Session 5 - Belmont City College Year 9 HASS - Civics and Citizenship

1. Find your group from last week. These are your party members

2. Come up with a name for your party based on your common ideas

3. Allocate one of the following job descriptions to each member

• Party Leader - speech writer and presenter

• Campaign Manager - organiser of campaign plan

• Media Consultant - marketing materials

• Treasurer - allocation of funding

• Policy Advisor - fact or fiction?

1. If you had to come up with a slogan/catch phrase/logo for your party, what would it be?

2. What is your party’s political values? What does your party stand for? Consider how you can connect with voters. Who are you representing? Remember that a political party is an organisation that represents a particular group of people or set of ideas. 

3. Create your party’s constitution? Include the following: What we value. Who has which powers. Who has which responsibilities. What our rights are. How we resolve disagreements. (This could be displayed in the classroom and referred to when making decisions)

4. Your challenge for each party is to come up with a policy for each of the following:-

Education, Community, Healthcare, Childcare, Cost of Living, Housing, Climate, Other

1. Expand on your policies - How would you implement each one? How would you pay for it?

These tasks can roll over into future sessions.

Q and A (allow extra time for this)

1. Get into three even lines at the back of the room

2. The challenge is for each person from each group to write a question into the ‘question’ column’ on the board about something you didn’t understand from today’s content/session.  

3. The group that is able to answer each question first, is first to leave

Successes

• Engagement and involvement, even from the group where each student generally refrains from doing anything. Having them in the same group means that someone has to do something

• They seem to have fun particularly relative to a regular lesson with workbooks and writing…Prac Teacher

• Group work without text books

• Ability to go back to content from previous sessions such as determining what a right and a responsibility was. They were able to look at the brainstorming activity from session 1

• Questions during reflection being able to tell use what content students were unsure about

Challenges

• Understanding and recalling the meaning for some of the terms - constitution, policy

• Missing weekly session due to assessments and other activities

• Relief and prac teacher so we couldn’t find the election campaign flyers to refer to

They are engaged with the making of their political parties but didn’t immediately understand that they can form and design their party so that it is specifically relevant to them, it doesn’t need to replicate an existing party. Although some of the basic descriptions for terms were on the board, it would be beneficial for the terminology and definitions to be displayed somewhere for students to refer back to each time they are in the class. Their understanding of the terminology is slowly emerging and they are showing interest in being able to design a party and policies that relate the their interests and age group.