- Good evening and welcome to the third and final workshop on our series of "Teaching Ben Franklin Authentically."

I'm Lauren McDowell, PBS North Carolina's Education Engagement Manager, and I am joined tonight by two incredible leaders.

I have next to me, Dana Hall.

She will be navigating the chat, supporting this experience And of course, our incredible presenter leading us on this journey, another purposeful and engaging experience, and it's led by Ms. Kimberly Jones.

She is a high school teacher in Chapel Hill.

She is the 2022-23 Chapel Hill-Carrboro Teacher of the Year, and the 2023-2024 Sullivan Chair for Excellence in High School English and Social Studies Education.

And last but not least, she's the Co-Regional Director for the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust.

So without further ado, I'm gonna pass the mic right over to you, Ms. Kimberly.

- Good evening, everyone.

Thank you so much for joining us again tonight.

I'm super excited.

I was telling Dana and Lauren how I hope that our time together has been fruitful and productive for you and your classroom, and ultimately, and most importantly, our students.

And I don't think that tonight will be any exception.

I've got some great tools to share with you, and some wonderful conversations that I can't wait for us to have and unpack together.

On the slide that you're seeing, these are just a few pictures into my classroom, and the kids that I show up for every day, and they're doing some primary source document work very similar to some of what we're gonna be doing tonight.

So let's dive in.

As Dana said, I hope you have a pen and something to write on, pen and paper.

You will need it throughout the course to night.

We're gonna be sharing tons of links and as those links pop up, you'll be able to access to sort of see this is what the worksheet looks like.

But in a virtual setting, it's a lot more difficult to navigate between tabs.

So I'm gonna be giving you sort of short, quick, easy ways to turn these very formal worksheets into crib notes that we can use for the sake of our conversation.

I always like to start my presentations by giving full credit to the amazing author of this curriculum, Dr. Shanedra Nowell, she's a professor at Oklahoma State University.

She's also a social studies teacher, and I hope you have found, and tonight will be no exception, that you continue to find that her resources, the curriculum that she's presented, is built around high-engagement, high-impact for students, and a great usability for educators.

Moving forward.

Our goals for tonight's workshop, we have looked at Benjamin Franklin as this evolving figure who had very unfortunate and highly-problematic stances on things like enslavement at points of his life.

We've seen him evolve into an abolitionist.

Last week, we looked at Benjamin Franklin the scientist and the inventor, and the incredible contributor to the common good.

And tonight, we are gonna be looking at Benjamin Franklin the Statesman.

We're gonna be exploring and analyzing the political writings of Ben Franklin.

However, the cool thing is, with Benjamin Franklin, even his writings are not all writings.

We're gonna do some illustrations, some political cartoon analysis.

All of these things are going to guide us to sort of see how Ben Franklin evolved, not just in his personal beliefs, but in his public beliefs and actions.

We're gonna access and expand our own content knowledge related to Benjamin Franklin.

The clips tonight are very meaty.

They're a little longer than some of the clips we've dealt with.

We are going to connect Benjamin Franklin's evolution as an enslaver to that of an abolitionist through his political writings.

We're gonna look and learn about some more strategies for teaching complex history.

And ultimately, I'm also gonna share with you a wonderful set of extension lessons all brought to us by PBS.

So let's dive in.

I'm super excited about getting into our conversations in our small groups and in our whole groups.

I wanna take a moment for anybody new, and for those of us returning for the third week, just to revisit our norms, of course, respecting and making room for all voices.

We're gonna talk a lot about public debate and public dialogue, and we want to model for our students the same ideals that they'll be seeing Benjamin Franklin and his fellow founding fathers using as they debate the issues of their day.

When we're in those breakout rooms, make sure that everyone is stepping up and making their voices heard.

Your perspectives are so important.

And whether you know it or not, I've had a chance to see the surveys.

What you give to each other, I put on equal bearing with anything that I can give to you.

The ability to work with teachers from across the state for you all to share your best practices is second to none.

The greatest learning that I ever do in professional development often comes in those breakout sessions when I'm talking to colleagues who are teaching students at the same level, in the same subject matter, but they are classroom educators.

You all bring a wealth of knowledge and I'm excited for you to share it with me and each other.

Moving forward.

There are three pedagogical frameworks that have driven all of our work, and they are with us tonight in our final session.

The first, anti-racist, anti-biased education.

Each one of us as educators, me as your facilitator, and Dr. Nowell in her creation of the curriculum, are committed to identifying our biases, embracing diversity, and actively working toward ending racism and racial inequalities in our society.

One of the ways we do that is through our second framework, culturally relevant and responsive pedagogy.

Supporting our students in their full, in the fullness of their identity, making room for all of who they are, what they value and what they believe to thrive and flourish in our classrooms.

And lastly, media literacy education, helping students to better access, analyze, evaluate, and respond to media in all its forms.

So tonight, we're gonna start with a brief conversation that was held in September of 1787.

Elizabeth Willing Powell approached Dr. Franklin after the signing of the Constitution and asked him, "Well, Doc, what have we got?

A republic or a monarchy?"

Benjamin Franklin responds, "A republic, if we can keep it."

Each one of us, every day when we go into our classrooms, whether we see ourselves as soldiers of democracy or bastions of the republic, we serve a paramount role in the protection and the promotion of our democracy.

And that's gonna be our first right.

Going forward.

As educators, I want us to take a few moments and reflect on our role in this grand experiment of democracy.

In a brief quickwrite, I want us to think about how we can help America to keep it, to keep our Republic alive and thriving.

So take about three minutes, and think about yourself, each day in your classroom, in your ED leadership, in your professional development work.

How do you support the continuation of our American Democratic Republic?

How do you model the ideals of our Republic and good citizenship in your classroom, in your school, or in your community?

I'm super excited to hear these responses.

So let's take about three minutes and write.

[bright music] Let's take about 30 seconds to wrap up our quickwrites.

[bright music] All right, coming together and moving forward.

In just a moment, you all are gonna be sent into breakout rooms.

And in those breakout rooms, you are gonna have the chance to introduce yourselves.

Some of you may be very familiar with each other if you've had a chance to converse.

But if not, take a moment to introduce yourself, where you teach or where you've taught.

And then I want each person to share, either in essence or by reading your response to the quickwrite.

As an educator, how do you support the continuation of our American Democratic Republic?

How do you model the ideas of our Republic, of citizenship in your classroom, in your schools, or in your communities?

To ensure that we all have a chance to talk, I'm gonna give us about four minutes in our breakout rooms.

That should give us about 60 seconds per person.

Don't forget to introduce yourself before you share your thoughts.

And when we come back to together, we're gonna share out some of what we heard.

Welcome back, y'all.

Welcome back.

I am super duper excited to hear from some of y'all about the conversations you were having in your breakout groups.

I would absolutely love to hear from at least one person from each one of those rooms.

So if you would be willing to share, you can just raise your hand and let us know how you see your role as a supporter and a promoter of our democracy.

Melissa.

- So I'm speaking for the team.

They were awesome and they can fill in.

But couple of things came up when we were talking about media literacy, information literacy, and how much responsibility we have for teaching kids.

You know, Ryan said, you know, "How to think.

Not to teach 'em what to think, teach 'em how to think," you know?

And there was another great quote, and I'm trying to remember what it was, but it was like, everybody taking responsibility for making sure that people are informed citizens.

And that's the key for that group.

Somebody I'm sure can weigh in with more information, but.

- Anyone else from that small group wanna share?

If not, I would love to hear from somebody who was in the other room, either about your own response or something great you heard.

Lee.

- I just want to say, I'm mortified.

The dogs were barking, and I think during our breakout session, I was on mute running my mouth the whole time.

So if you were in my group, I swear I was answering questions and talking to you.

And a couple times, I was asked direct, I think I was muted the whole time.

If I was, I am so sorry.

Oh, man.

I feel awful.

- [Participant] But you weren't.

But you weren't.

- What you didn't hear was a well-informed citizenry and to promote dialogue, which I think is very important, I try to model that.

And I have come out of the closet as a Ben Franklin fan, so I wanted him to make an appearance with me.

I'll scoot him to the side now, but thank you and I apologize.

- I love it so much, Lee.

I love it so much.

I have to tell y'all.

So my whole family knows that I've been doing these Ben Franklin trainings, and we took our kids to D.C., they had a bit of a fall break.

So we took my two stepsons, they're 17 and 13, and with COVID and everything, one of them had missed his eighth grade trip to D.C. so we took them up for the weekend and did all the museums.

And my older stepson loves, like, thrifting, he loves thrift shops.

And I think we had done three on Sunday, and there was one more he wanted to go to.

So I was just like, "I'm gonna stay in the car, drink this cup of coffee, you go enjoy you're antiquing."

And he sends me a text message from inside the store, and he's like, "I'm gonna buy this for you."

And it was this little praying picture of Ben Franklin with a series of Ben Franklin quotes, and he's like, "You just, you keep talking about Ben Franklin."

So he was like, "He can just be in your room with you all the time."

I was like, "Well, I think I'm gonna take him to school.

I don't know if I want Ben Franklin watching me while I sleep."

But I think it's awesome.

And I think it's really cool when our students see the things that we are passionate about, from historical figures to, you know, various movements in society.

I think that's one of the ways that we continue a healthy Democratic Republic, showing our students and modeling for our students a healthy love and appreciation of the roots of this nation, no matter how complex or at times, trying, or even tragic they may be.

I try to model, I was making my own notes.

I said one of the ways that I try to support and continue our Democratic Republic is, and particularly citizenship, is to embrace and celebrate the diversity that has always been present in our nation.

And I think when we teach history, authentically, when we teach history, honestly, we see that from the very roots of this nation that we have always been multifaceted.

We've always been a multicultural society.

Whether those voices were heard, whether those voices were valued, whether those voices were recognized, does not deny the very real reality that they were there.

And our duty as educators, as historians, as lovers of this nation, of history and of language, is to give voices to the stories of the people who we know factually were there.

How do we amplify those voices?

How do we make room for those voices?

And in doing so, invite the voices of our students into our classrooms and into the democracy, encouraging our students to make their own voices heard through voting, through civic action, through political discourse.

And I think one of you all mentioned earlier, through a critique of ideas and not people.

How do we support democracy?

We model it in our classrooms, giving our students voice and choice, be it through our pedagogical choices or just our classroom norms.

Moving forward.

Let's dive in to Mr. Franklin, the Statesman.

There are three big documents we're gonna look at tonight.

One, I'm gonna kind of briefly mention, give you some resources, some that we've actually already worked with a little bit.

But three we're gonna dive deep in.

But the four things we're gonna look at tonight are the Stamp Act, the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris and the US Constitution.

So let's dive in.

Going forward.

At the start of the American Revolution, we find Benjamin Franklin serving as a colonial representative for Pennsylvania, sorry, Georgia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.

He defends the colonies against the new laws meant to raise taxes.

When the Stamp Pact passes in 1765, Franklin initially supports it because he is doing his duty to Britain.

He is a very proud loyalist at this point, but he is uniquely and authentically American.

And at this point in his career, Ben Franklin is kinda trying to thread this needle between, how can I hold to the allegiances that I have to Great Britain, while also honor the reality of the world in which I live as an American in the colonies.

When the protests begin to erupt throughout the colonies over the Stamp Act, Ben Franklin reconsiders his position going forward.

Let's take a quick look at what he needs then to alter his thinking.

- Coming out of the Seven Years' War, Britain is on top of the world.

They had quite a huge amount of territory, all the territory up to the Mississippi River.

It was expensive to maintain and so you needed to tax it.

Franklin certainly went along with it and he said, "Well, empires cost money."

And much to his chagrin, he found himself going the wrong way, out of touch with American public opinion.

- [Narrator] The recent war with France had expanded England's empire but left its treasury depleted.

In the spring of 1765, the king's ministers and parliament came up with a new way to raise more money from the American colonies.

Now all legal documents, newspapers, books, almanacs, even decks of playing cards would need official stamps purchased from the government.

In Virginia, Patrick Henry denounced the act as taxation without representation.

Riots broke out in New York; New London, Connecticut, Annapolis, Maryland.

In Boston, a group calling themselves the Sons of Liberty, hanged and burned the stamp commissioner in effigy.

Then the mob destroyed the mansion of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson, who had worked with Franklin back in 1754 to propose the Albany Plan of Union.

The leaders of the protests had appropriated the motto Franklin had used at the time to encourage the colonies to act together, "Join or die."

Franklin didn't like the Stamp Act either, but from London, advised Pennsylvanians against overreacting.

His political enemies back home now spread false rumors that he helped write the Stamp Act and had been bribed by promises of a higher royal appointment.

When a mob threatened to attack the Franklin home in Philadelphia, Deborah wouldn't budge.

- [Deborah] I said, when I was advised to remove that I was very sure you had done nothing to hurt anybody and I had not given any offense to any person at all.

I sent to ask my brother to come and bring his gun.

If anyone came to disturb me, I would show a proper resentment.

- [Narrator] Shocked at the reports of mob violence in the colonies, Franklin wrote William, that unless some compromise could be found to ease the tensions, events were laying the foundation of a future total separation.

He flooded London newspapers with letters arguing that the Stamp Act was unfair, that the recent riots did not represent the attitude of a majority of the colonists.

He circulated a political cartoon illustrating that if the crisis escalated, the empire would be dismembered.

On February 13th, 1766, Franklin appeared before Parliament patiently answering questions posed by its members.

"Could an army make the colonists comply?"

he was asked.

- [Benjamin] Suppose a military force is sent into America, what do they then to do?

They cannot force a man to take stamps who chooses to do without them.

They will not find a rebellion.

They may indeed make one.

- Going forward.

So Franklin once again uses the power of the press.

Much like his "Join or die" illustration, he creates a political cartoon, challenging the Stamp Act.

His loyalties to England are ultimately tested and broken when he's branded a traitor and removed from his post.

One of the things, I think, in keeping with our idea about being promoters of a healthy democracy is particularly one of the points that came up in our last clip.

Note, when Benjamin Franklin tries to interject nuance into an argument, his political rivals immediately align him with the opposition.

And I think one of the things that we can do to help our students both understand, appreciate, and be responsible members within a democracy is to help them understand that despite the fact that we live largely in a two-party system, that most issues exist and are, they are handled somewhere along the spectrum of the middle that there is room, there must be room for compromise, for understanding, for nuance in our political discourse and in our political arguments.

And very often, it is, you know, justice, and righteousness, and morality versus depravity, and suppression, and fascism, or any of the other sort of, you know, common negative terms that we apply to political thought.

Even as early as the 1700s, in the very birthing moments of our nation, we see people falling victim to this very bifurcated mindset.

And Benjamin Franklin actually, in this political cartoon, shows us how the extremes of that mindset, that if there is not room for nuance, if there's not room for compromise, if there's not room for thoughtful discourse, the empire, as they know it, would be dismantled.

Going forward.

Last week I introduced a wonderful tool called Optic as a way to analyze visual text, or in this case a political cartoon.

This would be an excellent illustration to use with your students.

The "Can You Spare a Farthing for Belisarius," a political cartoon.

In Optic, students look at the overview of the image, they then break it into parts and analyze those independent parts.

They look at any titles or text.

They look at the inner relationship of various parts of the picture to other parts, what's in the foreground, what's in the background, what's on the left or the right, what are the relationships between those various elements?

And lastly, they work to draw some conclusions.

This particular political cartoon would be an excellent springboard for how do we end up at the point of the Declaration of Independence, Whether or not you might have a full lesson or day to devote to analyzing the Stamp Act.

This particular political cartoon would be a great way to sort of help students quickly sort of summarize, what was, you know, what was one of the catalyst for revolution?

Going forward.

I wanna dive into these meatier texts, these kind of cornerstone texts, starting with Benjamin Franklin and the Declaration of Independence.

Franklin returns to Philadelphia in 1775 ready to support the new United colonies against British tyranny.

He's elected as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress in 1775 and he worked to create American currency, as well as serving as our Postmaster General.

He's also selected to work alongside four other men, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman to draft the Declaration of Independence.

As we go through these next few slides focusing on the Declaration of Independence, I want us to consider, how does Franklin leverage the power of words in this essential founding document?

What connections do we see to Franklin's beliefs about slavery at the point, his belief and practice around the common good?

How do his additions to the document reflect these beliefs?

Let's go forward.

And take a watch.

- [Narrator] On June 21st, 1776, a packet arrived at Franklin's Market Street home.

It was from Thomas Jefferson, who, with Franklin, John Adams and two other delegates, had been assigned to draft a Declaration of Independence.

Working in a rented second-floor room of a house a few blocks from Franklin's and attended by his enslaved servant, Robert Hemmings, Jefferson completed a first draft.

He asked Franklin to suggest such alterations as your more enlarged view of the subject will dictate.

The old editor and writer recognized the elegance of Jefferson's prose and made only a few changes before returning it.

- Franklin sits back and ponders it a little and he makes a few really extraordinary suggestions to Jefferson.

And one of them is world-class.

Jefferson had written, "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable."

And Franklin said, "No, no.

We hold these truths to be self-evident.

Just as two plus two is four and the sun rises in the morning, it is self-evident that we have a right to revolution."

- Franklin is saying, "We're trying to create a new type of nation in which our rights come from rationality and the consent of the governed, not the dictates a dogma of a religion."

- They were doing something very radical and very scary.

To say something is self-evident, to say that it's common sense is to say that there's no other way to think about this.

That only in a rational person who's not using their mind correctly could contend with this thing, which is in fact really contentious.

It's a classic lawyer's trick to say, "We all agree to this thing."

Who is we?

The we is presumptuous.

- They were not talking about liberating women in any particular way, or certainly not slaves.

But in incremental ways, it grew and grew because if you talk about liberty for the individual, of you and me, you're talking about a greater liberty that can be applied to other people.

- [Narrator] On July 2nd, the Continental Congress unanimously approved the central clause of the Declaration, proclaiming American independence.

Two days later, July 4th, 1776, 12 of the 13 former colonies approved the entire Declaration.

New York would take a few more days to make up its mind.

- [Benjamin] And for the support of this Declaration, we mutually pledged to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

- [Narrator] On the same day, Benjamin Franklin was voting to approve the Declaration, his son William arrived in Connecticut, where he was told he was now officially a prisoner of the brand new United States of America.

- [Participant] You're muted.

- Thank you.

So let's talk a little bit about this.

How do we see Benjamin Franklin leveraging the power of words in this essential document?

We hear about one, you know, minute edit that creates a document with language that is memorized by millions, that is part of the citizenship test for our nation.

What connections do we see between his beliefs on slavery and the common good?

How do his additions to this document seem to reflect these beliefs?

I want us to stay together for this kind of debrief.

And I know I haven't given you time to necessarily make notes, but I would love to hear some of your initial thoughts.

How does Benjamin Franklin appear to be leveraging language in the Declaration of Independence?

Or either of those other two questions.

What connections do we see between his beliefs on slavery and this document?

One of the things I noted is, even as they talk about Thomas Jefferson, it's really hard for me to ignore the irony if I'm being kind, and the hypocrisy if I'm being honest, of writing a Declaration of Independence while being served by an enslaved man.

Thoughts, what did y'all think as we watched this clip?

I would love to hear from some of you.

You can also drop, go for it, Lee.

- Just amazing what a small little edit, like including self-evident, makes in the entire document.

I mean, if you were to quiz most Americans, you know, they know that phrase self-evident is in there.

And also with the connections, it amazes me, I was reading, I think this Walter Isaacson was in the first episode we watched, and there's almost no mention of Jefferson, I mean, not Jefferson, Franklin, the slave owner, but his views on slavery as it went into these documents, they're all over the place.

So there is a disconnect, even the way we look back on these people in history, that really stands out to me.

- Absolutely.

And when we think about last week's topic of the common good, one of the things that educators looked at last week or I had you evaluate, and it's briefly mentioned in the clip we watched, is who benefits from this document?

Who is explicitly included and who is implicitly left out?

What voices are amplified and what voices are ignored?

Keep that in mind as we move forward.

Going forward.

So PBS happens to have an excellent lesson that looks at the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and the relationship between those two.

All around the essential question of, did the Constitution fulfill the ideas stated by the Declaration of Independence?

In this lesson, students look not only at the Declaration and at the Constitution, but several historical documents, film clips that have been curated, and modern news stories to help them think about the impact of these documents on our country.

I highly recommend it.

It's a great lesson.

Every lesson in this deck, y'all, before I say, "Hey, use this," I've gone through and looked at them and thought about how applicable is it to my classroom?

I happen to teach high school English, but I've also thought, how could this be modified?

How could this be applied in a middle school or even a high elementary school classroom?

And every lesson that's included in the deck can be modified across grade level, across subject level to help students answer and begin to analyze some of these big questions.

Going forward.

So one of my favorite things to do in the English classroom, and this is one of the activities that we're actually going to work on a little bit, is the use of mentor text.

A mentor text are exactly what they sound like.

They are texts that we select, or excerpts from a text that we select as classroom teachers, and we have our students model their writing.

One of the best ways to do it is to help provide some guiding questions.

Because even though we may read an excerpt from the Declaration together to then ask students to recreate it, you want to help them along by providing guiding questions that speak to the core points of each part of the text that they're mentoring.

So what are the reasons?

In the Preamble, we get this declaration of, "Hey, here's what we're doing and we don't want this to come as a surprise.

We want you to understand exactly why."

So when we would give a task like this to our students, we would ask them, "Okay, you can think about here in school, policies, procedures that you all find inequitable or problematic, or heck, just annoying.

You can think about the world at large.

What is a social norm or practice that you take great umbrage to?

You can think about as simply as my own house, my parents have this rule that I have to be in the house or in my bedroom, or I have to surrender my phone at 10:00 every night.

I want independence from this ridiculous rule.

What would the Preamble to your declaration to your parents look like?"

I think this is one of those lessons where it's so easy to modify it across level to where our students are.

Whether we give them, like I said, the intro of the Preamble or a statement of beliefs, what are the shared beliefs behind this document?

I would like us to take a quick practice with just the Preamble.

You don't have to end up with, you know, a Jeffersonian paragraph.

But I would like for us to take about four minutes and do a model based on the Preamble, what would your declaration be?

And to help us kinda narrow the scope a little bit back to our idea of us as teachers.

When you think about the state of public education as you know it, what do you think we need to declare independence from as educators?

What would the Preamble to your declaration of education look like?

Let's take about four or five minutes.

I'm gonna give you five 'cause this is a bit of a heavy lift.

Let's take about five minutes and let's jot some ideas.

[gentle music] I'll tell you what I tell my students.

With mentor text, it's not plagiarism if you borrow a phrase here or there, it's just helping you follow the model.

So if you wanna start with, "When in the Course of human events" feel free.

Use whatever phrase is necessary you think to help you translate your own Preamble.

[gentle music] [gentle music continues] I am certain we are all still writing and thinking and writing and pondering, and I would like for us to come back together.

The thing I love about so many of the Founding Fathers, so many of our nation's earliest writers, early thought leaders, like Frederick Douglas and Thomas Jefferson, is their love of clauses and phrases.

My students are currently learning clauses and phrases.

And the fact that that first sentence, that first box is a single sentence is of the most beautiful things to my English-teacher heart.

My students would be like, "Ms. Jones, there's so many commas and you say we shouldn't use that many commas."

And I'm like, "You shouldn't use that many commas.

They could use that many commas because they knew what they were doing."

But I think it's gorgeous.

And the language, the thought, the consideration that went into each word, each phrase, each clause is incredible because, whether through their conscious mind or their subconscious genius, these Founding Fathers, these early authors of our nation, gave us an explicit statement of purpose, but one with such malleability that even today, we can share it with our students in a way that empowers them to reinterpret, to reimagine, and to reinvent what it can mean in an ever-changing world.

So to that end, after all of that, a bit of composity, I would love to hear thoughts, excerpts.

If you would prefer to type it in the chat, I'm absolutely checking in the chat as well.

But I would love to hear any kind of initial mentor text that you all were able to create.

It could be a clause or a phrase that you would be willing to share.

But if you are, feel free to drop it in the chat and I'll read it or use that Hand Raise icon.

And remember, this icon can be found at the bottom of your screen.

On the far right, there is a button that says, "Reactions."

If you click on it, you can click on the Raise Hand and I will see that you would like to contribute to our conversation.

So who's willing to share at least a piece of what you wrote?

Brenna.

I see lots of hands.

I'm super excited.

I'll start with you, Brenna.

- [Brenna] Okay.

I'm...

I'm not sure if I'm on the right path here, what you're looking for.

But I wrote that, you know, that both students and teachers are, you know, endowed by the Creator to be able to attend, have an education free of fear for their safety.

You're muted.

- Oh, thank you.

Thank you.

- You're welcome.

- I was just saying, "Wow."

That was not even a, that was not even an interpretation of what I thought.

But after, you know, this week's news with other school shootings and seeing the images of those young people having to run from that high school in St. Louis, it is so, so timely and so unequivocally true in the same way that the Declaration gives us these timeless truths that absolutely should be a truth of education for both our students and our educators.

Thank you, Brenna.

Diane.

Diane, what did you- - [Diane] Here I am.

So I was trying to get it in the chat, but I don't get anywhere near fast enough typing on the iPad.

So here's what I wrote and I think it's rather funny, kind of pertinent, and it has to do with censorship and banning of readings.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that individuals are endowed and able to pursue their own acquisition of knowledge without censure."

All writings have some merit.

And reading various literatures and prose is necessary to have understanding of the diverse experiences and a perspectives of each other.

- I love it.

- [Diane] Oh, thank you.

- Yes.

Althea.

- [Althea] I'm sorry.

I was clapping for Diane.

I don't really have something to share.

I actually have the same topic that she- - Gotcha, gotcha.

Gotcha, gotcha.

I love the support amongst colleagues.

Do I have anyone else who would like to, or be willing, to share a portion of what they wrote?

I was unexpectedly moved by a lot of what you have to say.

I think we are at a serious crossroad in our profession and I think teachers declaring the truth of our purpose and our duty, and the rights and the freedoms of our students is that clarion call is needed so much right now.

And I would be excited when I think of what my students might share, the declarations they might make about the state of their world, be it politically, or socially, or environmentally, financially.

Can you imagine what high school senior looking at, you know, the looming heel of a college education might write about college debt?

What a student, you know, depending on something like a Pell Grant, might write about, the cost of an education or the cost of a future.

Absolutely, Brenna, I absolutely agree.

I'm gonna move this forward.

I'm super, super jazzed about this particular exercise.

I hope that you all take it into your classrooms very soon.

Not only the use of mentor text, but the application of foundational documents as those texts that we can mentor.

I think it's very easy for students, like I said, to kind of look at the composity and the grandeur of a lot of their writings, look at all the clauses and phrases, and go, "Yeah, they understood stuff like that.

And I'm just gonna live under the laws we have now and I don't really have to think about that 'cause we all know it."

But having students do those deep dives and not only breed an appreciation for these documents, it can also generate an empowerment to embody those documents, to take ownership of them, as well they all should, because they all have it.

So, we move forward in time.

After the Revolutionary War, Benjamin Franklin is joined by John Adams, who is not a Franklin fan.

I think I told y'all last week, when Benjamin Franklin goes overseas, it's like a world tour.

Everybody loves Ben Franklin.

He is, you know, the great inventor, he is Lightning Rod Man he has made instruments, he has given us electricity.

And you know, when he walks in the club, everybody's hands go up and they stay there.

John Adams is not a fan.

He's like, "That is not what we are here to do.

He's talking to all these women.

Everybody's just, like, fawning over him.

We are here to work on this treaty and negotiate peace with Britain."

As we watch this clip, I want you to consider how it answers, how the Treaty of Paris answers some of the grievances that are raised in the Declaration of Independence.

There is an excellent lesson on PBS that focuses solely on the Treaty of Paris.

And the thing I love about it is it raises a couple of very accessible questions for our students.

As they're looking at the clip, as they're reading the Treaty of Paris, these guiding questions help to take, again, a document that might at first seem inaccessible to some of our students and make it manageable.

So what were France's motivations for helping the colonies?

Why does this outside team give us resources?

What did the colonies gain when France agrees to the two treaties?

And lastly, why was Franklin considered a champion of disinformation?

How does disinformation relate to audience, techniques, credibility?

How does disinformation relate to our common and contemporary world?

Going forward.

So let's take a look at this clip on the Treaty of Paris.

- Franklin is, first and foremost, a man of the press, and he plays that role to the hilt in those first months in France.

He's essentially engaged in a thorough disinformation campaign.

Washington's men almost without uniforms.

There's a wonderful quote in which someone says that they could've scared the British away by their nakedness.

They have nothing.

And Washington, during this time, is in despair.

While Washington is struggling all over, Franklin is in France saying, "It's victory after victory.

He has an army of 80,000.

Yes, the the British may take Philadelphia, but they will be trapped there.

The river will freeze.

They won't be able to reach their ships.

Washington will surround them."

He's utterly making this up.

He's promoting a war that isn't really happening, and he doesn't for a moment, in public, drop that mask.

- Benjamin Franklin also realizes he has to win the hearts and minds of the French people.

He knows that within the French population there's welling up this sentiment for liberty, and fraternity, and equality, and he taps into that by being a public diplomat, not just a private diplomat.

- [Narrator] Franklin moved from a hotel in crowded Paris to the village of Passy, two miles west, where a wealthy merchant offered the use of a wing of his sprawling estate rent-free.

Soon, a lightning rod sprouted from its roof.

Franklin sent his grandson Benny to a boarding school in Switzerland and assigned Temple to help with the diplomatic paperwork.

There were mountains of it, and a steady stream of visitors, who began arriving once they knew the famous Dr. Franklin was living there.

- [Benjamin] You can have no conception how I am harassed.

The noise of every coach now that enters my court, terrifies me.

- [Narrator] Besides his constant efforts to get more money from the French, much of Franklin's time was consumed handling requests from individual Europeans eager to fight the hated English in America.

- [Benjamin] Frequently, if a man has no useful talents, is good for nothing and burdensome to his relations, they are glad to get rid of him by sending him to the other end of the world.

- [Narrator] They came from every corner of Europe.

All of them, regardless of their talents and experience, expected to be commissioned as officers.

General Washington finally begged Franklin not to send anyone else.

But three of the men Franklin recommended would prove invaluable to the Revolution.

Count Casimir Pulaski of Poland would organize the American cavalry and serve with bravery and distinction before being killed in action at Savannah, Georgia.

Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben would develop a system of military discipline and drilling and impress the Continental soldiers with his ability to swear in multiple languages.

And the Marquis de Lafayette of France, whose father had been killed by the British in the Seven Years' War, believed that, "To injure England is to serve my country."

Only 19 years old when he went to America, he would become a surrogate son to General Washington and one of the most ardent champions of the Revolution.

Early into his diplomatic mission, Franklin was warned, "You are surrounded with spies who watch your every movement, who you visit and by whom you are visited."

He said, he didn't care.

- [Benjamin] As it is impossible to prevent being watched by spies.

I have long observed one rule, to be concerned in no affairs that I should blush to have made public.

If I were sure, therefore, that my valet was a spy, as probably he is, I think I should probably not discharge him for that, given other respects, I liked him.

- [Narrator] The chief spy in Franklin's midst was not his valet, it was Edward Bancroft, a Massachusetts-born scientist, now serving as the secretary to the American Delegation in France with access to every document and letter.

Every week, Bancroft wrote seemingly personal letters, and then, in invisible ink, provided his clandestine reports in the margins.

Each Tuesday night, he dropped them into the hollow of a tree in the Tuileries Garden where they were retrieved and taken to the British Embassy in Paris.

For his work as a secret agent, England paid him 1,000 pounds a year, the same amount the Americans were giving him to be their secretary.

His double-dealing would not come to light for 100 years.

- Franklin has been circled by two sets of extremely effective spies, a set of French spies, who are, themselves, surrounded by a set of British spies.

And every piece of paper that essentially moves off of Franklin's desk will end up in the wrong place, will end up either at Versailles or in London, but very rarely in the colonies.

- Franklin was no fool.

He knew what was happening.

He knew the spying that was going on was to America's advantage because the Brits got the sense that America was really quite close to France, and Franklin did nothing.

I mean, he just sat there and let it happen.

[horses tramping] [horse neighing] - [Narrator] On December 4th, 1777, a messenger rode into Franklin's courtyard at Passy with startling news.

After two battles near Saratoga, New York, British General Burgoyne had found himself surrounded by a larger American force.

And on October 17th, he surrendered along with his entire army, nearly 6,000 troops.

- Saratoga changes everything.

This is the moment Franklin has been waiting for.

There is no reason for the French to enter into any serious alliance until the Americans have proved that they can actually win this war, or at least put up a fight.

So this is the news that he needs to take to Vergennes, and the French foreign minister and to the court to be able to say, "Okay, now will you take us seriously?

Now will you officially," because until this point that the help has been unofficial, "Will you officially underwrite our Revolution?"

- [Narrator] Franklin sprang into action, writing reports of the American victory that would be spread throughout Paris, praising valiant French officers now serving in America, like Lafayette, and leading the British ambassador to realize he had completely underestimated Franklin.

- [Speaker] They play us off against one another.

Franklin's natural subtlety gives him a great advantage in such a game.

It is easy to see that in such a situation, peace between England and the House of Bourbon hangs by the slightest of all threads.

[people cheering] - [Narrator] On February 6th, 1778, Franklin met with Vergennes and signed two treaties.

One, a treaty of friendship and commerce meant French aid would flow in greater quantities and no longer in secret.

The other, the most important, was a treaty of military alliance.

France had officially joined the American Revolution.

- Going forward.

So one of the things we talked about as well last week if you were with us, is this idea of multiple perspectives.

How does the treaty affect different groups of Americans?

How does the Treaty of Paris benefit the new United States, the British, the French?

How does the treaty affect indigenous Americans, African Americans?

What hopes or fears might these groups have about the Treaty of Paris?

When you all receive the full slide deck, you'll see that there's a hyperlink.

I've just gone in and created a very simple worksheet that has these same essential questions and I've turned them into a note chart.

So as students are looking at excerpts from the Treaty of Paris, they're able to note two things.

How does this group benefit?

What is the cost or benefit to this group?

What is, I'm sorry, yeah, what is the benefit or hope that this provides for this group?

Or what is the cost or the loss that is applied to this group as a result of this particular document?

Going forward.

- [Narrator] At the end of 1782, a preliminary agreement of peace was signed and sent to London and Philadelphia for approval.

It did not require reparations to Americans who had remained loyal to England.

And France, which had given so much to the new nation, had been excluded altogether.

Franklin was assigned the task of smoothing things over with Vergennes.

- Franklin writes one of the greatest letters he ever wrote to Vergennes, apologizing for this in a beautiful way, and really disarming the, what could have been a huge international crisis, that we had not fulfilled our promise to work out the diplomatic aspects of the end of the war with France and not separately.

But he also, in that same letter of apology to Vergennes, this masterpiece, said, "And by the way, we need some more money too."

And he got it.

[people cheering] - [Narrator] Finally, on September 3rd, 1783, the Treaty of Paris was signed.

England officially recognized its former colonies as the United States of America.

The Revolutionary War was over.

Members of the British delegation refused to pose for the portrait meant to commemorate the moment.

In the unfinished painting, Franklin sits in the middle with his grandson Temple, the delegation secretary, sitting to his left.

On Franklin's right, sits John Adams, already worried about how history would remember the Revolution.

- [Adams] The history of our Revolution will be one continued lie from one end to the other, and the essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin's electrical rod smote the earth and out sprung General Washington, that Franklin electrified him with his rod, and hence forward, these two conducted all the policy negotiations, legislation and war.

[peaceful music] - The Treaty of 1783 is one of the most lopsided treaties in American diplomatic history.

It's a total victory for the United States, its independence is recognized by France and the rest of Europe and England and we get a third of a continent, everything from the Mississippi to the Atlantic and from the Canadian border to Florida.

We now become a nation larger than France, England, and Spain put together.

There's a consensus at the end among the negotiators, including the Brits, that we're witnessing the creation of an American empire.

- By the end of the war, France's coffers were more or less depleted.

France had the satisfaction in triumphing over their arch enemy, Great Britain, but they hadn't counted on bankrupting their own country in the process.

So Franklin extracted, in a way, the life blood out of the royal coffers, and he gave in return something that the monarchy was not counting on.

He lit a fire, not only in France, but in all of Europe, promoting the democratic ideals that the United States stood for.

To put down tyranny was something that all the peasants could understand.

- [Narrator] For Native Americans, the treaty was devastating.

Many nations had decided that they would be better off by aligning with the British, not the colonists, who for nearly two centuries had been encroaching on their lands.

Now the United States was claiming an even vaster territory.

And as its white citizens pushed farther west, more and more native people would be dispossessed regardless of whose side they had taken during the war.

- Going forward.

So I actually gave you all the multiple perspectives worksheet, just a slide, sort of this [indistinct] quickly.

I would use that multiple perspectives worksheet with the clip we just watched.

I actually had sandwiched it in between those two because I wanted to talk about how when we give clips to our kids, just best practice, in which I'm sure we all know, it's always good to provide them with the lens through which we want them to analyze a particular text.

In this case, we would've been looking at that multiple perspectives question, what does it mean for Native Americans?

The was is over.

That's great.

America has, you know, doubled in size.

We now have a third basically of the nation as we know it, implying that there aren't already people living within those spaces.

So what does our victory look like for those various peoples?

You could even take it a step further and go, what were the costs and the benefits to Europeans?

We have a huge and really powerful section on what the Revolution meant to France.

Yes, it's a moral victory.

You know, we beat the British, yay us!

At what cost?

At what cost to the French monarchy?

So giving our kids a very clear perspective with which we want them to analyze these kinds of texts could be really powerful.

I'm wanting to respect our time and keep us moving forward.

The next major document that we would be looking at is Benjamin Franklin and The Articles of Confederation.

This is a copy of Franklin's proposal that was annotated by Thomas Jefferson.

One of the things that I think is really key for students, no matter what subject area, if it's history, if it's English, if it's science, is the skills of annotation.

And annotation, when we present it to kids, can look one of two ways.

For a lot of kids they see annotate and they think, "Let me highlight everything."

They see annotate and they think, "Oh, I'm just gonna have to write summaries."

That is a step in the annotation process, but that's not why we have students do it.

It doesn't drive them to that level of kind of metacognition where they're thinking about the thinking, where they are summarizing and creating new questions, et cetera.

So when we have our students analyze, when we have our students annotate, there's a couple of things we can consider.

Letting our students know that annotation is truly a documenting of a conversation we are having with the text.

As they read, they'll be practicing close reading skills, slowing down their thinking so that they're not just reading for surface comprehension, but so they're reading with greater meaning.

If you go forward one slide for me, please, Lauren.

I have included for y'all a set of slides I use in my English class called "Why am I Reading This Again?"

And I'm going to just briefly, really briefly hitting these four things.

I share this with my kids, it goes into our Google classroom.

Anytime I hear, you know, "Mrs. Jones, are we looking at the same two paragraphs today?

Are we looking at the same document?"

I pull this slideshow that I made back out, and I tell them, "Here's why you're reading this again.

We're reading because we read in a pattern."

Our first bit of reading is, will you go to that, will you go to that... Yeah, the outline and go to slide number two.

I just wanna hit these slides really quickly.

The first time our kids read, they read for the gist.

We just wanna understand briefly what this thing is talking about.

The second time we read it, we're reading for significant moments, what seems important to you.

The third time we read, we're actually now ready to start interpreting those ideas, passed that simple, what level of what happened and what color was his shirt on page six, and what time do they go to dinner?

This third read is when we begin to apply this new knowledge to the context we already have in our brain and we begin to make meaning.

What do you think this document means?

What point is our author trying to get across?

We read again, step four, oh, sorry, slide five, differently to analyze methods.

Throughout these clips, we've talked multiple times about how Benjamin Franklin employs disinformation, how he has to write this letter to attempt to assuage the hurt feelings of France knowing that this letter is not accompanied by a check of sort of restitution.

That literally all he has is an "I'm sorry," and "Look at the great thing you did."

That's not gonna stop the French Revolution.

That's not gonna restore the coffers of France.

But he is able to understand purpose and apply methods to achieve the outcome he wants to achieve.

Again, finally, once we've read, once we've analyzed, once we've felt differently about things, we're then able to finally write and talk about our findings.

Back to our Benjamin Franklin slideshow.

I just wanted to share with that with y'all.

I think it's a cool tool and hopefully you can use across your classes be them English or history.

So one of the activities we would have our students do once we talk about the multiple purposes of reading of things multiple times and we have them annotate, is to pull a specific section, in this case, Article IV of The Articles of the Confederation.

We have them read, we have them annotate, we have them highlight and note significant moments, but then they respond in a group.

Not every conversation has to begin with written notes.

Some students are gonna wanna write their thoughts and they feel more comfortable expressing their thoughts, but it's completely valid if you have students work sort of collectively to create one sheet of notes.

But here are some guiding questions that I would provide in my classroom.

What connections do you see between these documents we've read and analyzed so far?

The Declaration of Independence?

The Albany Plan?

The Treaty of Paris?

Looking at synthesizing analysis over, sorry, synthesizing our thoughts about text over time, what are some of those common themes?

How can we tie those common themes to Franklin's concept of the common good?

What does it suggest about the common good if we see similar ideas come forward in each one of these texts?

What words or phrases might our students struggle with?

Having them do some of the vocabulary work, how can annotation help them?

I tell my students all the time, "I've read multiple texts that I'm teaching you probably 17 to 20 times, but there's always gonna be a section that sticks out to me.

There's always gonna be a word that I find that go, 'Oh, I always skip that word, and this is the time that I'm actually gonna pause to annotate it.'"

What improvements are needed that will be included when we finally reach the Constitution?

What questions do you have after reading The Articles of Confederation?

Moving forward.

The weaknesses of Articles led to a call for a Constitutional Convention.

In 1787, Franklin and other delegates are presented with a host of challenges as they are seeking to create one document that will guide this very new nation.

As we watch this clip about the foundations of the Constitutions, we're gonna see Benjamin Franklin work on both the Great Compromise and the Three-Fifths Compromise.

I told you that one of our frameworks for our teaching of Benjamin Franklin is an honesty and a prioritizing of anti-biased, anti-racist education and culturally-relevant, culturally-responsive pedagogy.

Particularly, when we're looking at problematic legal precedents, things like the Three-Fifths Compromise, we have to understand that, yes, this is a historical document that is fixed within the constraints of the time in which it was created.

However, we are also very aware as thinking, breathing, living people who see the consequences of those historical actions on the contemporary world to know that we have to make space for our students to have whatever psychological, emotional responses they might have to such an egregious injustice and making room for critique of this person that up till now, by and large, I mean he just won the war and got friends on our side, we've been praising.

What does it mean to have an honest critique?

And how does that fit into what we've come to learn about Franklin up to this point?

I've included in the slideshow, y'all, another tool that I use, and I've had you all do the I.M.P.A.C.T.

tool.

It's a great response tool.

This last session is so ban packed with videos.

I am aware, and I apologize y'all, that my face is increasing a little bit, but I really wanna make sure that I'm able to share all of the clips, all of the lessons, at least briefly, so you know when you get the PDF, what's in it, what you might be able to use and apply for your classroom.

So I'm sorry we haven't had quite as much breakout time.

I gave a little more time than I thought I would to the Declaration of of Independence mentor text, but I would not trade the conversation we had for anything.

I was inspired so much by what you all had to share, but I do wanna talk about the Constitution.

So let's move forward, and let's a look at clip.

[gentle music] - [Narrator] In May of 1787, delegates from all the former colonies began converging again on Philadelphia.

The Articles of Confederation that had been drawn up after the Declaration of Independence had proved inadequate for the new nation during the Revolution.

- When the Constitutional Convention is called, it's really a last chance for America to get its act together.

The Articles of Confederation really did not do what Franklin had asked for, which is unite the colonies into one nation.

- [Narrator] When George Washington arrived in Philadelphia, his first stop was to pay Franklin a visit.

- At the Constitutional Convention, he was one of the two great figures, that was George Washington and there was Benjamin Franklin and nobody else came third.

- Up until the end of the war, if you were trying to rate American leaders, Washington would be behind him and Franklin would be at the head.

Franklin's the great man.

By the end of the war, Washington has gone ahead, and in his will, Franklin says, "I leave him my crab-tree walking stick for his stroll towards destiny."

- [Narrator] On May 25th, 1787, when the Convention gathered for its first day, Washington was unanimously elected to preside.

- Benjamin Franklin's health is starting to fade, prisoners from the Walnut Street Jail, they have to carry him from his home on Market Street for the two or three blocks to get to what is now called Independence Hall.

- [Narrator] Franklin was 81, nearly crippled by gout and kidney stones.

Still he would attend every session but one.

From the start, it was clear that the 55 delegates did not agree on the details of how to fix The Articles of Confederation.

Franklin favored a single-body Congress and the three-member executive council instead of a president.

Virginians proposed two legislative bodies, a House of Representatives, that would select the members of an upper body to be called the Senate, and also name the president and judiciary.

Alexander Hamilton of New York thought the president should be elected for life.

Fierce debates on all the issues raged for days during a sweltering Philadelphia summer.

- [Benjamin] We must not expect that a new government may be formed as a game of chess may be played by a skillful hand without a fault.

We are making experiments in politics.

The players of our game are so many, their ideas so different, their prejudice is so strong and so various that not a move can be made that is not contested.

- [Narrator] The convention adopted many provisions that Franklin did not initially support, a two-body legislature, a single executive who could veto laws.

And others that he did, a four-year presidential term, the legislature's power of impeachment, and no requirement of property ownership for voting or holding office.

One of the thorniest issues was how Congress would be apportioned.

Under The Articles of Confederation, each state had an equal vote, and delegates from smaller states demanded that it stay that way.

Larger states, which would be contributing more in taxes, wanted Congress to be based on population.

Franklin was placed on a committee to find a workable compromise.

- And finally Franklin gets up and he says, "When we were young tradesmen here in Philadelphia, we had a joint of wood that didn't quite fit.

We'd take a little from one side and shave from the other until we had a joint that would hold together for centuries."

And his point was that compromises may not make great heroes, but they do make great democracies.

- [Narrator] As the impasse over apportionment threatened to derail the Convention, Franklin began inviting important delegates to his home where they could socialize in the late afternoon under the branches of his mulberry tree and try to find common ground.

- They discuss science, they discuss the things they're talking about that they have to compromise on, and he helps cool the passions of that hot summer under the shade of his mulberry tree.

- [Narrator] In the end, a compromise was reached.

Each state would have the same number of senators, two, chosen by their legislatures.

The members of the House of Representatives would be elected by voters, white men only.

And each state's share would be based on its population.

To mollify the Southern states, their populations would include their number of enslaved people, but each of those human beings would be counted as only three-fifths of a person.

- They can't talk about slavery directly and the word slavery is never mentioned in the document itself.

The difficult fact to accept is that the union is only possible if it includes the South and the states south of the Chesapeake are committed to slavery, especially Virginia and South Carolina.

If you did the moral thing in the summer of 1787 and took a clear stand and insisted on it, the Constitution would've never passed.

- It was a tragic compromise obviously for many populations in the United States who had no party to this agreement, they had never agreed that they would be represented in this way.

And so the compromise looks especially compromised in those terms.

- This is America's original sin and they know it.

Nobody in the convention, or at that moment, talks about slavery as anything other than a necessary evil.

- The original sin of slavery was more than just simply compromising.

The original sin of slavery began, at least for these colonists, years before.

For Franklin, unity and compromise was the only thing that could make this new nation move forward.

Without it, it would be a failed journey.

American democracy would not develop without it.

And for that reason, Franklin, as well as others, sidestepped the issue of slavery.

- [Narrator] On September 17th, 1787, the delegates gathered to vote on the proposed Constitution.

Benjamin Franklin made the motion for its adoption.

- Moving forward.

So we hear about Benjamin Franklin's question about whether or not the Constitution even has a shot without a great amount of compromise.

The Constitutional Convention takes place over four months in the summer of 1787.

And the reason that I let that full clip play is because I think it's one of those that has so many applications in our classroom.

For so many topics, in our English or in our social studies classrooms.

I think there are incredible threads that students can pull from 1787 to 2022.

When we talk about the nature of governance, what does it mean to be a steward and an actor in a Republic, in a Democratic Republic?

We talked about what our roles are as educators, but what truly is the role of politicians?

How did our Founders define that role for themselves?

How do modern politicians seem to define those roles for themselves?

Franklin talks about this very nuanced means of compromise.

He compares it to woodworking where you shave just a bit and you shave just a bit.

And there is a finesse in how he describes his process that so many of our students, for the majority of their life, unfortunately, haven't had the opportunity to witness.

And so for us, as classroom teachers, to take something that has already been, to use the word, adjudicated by history.

There are certain facts that we agree on.

There are certain reputations that we share about the leaders of this country.

To use those very Founders to insert nuance into modern politics that is so often black, white, blue, red, I think is really powerful for students, and particularly for teachers in districts and in states where they are facing even greater critique of the materials that they used to teach.

Where materials have to be turned in, they may have to be analyzed by third parties.

It's really hard to argue with the Constitution.

It's really hard to argue with the Declaration of Independence.

And so when we ground meaningful, contemporary conversations in exalted historical documents, I think it empowers us particularly at a time when many of us are feeling disempowered, or possibly even afraid of the curriculums in our classroom.

Going forward.

There's one last clip, it's about a minute and a half.

I'm not gonna show it to us 'cause I wanna respect our time.

But basically in this piece, so we can go forward, Lauren, Benjamin Franklin is sort of reflecting on what has been his legacy, on what is his belief as he told the woman at the very beginning, that, "We have created a Republic, if we can keep it."

And to that end, we come to a really cool closing activity that I think is awesome for students, and it's remixing the Constitution.

We did a mentor text on the Declaration of Independence.

In a remixing assignment, we simply give students a fixed set of text.

In this case, it's gonna be the Preamble and we give them two really simple options.

They can either create a found poem, or they can create a blackout poem.

So in found poetry, they're gonna be taking specific words, phrases, even a clause, I usually limit, I tell my students, "You can use five words in succession, at any one time.

After that, you have to inject your own original thoughts, words, et cetera."

I'm gonna show you two examples of what this could look like.

We're using the Preamble in this case.

Moving forward.

And moving forward one more time.

So "A Constitution for all people.

Tranquility, defense, and welfare form the promise of liberty and prosperity.

We the people of the United States of America."

This is an example of an excerpt from a found poem using the Preamble.

Going forward.

"We form a more perfect Union, justice, domestic tranquility, common defense, general welfare and blessings of liberty."

This is an example of a blackout poem using the same Preamble.

Going forward.

So when we would give this task to our students, I think it's really great when we can provide, I would probably do 1/2 of the page with the Preamble, my instructions on the other, and then space for students to play around with either two.

This is an activity you can do in small groups.

You can have students paired out in order to differentiate.

You might have one half of the room work on writing the piece, doing the found poetry, or sorry, 1/2 of the group working on writing the poetry, doing the found poetry or the blackout poetry, and the other half creating a visual that illustrates what we're talking about.

We've talked about Benjamin Franklin, the political cartoonist, as much as we've talked about him as a writer and a statesman.

And so I think it's really important, in the vein of democracy in our classrooms, of providing students with options to show their mastery of the content.

So if a student isn't the strongest writer, you might say, "Okay, here's the Preamble.

Create a political cartoon that shows the key ideas of this document.

Create a political cartoon that shows the key ideas that stand out to us in the Treaty of Paris.

Create a cartoon that shows us the key ideas.

Or even if you've had your students analyze, like, what were some of the weaknesses of The Articles of Confederation?

They could, much like Franklin does in that first political cartoon we looked at tonight with the Stamp Act, they could create a political cartoon that shows the weaknesses in the the Treaty of Confederations.