Curriculum Framework
Concept Goal and Outcomes
1. To develop understanding of the concept of conflict and its relationship to events and eras in the past.
Students will be able to:
- Identify the critical attributes of conflict.
- Identify major causes and effects of conflicts in history.
- Identify and describe major conflicts in American history.
- Explain the nature of important conflicts in American history.
- Identify and describe how conflicts in American history have impacted American peoples, societies, and government.
2. To develop understanding of the concept of democratic citizen(ship) in the context of U.S. history.
Students will be able to:
- Identify and describe the critical attributes of democratic citizenship.
- Use evidence to compare and contrast democratic citizenship to other types of citizenship.
- Explain how democratic citizens respond to conflict and injustices.
- Identify and describe how individual and groups of citizens responded to challenges and conflicts in American history.
- Describe how the concept of democratic citizenship has evolved over time.
Process Goals and Outcomes
3. To develop skills in doing historical inquiry and historiography.
Students will be able to:
- Understand history as a process and historical knowledge as constructed and interpreted.
- Formulate questions about ill-structured or complex historical events and issues.
- Hypothesize potential interpretations of historical events from multiple perspectives.
- Place historical events and interpretations in historical context.
- Evaluate and interpret different forms of historical evidence and accounts (e.g. secondary historical sources, documents, artifacts, film).
- Provide reasoned historical interpretations warranted with evidence.
4. To develop cognitive (perspective recognition) and affective (caring) elements of historical empathy.
Students will be able to:
- Describe the meaning of historical empathy as working toward recognizing perspectives in the past and developing caring attitudes towards others in the past and present.
- Recognize the perspectives of individuals and groups in the past.
- Place individual or group perspectives from the past in historical context.
- Recognize their limited ability to fully understand perspectives and experiences of individuals or groups in the past.
- Display notions of care for people in the past and present.
5. To develop skills in discussion and deliberation of historical events, issues, and ideas.
Students will be able to:
- Demonstrate the ability to participate in and effectively follow appropriate discussion norms during a discussion or deliberation.
- Demonstrate the ability to present a position during a discussion.
- Warrant their position or perspective during a discussion or deliberation with evidence.
- Demonstrate the ability to identify and analyze multiple perspectives on a controversial historical event or issue during a deliberation or discussion.
Individual Unit Content Goals
American Revolution Unit Content Goals
To develop an understanding of the causes of the American Revolution, the major events, influential individuals and ideas of the time, and the reasons for American victory.
Students will be able to:
- Identify and analyze the causes of growing tension between colonists and Great Britain leading up to the Revolutionary War.
- Trace the sequence of important events of the American Revolution and determine their significance.
- Compare the roles and perspectives of individuals from different regions and groups of society, including men, women, white colonists, slaves, and Native Americans.
- Identify key figures in the revolution and examine their impact. (e.g. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Patrick Henry, Marquis de Lafayette).
- Analyze influential ideas and beliefs guiding the American cause. Trace their origins (e.g. Paine, Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau), analyze their significance in documents such as the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the Declaration of Independence, and evaluate how these ideas became a unifying force in American democracy. Identify the ways in which these ideals stood in contrast to the realities of slavery.
- Identify and explain how the colonists were able to defeat the British to gain independence.
Civil War Unit Content Goals
To develop an understanding of the causes of the U.S. Civil War, the major events, influential individuals and ideas of the time, and the reasons for Northern victory and immediate effects of the conflict.
Students will be able to:
- Identify and analyze the economics, cultural, philosophical, and demographic differences between the North and South and individuals and groups within those regions prior to the Civil War.
- Analyze and challenge the idea of a coherent Northern or Southern viewpoint in light of such events as the Draft Riots, the secession of West Virginia from Virginia, and opposition to secession in Appalachian counties in Alabama.
- Compare different short and long term causes of the Civil War, create a hierarchy of causes, and be able to explain the hierarchy.
- Identify the impact of legal actions before and during the war.
- Criticize the major strategies of the North and South during the Civil War and compare the effects of the war on the North and South.
Post Reconstruction, Migration, and Labor Unit Content Goals
To develop understanding of major events throughout and following Reconstruction in the United States, the significant contributing individuals of the era, and the long term effects of reconstruction on American life.
Students will be able to:
- Analyze events that occurred during Reconstruction (1865 - 1877) as causes of tension between different groups (e.g. the North and South, poor and wealthy, blacks and whites).
- Locate and analyze documents from primary and secondary sources of the period, including excerpts from the Compromise of 1877, the Jim Crow Laws, landmark Supreme Court case Plessy V. Ferguson, and Booker T. Washington's Atlanta Compromise speech.
- Identify and explicate major changes to the geography of the United States following the Reconstruction era.
- Create a chronology of movements towards social, economic, and political change that emerged after the Civil War and have continued through present day.
- Use historical fiction and arts to compare and contrast portrayals of post-Reconstruction era life with non-fiction accounts.
Civil Rights Unit Content Goals
To develop an understanding of the Civil Rights Movement in America, including its major ideas, events, influential leaders, and its impact on other social movements.
Students will be able to:
- Understand the day to day realities of racial prejudice in the United States prior to the start of the movement, and the role of Jim Crow laws in prohibiting the social, educational, and economic advancement of African Americans.
- Examine the legal and social implications of legal cases such as Brown v. Board of Education and legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
- Identify the roles of key individuals and organizations within the movement, including their differing perspectives on how to achieve their goals (e.g. NAACP, CORE, SCLC, Black Panthers, Thurgood Marshall, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks).
- Recognize later social justice movements inspired by the Civil Rights Movement (e.g. the Women's Movement, American Indian Movement, Chicano and Boricua Movements, Gay and Lesbian Rights Movements).
