American Centuries

Pocumtuck Valley
Memorial Association

American Centuries > Lessons > History Lessons By Teachers > First Impressions of the Reform Movement

First Impressions of the Reform Movement

Details

Author
Jill Foulis
Topic/Subject Area
African American, Black Life; Civil Rights, Protest, Dissent; Slavery, Indenture
Historical Era
National Expansion and Reform, 1816–1860
Grade Level
High School (9–12)
Creation Date
2009
Last Revision Date
2024

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About This Lesson

Summary and Objective

Students will understand that society creates predilections, or assumptions about people, places, and things in society. These predilections ultimately contort and impact the individual both publicly and privately causing false generalizations to manifest themselves as truths. This lesson allows students to explore topics and people often generalized in a non-biased fashion. Through scaffolded learning activities, students will form their own observations about topics of temperance, mental health, women’s rights and racism and how little or how much society’s predilections about these topics have changed over the last two centuries.

Materials & Resources

Collection Items
Websites

Teaching Plan

  1. Learning centers will be created using primary source material listed in this activity in addition to the resources included in website links. Documents should be divided into the following topics: alcohol/ temperance, mental health/prisons, slavery/abolition and women’s rights.
  2. While this lesson is intended to utilize learning centers with primary source documents, teachers may opt to do one of the following activities to create the learning centers (depending on time and accessibility to computers). Option 1: teacher can generate materials for various learning centers by using resources found at the Library of Congress website as well as the resources listed in this activity. Option 2: assign students one of the reform movements and have each group research documents to include in a learning center on their reform movement. Provide the Library of Congress website to use as a resource. Teachers should supplement the group’s documents with the documents and websites suggested in the Materials & Resources section.
  3. Once the centers have been created, the lesson can continue.
  4. Students will be asked to visit each learning center and examine the various documents. They are to write down 5 observations or ideas that come to mind about the documents.
  5. Once every student has examined all centers, students will reflect on their initial observations and create a one sentence summary of their predilections. They will then share their assumptions with a classmate in a think-pair-share activity. During the discussion with their partner, students may add or change their predilection in any way. Pairs will be asked to share their predilections with the class.
  6. A whole class discussion will commence beginning with the teacher introducing the term predilection and what it means to society. Modern day examples may be provided to grasp the concept. During the whole class discussion, students will share their observations and generalizations. Teacher will ask students to consider if society has changed for the good or bad because of this predilection or if the society has changed at all.
  7. Students will then be asked to predict what consequences predilections may have on a society. Discussion should lead to the idea of reforming society and why reform movements happen. A connection to issues needing reform today may be relevant and aid in connection to reform movements of the 1820-1850s.
  8. Students create a T chart to compare the content on the reform movements they discovered in the learning centers with the reform movements of today. Some students may have little information on their chart, but this provides the teacher with a formative assessment of students knowledge on this topic as well as a jumping-off point for further detailed discussion of the reform movements of the early 19th century.