
• As an assessment, you can have the students answer reading comprehension questions on each of the passages individually or on the passage as a whole.
  

  Wordle of this blog post

Second reading strategy is wordle. This is a free Web site that takes the words from any text and forms a jumble of words. The most frequently used words in the text will appear larger in the jumble. There are two ways you can use wordle.

• The first option is to assign students a reading at home. Have them put the reading into wordle, create the wordle image and look up the definitions of the most frequently used words. Then discuss in class the next day.
• The second method is contained within your classroom.  You can do this all in class (either as a whole class with one computer or individually/paired if you have the technology) and ask students if they know the definitions of the words. After all the most frequently used words/unknown words are defined, continue with a guided or popcorn reading assignment in either groups or as a whole class.

The third strategy requires coordination and planning, but is something that I’ve done in my classroom with great success. Team teaching. Pair up with an English teacher (or several) and either coordinate a way to teach the same material, or get one of their advanced classes to come into your class and pair up with your students to read the particular passage. This strategy does require more work and effort, but I’ve found that sometimes when teachers take a step back, and let students help students achieve, you see results.

I hope you will be able to use some of these strategies in your classroom to help your students succeed!