The Hearing

The most persuasive proposal is not the one the data supports.

The Hearing seats your eighth graders on a planning committee deciding how to allocate a public grant across three proposals. Over ten days a celebrity endorsement, a confident CEO, and a cherry-picked statistic all pull against the evidence. The committees who follow the data past the charisma cast the recommendation that holds up. It is civic decision-making with real money at stake.

See what your students get, and why it lands.

No mockups. Every page below is real, pulled straight from the files you download. Tap any one to see it full size.

A worksheet was never going to teach this.

Your eighth graders are not reading about how local government works. They are a planning committee allocating a public grant, where a celebrity backs one proposal and a neighbor pleads for another, and neither argument is the evidence. The committees who weigh what the data actually shows, past the charisma and the emotion, recommend the proposal that earns it. That is civic reasoning, with real money on the line.

Tap to read the testimony

They are graded on their reasoning, not on the allocation.

Here is what surprises teachers. A committee that allocated the grant the way the designers intended is not graded higher than one that did not. There is no correct allocation. Students are assessed on the quality of their reasoning, traced through their own daily journal. A defensible decision that ran against the crowd scores higher than a popular one with no thinking behind it. That is how an eighth grader learns that a defensible judgment beats a persuasive one.

Tap to read the grading note

Let the workbook compare the proposals.

The Hearing comes with a workbook that holds each proposal against the budget and the evidence, side by side. The committee logs what it finds, and the comparison builds across the ten days. Their attention stays on the hard part, which proposal the data supports, instead of on keeping the pitches straight.

Tap to see the comparison sheet

Every day is already scripted. You just run the room.

You do not need a public-policy background to teach this. The guide scripts every day, names what students will likely say, and gives you exactly how to respond. The proposals, the testimony, the cherry-pick audit, and the final recommendation are all written for you. You bring the facilitation. The simulation brings everything else.

Tap to read the teacher guide

The lesson plan is already written.

Every simulation comes with a fully editable, admin-ready lesson plan. Standards alignment, daily pacing, learning objectives, differentiation, and an assessment plan are already done, so you can hand it to an administrator or adapt it to your district template in minutes.

Tap to preview the lesson plan

Everything you need to run it.