Lesson 3: The Enlightenment

How did the philosophies of the Enlightenment influence politics and society in Europe?

autonomy, democracy, John Locke, social contract, Scientific Revolution, Voltaire, laissez-faire, unicameral, parliament, James Madison, Baron de Montesquieu, Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, humanism, philosophy, Nicolaus Copernicus, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Jefferson, Rationalism, republicanism, Frederick II, Immanuel Kant, Enlightenment, individualism, Galileo, Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, King George III, Renaissance

RH.6-8.1 Cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of primary and secondary sources.

RH.6-8.3 Identify key steps in a text’s description of a process related to history/social studies (e.g., how a bill becomes law, how interest rates are raised or lowered).

RH.6-8.6 Identify aspects of a text that reveal an author’s point of view or purpose (e.g., loaded language, inclusion or avoidance of particular facts).

DOK 3 Strategic Reasoning

2a. Planning of instructional content that is aligned with standards, builds on students' prior knowledge and provides for appropriate level of challenge for all students.

Students may believe that the Enlightenment was primarily an English movement that spread to America.
Students may not understand the connections between the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment.
Students may think of the American Revolution as fueled primarily by American thought and writings and may not realize the importance of European thought and writing in the Revolution and the formation of the new government.

Integrate visual information (e.g., in charts, graphs, photographs, videos, or maps) with other information in print and digital texts.

By the end of grade 9, read and comprehend history/social studies texts in the grades 6–8 text complexity band independently and proficiently.

The Reading Passages—Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Salons of the Enlightenment, and Enlightenment Ideas and American Democracy—provide informational texts at the appropriate level of text complexity for grades 6–8. These readings are accompanied by selected and constructed response questions that can gauge student comprehension. Primary source quotes in Enlightenment Ideas and American Democracy add complexity and depth to the content.

Students will complete a review sheet as well as a open-note quiz. 

There will also be a cumulative project that will assess their understanding about the topic.