What The Presidency Reading Activity Actually Is
The Presidency is an EDSITEment lesson series built around the U.S. executive branch. Reading Activity The Presidency Lesson 1 is the first of several reading exercises students work through, usually assigned around the start of a government or civics unit. It lays out the constitutional basis for the office, the basic structure of executive power, and the historical arc from Washington through the modern era. You download it as a PDF, print the pages, and students read through on their own or in small groups. I used this back when I was teaching high school government. The thing about it that trips people up is the pacing. It's not meant to be read cover to cover in one sitting. The reading itself runs about twelve pages, and if you just hand it out and say "read this," students will skim and miss the actual content. The structure has three sections: the constitutional setup, the growth of executive authority in practice, and the checks that other branches put on the president. Each section has its own set of questions at the bottom.
Reading Activity The Presidency Lesson 1 — How to Run It
Here's the straightforward process. First, go to the EDSITEment website and search for "The Presidency." The resource page has the reading linked as a downloadable PDF, along with the answer key and any accompanying documents. You don't need a paid account for the free materials. Step one: download the PDF and the answer key at the same time. The questions aren't scattered across the text — they're grouped at the end of each section, which makes grading simpler. Step two: decide whether students are reading individually or in pairs. I found pairs work better for this particular reading because the language sits somewhere between a textbook and a primary-source compilation. Some sentences reference specific Supreme Court cases without much context. A second set of eyes helps. Step three: give them a clear purpose before they open the document. If you just say "read and answer the questions," they'll treat it like homework to get through. Instead, frame it around one question — "How did the president's power change between the early republic and the twentieth century?" — and tell them to annotate as they go. The reading itself doesn't guide annotations, so you're adding the structure.
The actual time commitment runs about forty to fifty minutes for a class period. Students who read carefully and answer the questions completely finish in one period. Those who don't stay on task drag it into the next day. The reading isn't long by textbook standards, but the density of names, dates, and case citations slows people down if they encounter unfamiliar terms without support.
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The Questions and What They Actually Test
The questions at the end of each section aren't recall questions. They're analysis questions that expect students to synthesize information from multiple paragraphs. For example, one question asks students to compare how the Federalist era and the Jackson era each expanded executive power in different ways. The answer doesn't come from a single highlighted sentence — it requires pulling from two different sections of the reading. I've seen teachers use these questions as homework answers, but that undercuts the activity. The real value is in the classroom discussion that follows. After students complete the questions individually, a short group share — ten minutes in pairs — surfaces the interpretations that students actually wrestle with. Then a ten-minute whole-class debrief closes the gap between what they wrote and what the text was trying to establish. The answer key is available on the same EDSITEment page as the reading. It's not perfectly aligned with every phrasing students might produce, but it covers the core points. Don't grade for exact wording. Grade for whether the student demonstrated they actually read the section and could connect two related ideas.
Edge Cases and Things That Don't Work
The biggest issue I ran into was using this reading without a vocabulary preview. The text drops terms like "executive privilege," "impeachment," "executive order," and "signing statement" without definition in the first pass. Students who don't know what those mean will either skip over the sentences or misinterpret them. The workaround is simple: put three or four of the key terms on the board before handing out the reading, and ask students to predict what each one means based on how it's used in context. This takes about five minutes and saves twenty minutes of confusion later. Another issue is the age range. The reading is written at a level that works for juniors and seniors in high school, but it's too dense for freshmen who haven't done much analytical reading yet. I once tried it with a mixed class and had to split the reading into two sessions with a vocabulary introduction between them. It worked, but it required more prep time than the activity normally demands. The PDF download link is only accessible from the official EDSITEment site. There isn't an alternative source I'd recommend. If the page goes down or the link breaks, you're stuck waiting for the site to come back up. This has happened to me twice over the years — minor downtime lasting a couple of days. Not a catastrophe, but worth knowing if you're planning to use it close to a due date.
When This Reading Falls Short
The activity is solid for building baseline knowledge about the presidency, but it has gaps. It doesn't cover recent presidencies in much depth, and it treats executive power as a mostly linear story. Students who already know something about the subject might find the narrative oversimplified. In those cases, supplement with a primary source — an excerpt from Federalist No. 70, or a passage from a presidential speech — to add texture that the reading itself doesn't provide. If you're looking for a more interactive version of the same material, the C-SPAN Classroom site has video clips that cover the presidency in a more contemporary frame. Pairing one C-SPAN segment with this reading gives students both the historical grounding and a modern touchpoint. That combination runs about sixty to seventy minutes total, but the engagement is noticeably higher than the reading alone. The reading activity works best when you treat it as a foundation, not the whole lesson. Plan the next class around a debate or a case study that uses the concepts from this reading. Otherwise the material fades quickly after the assignment is turned in. I've noticed that students retain the information better when they have to use it in a follow-up task within a week or two.
If you're teaching this unit on a tight schedule and can't spare the full period, the reading can be adapted. Assign sections one and two for homework and use the class period for questions one and two. It's not ideal, but it gets the material covered. The answer key makes this straightforward since the questions map directly to the assigned pages.
