“There’s no middle ground on middle school,” says Sam Agami, who’s in his 22^rd year teaching at Princess Anne Middle in Virginia Beach, Virginia. “Either you think these kids are awesome, or they’re monsters. I think they’re awesome. They’re sophisticated enough intellectually that you can engage with them on interesting content. They’re young enough that they still get excited about things. They don’t think they know everything just yet.”

Agami teaches 8^th grade Civics and Economics, a course with plenty of challenging content to engage. “I think content is super important,” says Agami, who began earning his Master of Arts in American History and Government during the second year of the program’s existence. “But if you don’t have a good relationship with your students, you’re not going to get them to open up and encounter that content.”

How Good Teachers Build Good Relationships

How do you build good relationships with students? “You have to build mutual respect,” Agami says. Students “have to know that they’re safe in your classroom to express themselves and to be who they are.” Also, “they have to understand what you expect from them: you have to be clear, consistent, and fair.” At the same time, a good teacher “has to be flexible” enough to give students space to self-correct. The bottom line: “Kids are going to work for teachers who they think care about them.”

Agami attributes his talent for building relationships in part to his complex family history. The Yankees and Knicks pennants on the wall behind his desk evoke just one of his several identities. His father, a college accounting professor, immigrated to America from Egypt. His mother, “an American white girl from Illinois,” traveled with her husband to Egypt after their marriage. She returned to the US to give birth, “so that I would be born here as a citizen.” After Agami’s father was able to rejoin his mother, they lived for a decade in New York City, then settled in Virginia Beach. “I’ve always been in multiple worlds; I don’t have a tribe or a home base. I can understand different perspectives, because there’s nobody from my perspective, and I’m always aware of that.”

This gives Agami flexibility. “Whereas some well-meaning people say, ‘I’m just going to treat everybody the same,’—well, no, you don’t treat everybody the same. You treat everybody appropriately.”

The Expectation: Learn What Those Who Choose Citizenship Learn

He explains how he conveys his expectations of students. “The first topic I cover every year is citizenship. When we’re talking about naturalization, I tell the kids, ‘with very few exceptions, most of you were lucky enough to be born in this country.  So, you don’t have to study to complete the naturalization process. However, this class is your naturalization process. Everything that somebody who chose to come to this country and chooses to be an American citizen has to do to qualify for citizenship, you have to do to complete my class.’”

This does not mean passing a naturalization test with a randomized set of multiple-choice questions. Rather, Agami expects students to learn the duties of citizenship: “what you should do and should want to do as an American citizen. That’s the reason my class exists.”

Agami thinks the most important thing young citizens must learn is “how to interpret information. I tell my students, it has never been easier, probably in human history, to get information.  But it’s probably never been harder to figure out what’s legitimate”—that is, which facts are true and which interpretations of them are most reasonable. “I think working with primary source documents is a really good way to train students to interpret information.” Familiarity with key documents in American history gives students “a lens through which to view current events,” since current issues often grow out of past decisions.

Holding Students Accountable to the Evidence Primary Documents Provide

When Agami began teaching, this was not his approach. He taught from the textbook. “I was putting my own spin on things,” but not researching the primary documents to test his opinions. Then, on a whim, he and a friend took advantage of weeklong seminar at Ashland University (in those early days offered free of charge through federal “Teaching American History” grants). Professors Macubin Owens and Lucas Morel taught the course, on “Sectionalism and Civil War.” The first ninety-minute session fascinated Agami. Having never before attended a professional development program that invited him to serious thought and study, “it hadn’t dawned on me that I should do the reading ahead of time. I spent every moment of every break period hustling to get it done.”

Two years later, Agami enrolled in the new MAHG program. Well before graduating in 2013, he had redesigned his civics course. “Now I wasn’t satisfied to teach somebody else’s take on history; I would go into the sources to find excerpts I wanted students to inquire into directly. I wanted them to get different voices and perspectives.”

He found eighth graders capable of deep focus on a short excerpt. They could read Federalist 51  to understand the separation of powers—if given only half a page of Madison’s argument. “You want them to approach the material, but you don’t want them to be turned off and not do it at all.” Agami found ways to ensure students engaged the text thoughtfully. “Usually once a week I give them a small section of a document and ask them to answer three questions that relate to whatever we’ve taught that day.” After reading a  digital version of the excerpt, students not only type their responses; they use colored highlighting to key each response to the section of the document that substantiates it. “Eighth graders being eighth graders, half the time they’ll try to take a shortcut, thinking, ‘I can figure out what he’s looking for, so I’ll just type that in.’ I tell them, ‘you need to be able to show me where your answer came from.’”

Helping Students Trace the Influence of the Declaration

He borrowed an exercise from Professor Owens to help students trace the historical continuity of America’s founding ideals. Students read the first paragraph of the Declaration of independence alongside the Gettysburg Address and Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech. Students see “how the Declaration inspired leaps forward in liberty. I’ve seen kids really get that.” At first, students are surprised. They’ve heard recordings of King’s dream for America at the end of his speech. “But they’re not used to hearing a black American refer to the founding as the basis for civil rights”—that the purpose behind the American experiment in self-government “was not in conflict with civil rights but in support of them.”

A lesson Agami was about to teach would present multiple points of view on this question. Students would study the Preamble to the Constitution alongside an excerpt from William Lloyd Garrison, who condemned the Constitution as “the slaveholders’ document.” Then they would read Frederick Douglass, who explains in My Bondage and My Freedom why he concluded that Garrison was wrong:

. . . The Constitution of the United States—inaugurated “to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessing of liberty”—could not well have been designed at the same time to maintain and perpetuate a system of rapine and murder, like slavery; especially, as not one word can be found in the Constitution to authorize such a belief.

“Reading primary documents, you’re not just trusting what somebody said about something. You’re actually looking at evidence and coming up with your own conclusions. I want students to understand that citizenship is active, not passive.” Before voting or advocating policies, citizens must sort through and evaluate the avalanche of information currently available. They need both an historical basis and a reliable process for evaluating discordant claims. When citizens are ill-equipped for this task, Agami tells students, “our system of government does not work.”