Teaching Impeachment

Today in my upper level Colonial America & the American Revolution course, the students voted to pause our regular schedule and talk about impeachment for part of the class. I first answered questions they had about what was happening right now, then explained that we were going to look at the roots of impeachment in the Constitution.

I shared the relevant sections of the Constitution with the whole class and briefly discussed what they meant. I then split the class in half, with one group examining an excerpt from Federalist no. 65 and another an excerpt from the debates in the Constitutional Convention. They had to pick out the most important phrases and then summarize the document and their reactions for the other half of class.

I have created a 3-page pdf version of this material to download, which could be reduced to just one page printed to distribute in class if you share the constitutional clauses on the screen rather than printing them.