2016 Founders Fellowship

0:04 [Music] The Founders Fellowship Program is a Bill of Rights Institute program where we have teachers from all over the country and they come to Washington DC for an intensive week of professional development. My name is Grace Straxma and I live and teach in Draper, Utah. My

0:24 name is Ryan Malay. I’m from Bo, Kansas, uh, North Central Kansas. Stephan Capton. I hold the rank of major at the New Mexico Military Institute. Hi, my name is Stacy Walton and I’m from Odessa, Texas, which is West Texas. My name is Karen Karnick and I’m from Rock Springs, Wyoming. My name is Rodney Ren. I’m from Witchah, Kansas. I teach at

0:45 Witchah Collegiate Upper School. Well, my name is Joe Tuan Daniels. Uh, I currently teach at Summit High School in beautiful Summit County, Colorado. I live in Breen Ridge, Colorado ski country and super stoked to be here in DC. My name is Heidi Rubich and I teach uh high school in Rock Springs, Wyoming. I’m originally from Montana. This uh I have taught for 12 years and I love

1:06 teaching high school students. I love social studies. I think the most important thing that social studies teachers can do is give our kids a way to judge what’s truthful, what’s not truthful, and make their own decisions. We are conducting founders fellowship this week with 44 teachers from across the country and our topic is the first amendment. Students don’t always

1:28 immediately engage with um understanding the constitution and the principles behind it. So it’s our job at the Bill of Rights Institute to equip teachers with classroom friendly lessons that will help them open up those essential constitutional principles and concepts. I have an intense interest in the

1:48 constitution, the bill of rights and the various um seminars that I have attended thus far have strengthened that understanding of the bill of rights and constitution and in turn that can be passed on to cadets at the military institution in the various

2:08 disciplines in the social science department. It’s pretty cool to just kind of sort of be immersed in the content that we love as teachers, but also too, I really enjoy the fact that uh we get a chance to meet with people that we don’t necessarily know, form friendships and relationships all centered around the passion that we have in terms of being not only history teachers, but teachers of American government as well. Um, it’s incredible

2:30 because I get to be a learner rather than be a teacher. I get to actually absorb all of this. So I get to take notes, listen to people who know so much more than I do. We have scholars come and they present lectures to the teachers. Uh the Bill of Rights Institute staff run through lesson demonstrations for the teachers and we

2:51 provide an extraordinary amount of supplemental materials and classroom demonstrations of lessons for them. We also have discussion groups and we tour around Washington DC and we do a lot of programs out at several different museums and courts. I love the lesson plans that they give. They’re just

3:12 something that’s completely different that the kids hadn’t done and I wouldn’t have thought of on my own. So, I really enjoy that. But my favorite part is probably just talking to teachers and having the time in the evening to hang out and talk to each other and and enjoy that kind of company. It has been very intense this week. Um, I’m looking forward to just continuing to get ideas from other

3:34 teachers. I’ve teaching for 23 years. After a while, it gets kind of I hate to use the word stale, but you need a, you know, to be rejuvenated. So, I’m looking for other ideas to incorporate in my classroom. And thus far, I mean, the program has just been wonderful. Um my first year of teaching was this past year. So being relatively new to the

3:55 profession, I’m super excited about the founders fellowship with the build rights institute. Um not only for the lectures and the resources I’ve been given, but just to interact with the other social studies teachers here who have a lot more experience who maybe teach in different types of schools and just see what they have to offer. My undergraduate work is not in education. So for someone who has no particular

4:16 training in pedigogy that specifically the teaching resources that Barri offers is absolutely incredible and I and I and I know that there are other people who do have years and years of pedagogical training and they think the same thing and I’m not going to try to speak for them but certainly for somebody like me who essentially is a new teacher to this subject material. Having the ability to go through and at least look through and

4:37 examine some different ideas on how to present that stuff, how to uh how to teach that stuff in the classroom, I think is just highly beneficial. The more that I have uh progressed as an educator, I’m starting to realize that uh it’s extremely important for the students to find truth for themselves as opposed to accepting my version of the truth. And I think using documents for

4:57 students to wrestle with a lot of the same issues back in the past that they’re wrestling with today just shows that pretty much this country was founded on human principles. We mess things up, but we also have the opportunity to get them right. One, the curriculum is phenomenal. Two, the both of the speakers that we’ve had um Dr. Munos and Dr. DS have just been

5:17 absolutely fascinating, full of content. So, it’s been a good balance of um curricula and lessons and speakers to help with that content. The site visits have been phenomenal. I really appreciated getting a chance to look at the National Archives this morning. Um spend some time here in the museum this afternoon and I’m looking forward to the Supreme Court tomorrow. So, I think the

5:38 whole setup of the Founders Fellowship is just a great great setup. Main theme for this week is to help teachers communicate to their students how vital all of the protections of the first amendment are. So religion, speech press assembly petition these

5:59 are these are the fundamental tools for citizens to learn to exercise their liberty and equally important to conduct themselves in civil society as virtuous

6:19 beneficiaries of the liberties communicated to us through our heritage. Um I think that a fellow teacher or administrator could look um to to the founders fellowship to one make connections with other um colleagues across the country that they are going to have connections with that they can you know share lessons with. Two, they’re going to find some

6:40 phenomenal content in the professors um that that will speak. Three, they’re going to get great curriculum um with the resources that are provided and just adding to their base of knowledge. Um, and so I just always try to encourage teachers to go to the website, look at the resources. Um, you know, use the documents and use them not necessarily in a manner that you would think would

7:01 misconrue your students understanding, but that’s something else that I like about the Bill of Rights. It’s like you guys give us a framework to do what we feel like we know is best for our students. And so I would just encourage people to give it a shot. Um, I tried you guys out like good gracious when I first started teaching a long time ago. Didn’t know what I was doing with civics and government. Found a whole bunch of awesome resources that I was able to tweak. Seems like every year you guys do

7:22 something different to keep me stoked. This is one of the reasons why I love to be a part of not only things like the founders fellowship, but the day seminars that are done all over the country as well as the weekend colloquium. So again, just to reiterate, I’d say give it a shot. Um, if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, but you won’t know that until you try. [Music]