What's new at Fergus High School? I'm right in the middle of my Mock Congress. A couple of years ago I stumbled upon a program run by the Youth Leadership Initiative run by the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. This outfit supports and offers an Internet based mock congress called e-congress in which high school students create "mock" federal bills. My students' bills are sent to high schools all across the country where they are vetted and debated in a "mock" committee while my students do the same with bills from all over the country. The end result is that students learn quite a bit about contemporary issues (popular bills usually involve capital punishment, immigration, legalization of drugs, higher education costs, abortion, same sex marriage) and they get to experience the anticipation of waiting to find out if their bills pass.

The end result is experiential learning at its best, a school of education that I love to be a part of. I firmly believe that the best teacher is the experience of doing and this mock congress style strongly pushes that idea.

Here you see some students from my A.P. Government class researching and writing their bills.