Lansing, Michigan – A new program designed to teach high school students how state government works while strengthening their critical thinking, decision-making and communications skills was unveiled today at the Michigan Historical Center by Gov. Rick Snyder and officials from the Michigan History Foundation.
“This is a great example of the public and private sectors working together to reinvent education in our state,” said Gov. Snyder. “It offers a nontraditional approach to history and civics that demonstrates how museums can be part of Michigan’s any time, any place, any way, any pace education that reaches youth in new and exciting ways.”
The David and Betty Morris Learning Center, which houses the Governor’s Decision Room, will allow high school students to role-play as historic figures from Michigan’s past while facing an issue that requires them to make decisions and develop an action plan. The first learning module that will be available in the Governor’s Decision Room will be the circumstances former Gov. George Romney and his cabinet faced in Detroit in 1967. Future modules will be developed based on the PBB crisis of the 1970s and the Sit-Down Strike in 1936-37 in Flint.
In three pre-visit sessions in their classrooms, students will learn about the role of state government and review documents leading up to a particular crisis or event. The students will then travel to the Governor’s Decision Room at the Michigan Historical Center for a half-day session where the situation unfolds as they see newspaper articles, letters from the public and reports from advisors. Then they will make a decision on the best course of action to follow and present that decision in a press conference.
“The Governor’s Decision Room will help students understand the complexity of making critical government decisions in situations where there is no clear wrong or right course of action,” said Sandra Clark, director of the Michigan Historical Center. “It is a civics lesson in real time.”
The program is modeled after the White House Decision Center in the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum in Independence, Mo. In that program, teachers choose from four role-playing scenarios: the decision to use atomic bomb at the end of World War II, post-World War II civil rights and desegregation of the military, the response to the Berlin Blockade, and the response to the North Korean invasion of South Korea.
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