Studying the Supreme Court can be challenging for students. They may read about the landmark cases and Chief Justices and say so what? C-SPAN has an excellent resource to bring the Supreme Court alive in your classroom...an Interactive Timeline. The timeline has profiles on the Chief Justices, changes in the Court, and profiles on major cases that have come before the US Supreme Court. Another benefit to utilizing the Interactive Timeline in the classroom is to practice Common Core skills of identifying evidence in responses and practicing sample tasks of utilizing video in performance tasks.

The Interactive Timeline provides many options for teachers and students. In many cases, the timeline has also included video and a few questions for the timeline entries. The video may consist of interviews with scholars, experts, or more recently- audio of arguments before the Court. The questions lend themselves to many uses. Highlighted video and questions may be used as a warm-up to set the stage for day's lesson.  Another possible use would be to have students view the video and questions as an anticipatory set to a unit review where students connect the case to events in a unit or theme in American history or government. Additionally, the timeline has a variety of formats that it may be viewed in. One may view it in the traditional timeline configuration, as well as in a flip book, list or map.

Beyond the timeline uses in the classroom, it may also serve as an idea for student extensions. Perhaps, you may show the timeline as an example and jigsaw your class to create timelines on landmark cases related to themes such as civil rights, federalism, or SPEC (social, political, economic, cultural). A detailed posting on how to create an interactive timeline on Capzles coming soon. Another possible extension would be for students to use the timeline to create their top 10 list with biographical info. Yet another would be to connect your desired case or number of cases to relevance in the United States today based on current events. The possibilities are endless.