>> I'm Colleena [assumed
spelling], I work in the learning
and innovation office at the library.
And today, for today's office hour,
we're going to be exploring ways
to use congress.gov with students.
And we're really glad that you
can join us live or by recording.
If this is your first time with us, welcome.
And if not, welcome back.
These office hours, for those of you
don't know, are short informal sessions,
we're going to do a 20 minute presentation.
And sessions are being recorded.
You'll have the opportunity to talk to
each other and our presenter via chat.
So I really would love if you could use
the chat to tell us your first name,
where you're joining us from,
and what and whom you teach.
That would be great for us all to get to know
each other and to get a sense of the kinds
of issues or topics you might be
interested in within our larger subject.
As I mentioned, today's episode
is focused on congress.gov.
And how you might use it to teach
students about the bill making process.
We are joined, will be guided by Jen Ridel,
a civics and US government
teacher from Washington State.
And she's also this year's teacher in
residence, and has presented in office hours
in the past, so you may recognize her.
If you have questions or comments
at any time during our presentation,
please feel free to post
them right in the chat box.
I will be posting links and, you know,
communicating with you via chat in the chat box
and either I or my colleagues can
answer any questions that you have
or pose them to our presenters during Q&A.
Now I'm going to pass things
over to our presenter, Jen.
>> Well, I am so glad that you
oops, I don't know what I did.
I'm so glad that you're all here.
And it looks as though we've
had somebody asked to annotate.
And I am not getting out of that.
I apologize to our viewers.
Lets -- let's try this again.
So I'm very happy that you all are here.
And as Colleena indicated, I've gotten to spend
a year at the Library of Congress as a teacher
in residence, and really spent time
digging into collections trying
to think how could those collections be
used in the classroom and when I'm not here
in Washington, DC, I am back in Bellingham,
Washington, two hours north of Seattle
in the Bellingham School District.
I teach at Options High School, which
is an alternative public school.
So I have the lens of a lot of different
hats and I'm excited to share that with you.
So the first thing I want to say
is, if you forget everything else,
or your toddler starts screaming,
please remember congress.gov,
and this is where you're going to
find everything that we are talking
about today and that we're highlighting.
The hope is that I'm highlighting helpful links.
And I will be focusing specifically on tips
to use to make the lawmaking process engaging.
You might already do that.
But it's always nice to find some other
tools for our toolkit as teachers.
And I know, and I'm sure
many of you have experienced,
that bill making is a very
complex process for students,
and often they do not have any background in it.
So consequently, I try to approach the process
with as many real world examples
that helps them.
And when I teach it, I want them
to understand, first and foremost
that the bill making process
requires multiple steps
and layers in terms of checks and balances.
I want them really to grasp the
importance of choice and clarity of words.
And then lastly, I want them
to think about how sponsorship
and sometimes partisanship affects bills and
I know in my lawmaking simulations in class,
all those things have factored in.
So what I'm going to show you today offers each
of these things, you're going to see resources
of how to investigate current legislation
and past, you'll get a sense of how
to find content, who sponsors bills.
And then also to help kids, I'll point you
to some selections from sections on the site
to help kids find those processes.
And then, in just a second, I'll highlight
ways that you might direct kids to this site
so they can investigate who their congressional
delegation is and how to actually contact them
and make their voice known
on particular pieces of law.
And then lastly, we'll look at a couple other
sections on where you could link from this site
to American founding documents and CRS reports.
So here is an image.
I circled everything I just highlighted.
We'll start with the lower left on
the current members of Congress.
Pretty easy to use, whether
you do it for students
or you direct them to the site themselves.
To do a drop down, select their state
or they know their representative
or senators name, they can search them that way.
And that will take them to their
representatives and senators respective sites.
On those sites, typically they tend to
have information about the biography
of the individual, as well
as committees they serve on
and current things that they're involved with.
Then if we kind of go to the 12 o'clock position
of the image here, under searching CRS reports,
so that stands for Congressional
Research Service.
And these are reports that are first and
foremost prepared for members of Congress
and their staff in terms of
clarifying different topics.
And -- but yet these reports are
also available to the public.
I caution you the teacher
to sending students directly
to them unless you've done a
little due diligence yourself.
They are very well written,
they're non partisan.
They can be lengthy and they often
could use information or word choice
that your students might not be familiar with.
So little pre reading and a
little reconnaissance mission
on your part might be helpful
before sending them to it.
And then on the right hand side, you'll see
what I have circled, the legislator process.
These are nine videos you can directly link to.
And each one of them highlight specific
steps affiliated with the lawmaking process.
You can see there, there's a
PDF to access that information.
And then what I'm also really excited
about, there's a PDF in Spanish as well.
And I think that's helpful
for a lot of our students.
And then on the final point I want to
identify is the lower right hand corner,
the US founding document links, and
this will take you to additional links
on the Constitution, Declaration
of Independence,
the Bill of Rights, and the Federalist Papers.
And then each one of those sites has more
information about the respective document,
and also gives you images of primary
sources that would be fun to use with kids.
So, on that note, you've just
gotten a really quick overview
of some ways you might engage your students.
There obviously are a lot of other things on the
site, which I encourage you to play around with.
And maybe you're doing that right now.
So moving on to focusing on how
to use this site for lawmaking.
You can see again, I circled
three different facets of this
in terms of trying to find legislation.
And the first thing we're going to
look at is under Current Congress.
And Current Congress is exactly what it
says, it's the current session of Congress,
you can search it as indicated
there with general terms.
I used education.
So, and you'll notice there on the
lower left, I -- I unchecked --
all the boxes were naturally
checked, I unselected those
and then only selected legislation.
And then you can see to the right
there, there were over 4000 hits.
And they -- this is the first page
showing though, so if you're going
to have students do this, you might want to
help them maybe be a little bit more selective
on their search term, but I wanted to show
you really how easy it was just using a term.
The next thing that you could ask students
to find bills on, if you're wanting them
to get a sense of what legislation looks
like, is back to the homepage at congress.gov.
Under more options, you can click on that.
And then you can again, put words or phrases in.
And then what's different here from the
previous search I identified for you is
that you can show a date range, you can
look in previous congressional sessions.
So I did another search with education.
And I looked at the 115th congressional session.
And then this came up with as you can see
there, just shy of 3000 hits under education.
But there's a lot of different ways
that you can get at showing students --
or if you don't have a particular agenda,
that topic and you just want them to play
around on topics that interest them.
These two functions under Current Congress, and
then under more options are things to consider.
The final thing I want to show
you that will lead us for the rest
of our time is looking under most viewed bills.
And you can see that there where it says top 10.
And this is just what are
people actually looking at?
So I pulled a screenshot of this from last week.
And you can see May 17 is the date.
And you'll notice that a lot of
the top bills obviously have to do
with our reality right now
with the corona virus.
But there's some other bills
that people have been searching
for that have other topics involved.
You can see gun violence, CARES
Act, rural STEM education.
And so most of them have to do with our
current moment in time as you would predict.
But what's fun is if you go back right where it
shows months chronologically, you can go back
and look in February and as you would imagine,
when our focus wasn't what it is
now, the topics were very different.
But for illustrative purposes today, we'll
focus on the building blocks of the STEM Act,
which did actually become law a bit ago.
But it's a nice thing to focus to show you as
ways you might use this site with its functions.
So looking at this image, you get --
students and teachers can get a
fair amount of information from it.
You can see the title, right here,
the Building Blocks of STEM Act .
You can see this -- every bill
is going to show its tracker
so you can figure out where it's located.
And to be honest with you, if you're
overwhelmed with all these links, and buttons,
I was initially to, and it just
took, I don't know probably
about an hour of playing around on the site.
And that's what I'm hoping to provide you
some shortcuts to start to get comfortable
with what do each of the links tell me and
then how would I use these with my students?
So we're going to focus --
you can see at the bottom,
there's a summary, which
I'll get to in the text.
There's also other functions.
You could click on actions, titles, amendments.
We'll focus on co sponsors and
then committees and related bills.
So just right here, this might serve as
talking points for you if you're going
over the bill making process with students,
maybe after you've used some of those videos,
and having them apply the knowledge from the
videos to an actual piece of legislation.
So here we have the three
aspects of the Building Blocks
of STEM Act , that I wanted to focus on.
The first thing is co sponsors.
And while I recognize we have to be careful in
classrooms to not get into any partisan weeds,
I do think it's really important for students
to recognize that a good bill might struggle
because of perhaps the political
landscape that it's living in.
So when you click on co sponsors of any bill,
and in particular, we're looking at this one,
you can see there's eight indicated there.
And then it goes further.
And you can see that who -- you don't
-- you can also see who sponsored it,
but you can just see the split in
terms of the political parties.
So what I notice here is
that you have an even split
between democratic and republican co-sponsors.
And I think that's important to show students
and not even tell them what that means.
But ask them and prod them.
What do you think this represents in
terms of this piece of legislation?
So then moving forward, we have summary in text
is what I would spend some time on with students
in preparing them to write
their own pieces of legislation
for our lawmaking simulation in my class.
And I really think if you treated the summary
section -- it has that act as a reading preview,
it can be really helpful for students.
I've noticed a lot of my students tend to
struggle when I've literally gone to say
in the past, I'll be honest, I haven't spent
as much time on congress.gov as I have now.
And I definitely -- I'm not just
saying this because they're paying me.
I definitely will be using this for
both my civics and lawmaking classes.
But this is really helpful
to use the summary section
to help kids understand what
they're going to be reading.
Because the way laws are written
most of the general public,
let alone students don't understand how
the formatting and what the words mean.
And if you can help decode some of that
mystery with students and give them purposes
for the reading ahead of time, I think that
you'll have an even smoother experience
and a really engaging experience with students.
So if I was looking at this,
I would identify with students
and almost doing like a think aloud.
Where okay, I noticed the National
Science Foundation is getting grants.
It looks like they're supporting technology,
engineering, science, math, computer science.
I might notice -- ask students what
else do they notice in section three?
What is -- is -- what is the NSF,
the National Science Foundation?
What are they getting grants to do?
What's the purpose?
And then we might look further in section four.
Oh, these grants it says here
is to increase the participation
on under -- underrepresented populations.
Okay, and they even list there I noticed
pre kindergarten through elementary school,
and they go further, students or
teachers might notice in the think aloud
that these grants can -- can be
for the purpose of instructing
and equipping teachers and caregivers.
And increasing underrepresented
groups within the STEM field.
So you can get the sense of what I'm doing
here, and many of you already do this.
But using this as a think aloud, I think would
help kids particularly decrease any anxiety
about reading what I often call legalese.
Next, going into the text of the bill, and
again, this can feel overwhelming to students
who have never encountered anything, they
can see numbers, and you can spend as much
or as little time breaking
this also down with them.
But I would -- I'm planning on giving an
image like this to my students in the fall.
So before we ever even jump into
them identifying their own bills,
we're going to look at several different bills.
And we'll -- we'll break them down.
We'll look at their anatomy.
What's the purpose of the bill?
What are the reasons it's necessary?
And then this is a really rich
opportunity for you to take with students
and have them think about
what does the bill offer?
What does it require?
Why is it needed?
Has the text of the bill satisfied that and --
or do the students have further
questions of whether
or not they think public monies
are -- should be spent on this?
You might push the students to consider who
would support this bill, who might oppose it.
And those are all the same questions that we go
through my bill making simulation with the kids.
And I'm sure I'm not alone with that in
terms of other teachers that do that.
But I think in playing around with this site,
there are a litany of ways that you can use it.
You can set students free with
it, if you feel like they are --
have the skills and the knowledge.
You can do some pre teaching on some
vocabulary that they might encounter.
You can use all nine of them videos, or a
few of them to illustrate your purposes.
They -- you could even ask students
to find pieces of legislation
that their particular congressional delegation
has proposed and ask them to follow that --
the -- the lifecycle of that bill.
So I actually for once in my lifetime
have actually finished talking.
A little -- well, actually,
not all the way done.
Sorry. I wanted to give one other section
of that previous bill the
Building Blocks of STEM ACT .
That there was one further section that I
would have kids walk through and evaluate.
And again, I would do the same thing I talked
about earlier that I know a lot of you do,
I would do a think aloud and I would read this
and I would ask the kids,
what does the wording mean?
What do we expect the bill to do?
Where does it leave us thinking
or scratching our heads?
We want more.
So I apologize for not finishing that.
And there for once like I was saying,
I actually didn't talk over time.
I know I threw kind of a firehose
of congress.gov of you -- at you.
But I think that this site holds
a lot of gems for us that need
to teach about the legislative branch.
And I think it's a great portal for kids to
interact with legislation and maybe take some
of the overwhelming aspects
of legislation away and get --
equip them with an understanding
of what bills look like,
what topics bills could be proposed concerning,
and also give them an entry point to interacting
with their legislative delegation.
So at this point, while we're looking at
probably the shortest online office hours
in history, I would hope -- I see the
chats been kind of active and I'm hoping
that we can have some interaction there.
So I am going to -- I think at this
point, Colleena, if you want to jump in,
we can entertain some comments
or questions perhaps.
>> No, that's great.
Thank you so much, Jen.
Yeah, I really appreciated
how you not only walked us
through how we might use this resource, kind
of functionally, but of the different lenses,
we might use like perspective taking, the
kinds of vocabulary that students can use,
obviously learning about the process and even
throwing in that kind of local focus aspects.
Like when you mentioned students looking
at their their respective districts.
We did get a couple of comments.
I had asked how, you know, how teachers
among us might use this resource.
And Jennifer said that she uses this
resource with the club that she sponsors,
Model Student Senate, and
that she could also use it
with her AP government or US government classes.
And then Liz added that, that she's
doing PD with Econ and GIS this summer
and looking at the influence of COVID.
But she's doing a government section
that could possibly, you know,
incorporate congress.gov as a resource.
You did get one question here from Lauren.
She says, is the bill tracker
function updated frequently?
I am not sure.
Jen, do you know the answer to that?
>> You know what I wouldn't -- I
wouldn't hope to speak to that officially,
because I don't know that, Lauren.
I did see and I don't want to
give their names at this point.
But I did see some people that
might have an answer to that.
If somebody else would like to chime
in, that's from the law library,
if you feel comfortable or let Colleena know.
>> That would be great.
Or if you'd like to post in the
chat, please feel free to do so.
And Lauren if you don't -- if you don't get
the answer to that, please feel free too --
I see that Jen on the screen has the Ask
a Librarian, Ask a Law Librarian link.
So you can feel free to pose that question
to one of the reference specialists that are
on staff and they -- they can
give you the most precise answer.
I did see another comment
from Keely [assumed spelling].
And she says that I know that something like
this could be good for feature debate class.
And she says, we certainly did
similar thing for our debate team
when I was a TA for a speech class.
They really enjoyed looking at bills
like this and then doing debate.
So there's some other other ideas
of things that have been done.
That definitely sounds like another
possibility for using these resources.
>> And I think Colleena likes to point
it out, and you don't have to limit this
to what traditionally, people
think are a civics or a law class,
although that's what I spoke about.
I mean, this could be done in
an English class just for the --
the looking at the importance of how sentences
are constructed, and clarity and certainly
in debate, any type of writing
exercise for students.
We know that students under a lot
of states under their objectives,
and under their standards, they're asked to
write informationlly and analyzing and writing
about legislation would be a really nice venue
to get them to practice informative writing.
>>Yeah, that's a great -- that's a great point.
Because I know, you know, in your -- in
your work and your civic classroom yeah,
this definitely has applications,
but you're right.
In other disciplines, this can
definitely have a place as well.
>> Actually, okay, so we have a another
let's see, couple of more comments.
And I see that -- that Ana from the
law library has -- she has responded.
It says, Hi from the law library.
The bill tracker is updated regularly.
Generally, if a bill is modified, you will
receive an update the following morning.
Sometimes the changes are made in the morning,
you may get an email update in the afternoon,
but you'll get no more than two emails
each day based on the alerts you setup.
So Lauren, hopefully that's
-- that's helpful for you.
>> Thank you so much Ana for weighing in.
Great to have you here.
And so and then Kathy has
a question for you, Jen.
She says, would you show
students how to use the site?
And if so, how much time
would you use to set that up?
>> That's a really good question.
And I like most the educators listening now
or down the road am thinking about am I doing
that synchronously with students?
Am I doing it face to face?
I would probably allocate -- I
would do exactly like I indicated
in this session where I would do a think aloud.
First, I would do probably some work ahead
of time on -- on bill making in general,
and the vocabulary connected to it, because I
deal with a lot of students who don't have a lot
of discourse language background, and
so it's really important to give them
for the equity piece, the ability to know
what words mean, so they can be empowered.
So I would probably do some
pre teaching, some vocabulary.
We would look at some videos and then I
think in terms of showing them how to decode
and go through a piece of legislation.
Honestly, I could see that easily 30
minutes depending on how the think alouds go
and the queries, the give and take
between teachers and students.
I could have them do some parent sharing
in terms of looking at an additional piece
of legislation to practice that analysis piece
before I ever get them thinking about topics
that they might write their laws on.
When I do my bill making simulation,
I give them a rough template
of what their legislation has to include.
The formatting of it and their -- the
language that it has to begin with.
But I think Kathy, maybe 30 to 40 minutes,
all said and done of previewing the site,
and I would probably then create an
activity where they play around on the site.
I don't know about a scavenger
hunt, but something close to that.
>> I wonder if you could please say
a little more about maybe the kinds
of vocabulary you find that
you have to introduce early on
or maybe how you might introduce some of
the bill making or the legislative lexicon
with your students, how you might start.
>> Well, I might be different
than other legends --
other legislators, listen,
other educators listening.
I have taught AP government
and I have taught down to
that micro level of detail and vocabulary.
But given the student population I work with now
who have a lot of barriers outside of school,
I tend to think what is most important for an
eclipse citizen in the society to understand and
and what could they teach
themselves a later date if need be.
So I tend to teach things -- and this might
seem elementary, but there's a lot of citizens
out there and people in America
that don't know it.
I teach the difference between a bill and a law.
I teach about what is a committee, what is a
subcommittee, what's the functions of them.
And really, if you're teaching bill making
just using the diagram and no application,
you're not giving kids a real bill
to dissect or they're not getting
to engage in the process themselves.
Honestly, it's really boring and easy to forget.
So I would say the most engaging, powerful way
for them to internalize lawmaking process is
to actually get to do it themselves.
Because time and time again, in
the reflection piece, after I've --
we've done the kind of the nitty gritty,
the lower level of Bloom's taxonomy
of learning the information by getting to
apply it and synthesize it in their own bills.
Kids have said I had no idea how
hard it would be for a bill to pass.
And then I really tried to bring somebody
from my congressional delegation
into my classes at some point.
So ideally, it's after the kids
have done their own lawmaking.
So those questions during their Q&A with their
representative or senator are more powerful,
because kids have some of that
discourse language and vocabulary.
And they've gone through, let's be honest,
a very truncated, limited elementary version
of the bill making process, but they get the
basics and so I think it's really important
for all levels of kids, whether
we're talking at grade level class,
one that is a not at grade level, or a -- an
AP class, to really give them the vocabulary,
but then really give them
the chance to do the process.
And I know teachers get nervous
about -- about losing time for that.
But I think you gain a lot in
student long term learning.
>> Great, thanks so much.
Absolutely.
[Inaudible] has a question for you.
She says, would you recommend
congress.gov for elementary grades?
And if so, how can teachers
incorporate this into their instruction?
Amar, that's a really good question.
Because I've been wondering that myself
to think what would be the lowest
grade level that I would set loose?
And what I mean by that is with some assistance
and scaffolding, I would say definitely
with teacher assistance and do pre teaching,
just like I would do with my high schoolers,
I would say maybe you could have
fourth and fifth graders access
at least the congressional delegates information
in terms of who's their representative?
Who's their senator?
I definitely think those kids, even
third graders could navigate that,
if that was where they were initially going.
And maybe then if teachers gave them very clear
task of once they were at their representative
or senator site to figure out one topic
that that person is passionate about.
And I can see definitely that grade level
writing letters to -- to their representatives.
I think that would be very powerful.
Even maybe once the class decides to study a
particular law they think applies to elementary,
maybe the kids could see if they could get a
Skype session set up with with that person.
I think that would be -- we really need civics
to be infused in the elementary grade levels.
And anything that elementary
teachers could do would be great.
I know that the videos would be as
effective with the elementary crowd
as they would be with perhaps
sixth grade and up.
So I think there's some other
resources out there for elementary
for the videos to explain the process.
But definitely I think Amar, they could
use the access to how to interact directly
with their representatives and senators.
And I also think a teacher can select -- one of
the great functions on the site is when you go
to a bill, it actually allows you
to copy a link to a section of it.
Or you could do what I did
and just do a screenshot
and the teacher could actually
guide the students
in thinking about what does this bill mean?
How would it affect your life?
And I think, you know, you elementary people,
you know your students, you
could easily do that.
You don't have to study a whole bill.
You could just study a portion of it, and
you're giving the kids a real application
to the bill making process
in an age appropriate way.
>> Definitely, and actually,
Carla, weighed in and she said
that she teaches pre service
teachers elementary level,
and says that she thinks it's
like fourth to sixth grade.
>> I like that.
I think that's -- that's -- I
rec -- I go with you, Carla.
You're the expert in that realm.
And I just think I know that you
elementary folks have so many --
and Amar's heard me say has so many
picture books at your disposal.
And there's a lot of really good compelling
ones out there that you could easily use
that are age appropriate to read,
to prep your students for thinking
about the bill making process
or the life or efforts
of a particular representative or senator.
That would be a really nice way
to get kids into this topic.
>> Definitely, definitely.
If I see any other comments or questions.
There are a lot of good back and forth
dialogue in the chat, so if you have a chance
to look please do and please contribute.
Keep asking questions.
I see that Dan suggested that perhaps
seeing a bill a member of congress sponsored
and asking students to write a
letter for or against that bill.
Carla mentioned that she
loves it, [inaudible] who --
who the people are that are
involved in proposing the bill.
Kind of, you know, what -- what
sense that might give students.
I also just want to -- I want to call
your attention to something that --
that Ana, our colleague from the
law library, just let me know about
and she just wanted everyone to know that the
law library is doing a webinar on congress.gov.
So if you want an even deeper dive into how to
use congress.gov, that's over the other kinds
of resources that Jen touched on earlier, I'm
going to put a couple of links into the chat box
for how you can get more information about
those webinars and how you might register.
The webinar is going to be on May 28.
So this Thursday.
So feel free to explore that if you're you're
interested in learning more about congress.gov.
Thanks again to everyone who's been contributing
and for all of you who are listening.
If anyone has any other questions
or comments or ideas about how --
how we might use this resource
with the students across the --
across the curriculum and across
the grade level, please let us know.
Thank you so, so much Jen for sharing your --
your knowledge and your understanding
of how congress.gov works and how you --
you can see using it with your students,
the various ways you think, you know,
they might be able to engage with it.
It's been really helpful.
And really a -- I mean, I've
-- I've learned something.
That's -- that's great.
>> Thank you all.
Thanks for -- my team at the library.
And thanks for everyone that joined in
and just -- I love all the comments.
Thank you.
And I -- we -- I just hope that
people can play around with this.
I honestly had not played much with it
prior to living at the library this year.
And I'm excited to take this back to my
students, and I hope others will find
that equally exciting to use with them too.
>> Awesome.
Awesome. Well, just to give you a heads up
about what's coming up the rest of the week.
On Thursday, in addition to the
law webinar that I just mentioned.
Our next office hour is going to be
this Thursday, May 28, at 2 pm Eastern.
We'll be back here, and we'll
be talking with Ryan Rift.
He is a historian in the library's
manuscript division, and he'll be talking
about the Spanish Flu in
the context of World War I.
And we'll be doing that through
the lens of manuscripts available
in the Library of Congress' collections.
And also, tomorrow, we'll
be hosting a webinar on --
called Foundations: Analyzing Primary
Resources in the Library of Congress.
That's at 2 pm tomorrow, that's by registration.
So I'll put a link to that opportunity in the
chat box if you're interested in pursuing that.
But if there are no other questions, I'll
end it here and just say thank you so much
for joining us today and we hope
to see you at a future event.
Have a great afternoon.