Teachers Designing Instructional Materials: A Unit on the Assassination of Kennedy (Part 2))
A group of teachers at Cardozo high school in the mid-1960s created and taught a unit called “Who Killed Kennedy?” Part 1 described the background and purpose of this teacher-designed unit of eight lessons including a test. We taught the unit to 15 classes spread across U.S. history, Civics, and Government at Cardozo during the first few weeks of the semester in 1966.
Nearly all of the student were in the General track. In District of Columbia schools then students were assigned to Basic, General, and Honors tracks based on their IQ scores. General track students could select college prep courses or vocational ones. They ranged in reading skills from some at grade-level to many at two or more years below grade-level. It is these General students, we felt, that had been ignored by recent curriculum materials (then called the “New Social Studies”) and for whom the usual social studies fare was tedious and boring.
The Lessons
On the first day of the unit, we recalled through newspaper headlines, photos, and personal accounts of how the the events in Dallas on November 22, 1963 affected people. We got students to recount what they experienced a few years earlier and answers the central question of the unit: Was Oswald the