BRI Heads Back to Campus With Wisconsin, Michigan Programs

College students aren’t the only ones arriving on campus lately.

This month, the Bill of Rights Institute headed to the University of Wisconsin and Michigan State University to deliver professional development to local teachers.

The sessions focused on teaching civics in the 21st century and the judicial branch of government.

Scholars from the University of Wisconsin and Michigan State spoke at each session, and Wisconsin attendees also heard from local civic organizations.

Participants at the Wisconsin session “heard scholarly lectures with a Q&A from university staff, did a workshop about how to engage in civil discourse where they discussed their own classroom approaches, participated in three different deliberative strategies, and engaged with three different civic organizations about what civic education could look like with their curriculum,” said Joe Schmidt, BRI’s Director of Programs.

For the Wisconsin participants, Schmidt hopes they gained “an expanded set of civic resources, increased knowledge about civic education today, and strategies to use in their classroom to develop classroom communities as well as pedagogical approaches to contentious topics,” he said.

Schmidt added the Michigan State session participants received resources and activities from BRI staff. Then, they worked in small groups to create lesson plans they would use in the fall that focused on BRI resources and the Supreme Court.

Schmidt hopes the Michigan State session participants gained a deeper understanding of how the Supreme Court operates and will have new tools to develop lesson plans that meet the needs of their classrooms.

Teachers at both sessions provided BRI with valuable feedback.

One teacher praised the pacing and structure of BRI’s programs, while another appreciated the opportunity to demonstrate “the discourse strategies to see how they could work and... ways to adjust them for our classroom environments.”

“I have ideas that will support the facilitation and scaffolding of civil discourse conversations,” another teacher added.