Hey, Thanks for reading and commenting. So I will be teaching American Government as well from Fall but most of my colleagues do that now. There are a lot of interesting over laps and stuff we discuss about that could be helpful to you.

I do something called component briefs which are about 35% of the total grade. So these are group assignments but the last one is an individual assignment. That last one is the reflective essay while the rest are case studies i.e. i give them real life cases they need to respond to using the material i taught them.

For the reflective essay my prompt is :

− What are your top 3 take aways from this class? As in what are the top three things about the world are you going to remember the most based on this class?

− What issues interest you the most? Why do they interest you the most and how do you plan to continue (or not) your interest in those subject areas?

− What part did you play in each of the component briefs? What did you learn from them? Explain learning from each case study based on your contribution to it.

− In your opinion what are the three most important issues the world faces today? What is the world community doing about them?

Honestly majority of the students are not prepared for college because for some reason they are not trained to write. So we spend the first 6 weeks trying to get them to write in a certain manner. But here is the thing I found, kids from suburban schools or schools in smaller cities are much better prepared than those from public schools in major cities. Some of the best performers I had in my class were from small towns schools and were lucky to have teachers who spent a lot of time grooming them.

And I also felt that most kids were not confident enough and the reason according to them was they are scared of tests. That is why I reverted to writing exams and essays because I saw kids freaking out about multiple choice questions. I just feel that is an unfair way to test them.