Post written by Jill Bass, director of Curriculum and Teacher Development for Mikva Challenge's Center for Action Civics. Connect with Bass by e-mail at jill@mikvachallenge.org. This post was originally featured inASCD Express.
Every teacher has at least a handful of moments with students that make him or her think, "This is why I became a teacher." One such moment for me was on a campaign trip with about 60 students in Des Moines, Iowa, in 2007.
Mikva Challenge, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that helps develop youth leadership and engages young people in politics, had brought students from all around Chicago to spend five days working on the campaigns of the myriad candidates running for the Republican and Democratic presidential nominations.
I was chaperoning six students from the high school where I was teaching at the time, a school in a