Welcome to Hands-on Lesson Plans, a new resource from the Parliamentary Education Office (PEO) for middle to upper secondary teachers. These hands-on lessons encourage investigation of parliamentary principles, concepts and processes through highly interactive and student-focused activities such as parliamentary role-plays, teamwork, speeches and debate. They are designed to make teaching the core functions of federal Parliament an enjoyable and easy exercise.
The series includes 12 separate lessons across six themes: Political Movements, Representation, Transparency, Executive Government, Legislation and The Constitution.
Each lesson plan is available as a web document (HTML) and as a printable document (PDF). The PDF document is designed to be more graphically interesting and to print on 2 to 3 A4 pages—ready for entry to your program of work.
Hands-on Lesson Plans cover the following parliamentary topics. In general the higher the number on the lesson plan the greater the challenge.
Download complete set: 12 Hands-on Lesson Plans [PDF 2.57MB, 37 pages]
Hands-on Matrix
Using the lesson plans
All classrooms are unique with unique students who have particular personalities, abilities and learning styles. The lesson plans, therefore, may easily be adapted to suit your particular school context and students’ needs. We invite you to do this. You should choose how closely you follow each lesson plan—the potential is there for you to improvise. In particular, areas of flexibility include:
- The lesson outcomes. Each lesson plan lists a set of lesson-based student outcomes. These may be matched against state and territory curricula in Studies of Society and Environment (SOSE), Human Society and Its Environment (HSIE), Legal Studies, Civics Education, Politics, Commerce and History.
- The lesson duration. Some lessons may be accomplished in a single period while others may require two to four periods depending on your individual circumstances.
- The lesson sequence. Each lesson plan may be used as a stand-alone resource or may be delivered in the recommended sequence to provide a deeper and more integrated knowledge of the federal Parliament (see The Hands-on Matrix). Some lessons work better in pairs, for instance, the representation lessons (2 and 3) or the legislation lessons (10 and 11).
- The lesson relevance. The lesson plans are designed to be topical and relevant to middle to upper secondary students. However, you may wish to modify aspects of the introduction or main activity to take advantage of your students’ particular interests and/or current political, community or school issues.
- The lesson content. Should the content prove either too simple or too challenging for your group, we recommend, of course, that you use your discretion to modify it to match the ability of your class.
PEO web support
This website contains a great deal of information that may provide useful background reading or extension reading. The following online material contains information and teaching resources to assist the delivery of these lesson plans.
If this information does not answer all your questions about how to deliver the Hands-on Lesson Plans to your class, or if you have a suggestion or an idea for this series, please contact the PEO by phone, fax or email.
Ph: 02 6277 3147 or 02 6277 3508
Fax: 02 6277 5775
Email: info@peo.gov.au