During a political campaign, you can hardly turn around without encountering an endorsement or attack on a candidate. High schoolers examine the ways that negative advertisement, positive advertisements, and everything in between can affect the way citizens cast their vote in an election.

Concepts

american politics, political campaigns, politics, presidential campaigns, campaigning, advertising, evaluating claims, logical fallacies

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Additional Tags

social studies

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Instructional Ideas

• Use current ads from a political campaign to illustrate the tactics that learners might be seeing on an everyday basis
• Find clips of as many of the ads mentioned in the presentation as possible
• Have your class create a political advertisement for a fictional (or real) candidate, and encourage peers to identify the strategy of each ad

Classroom Considerations

• Focuses specifically on the American political system
• Each slide contains a lot of text; considering paring down the amount of information
• The most current ads are from 2010
• Prompts learners to submit their work on an assignment tab, and to discuss their ideas on a discussion board; if these websites are not part of your classroom setup, remove the final slide

Pros

• Encourage thorough evaluation of claims and reliability of sources
• Provides historical examples of effective advertisements
• Comes with exercises for classmates to evaluate each ad

Cons

• None

Common Core

RI.9-10.8 RI.11-12.8