Alabama Social Studies SS24.5.3b
The Standard
- SS24.5.3
- Describe Progressive Era social reforms in both the United States and Alabama.
Summarize the role of labor unions and reformers in changing laws governing working conditions.
2024 Alabama Course of Study: Social Studies
Teacher's field guide
What This Standard Means
What Students Need to Do
- Students explain how unions used petitions and strikes to push for safer factories and shorter hours. They describe how reformers exposed harmful conditions and pressed lawmakers to change rules.
What Mastery Looks Like
- Given a factory with locked exits, a student explains how workers could organize and how a reformer could publicize the danger. They connect those actions to a law requiring usable exits.
Common Misconceptions
- Students may think unions wrote laws rather than pressured lawmakers to pass them. They may also assume one protest fixed conditions in every factory.
How to Assess It
- Exit ticket: A factory locks its doors during shifts. Explain one action workers in a union could take, one action a reformer could take, and a safety law they might seek.
Lesson moves
Ways to Teach It
Give pairs four cards labeled locked exits, union petition, reformer's report, and safety law; have them arrange a cause-and-effect sequence.
Read a short account of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire; ask, 'What evidence could reformers bring to lawmakers about locked exits?'
Display three problems, locked exits, 12-hour shifts, and child workers; teams race to propose a union action, reformer action, and law for each.
Walk the school's fire exit route and compare its clear doors with locked factory doors at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.
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Related Standards
- SS24.US1.20b
Describe the political reforms passed during the Progressive Era.
- SS24.US1.18c
Summarize the rise of labor unions and their efforts to improve working conditions in industrial America.
- SS24.E.5c
Research and present information on the role and impact of economic institutions on state and national economies, including labor unions and nonprofit organizat...
- SS24.US1.7a
Summarize the contributions of women reformers in the early to mid-nineteenth century who sought to expand political and educational opportunities for women.
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