By Sarah Cooper
The last time I wrote here about my 8th grade U.S. history and civics students writing a letter to a politician was February 2020 – just before the pandemic upended traditional teaching practices and almost three years before ChatGPT and its fellow artificial agents began to transform education.
Reaching out to one’s political representatives is a chestnut for civics teachers because it sparks authentic political engagement.
My article in 2020 offered tips about how to narrow the letters’ scope and elicit a response:
1. Go interdisciplinary with the topics
2. Base letters on a bill, if possible
3. Find the best people to whom to address the letters
4. Relate the project explicitly to how Congress and state legislatures work
5. Give detailed advice and models for writing the letters
6. Proofread the drafts thoroughly so that students can be proud of their work
In 2026 all of these tips still apply. However, as with every major project I’ve assigned in the past several years, I’ve had to update it to respond to the latest AI developments.
In doing so last month, I realized this is my first project that has become not just different but markedly better because of, not in spite of, using AI. In partnership with Google Gemini (our school’s approved provider, since Google states that our chats aren’t used to improve their model”), my students became savvier global citizens than they ever were before.
Finding Meaningful Legislation
As comprehensive as the Govtrack.us and state legislature websites are, it has been cumbersome to find a bill relevant even to a simple topic, such as tutoring or homelessness. Even with a master’s degree in history, I’ve been hard-pressed to help students sort through a random set of bills in the limited time we have in class – especially since the letter to a politician needed to be related to the topic of their interdisciplinary community impact projects.
Gemini changed everything when I asked students to use this or a similar prompt:
I’m an 8th grader writing a letter to a California politician. Could you please give suggestions for a California or U.S. bill that 1) builds on previous bills, 2) is currently being proposed already, 3) OR has been successfully signed into law already that relates to [my topic]?
Whereas, in previous years, our two in-class research days had served up a mess of frustrated questions and dead ends, suddenly students were asking me questions not about how to find a bill but about what the bills meant.
What About Accuracy?
Once students selected a bill for their letter, they had to “confirm the existence of the bill and ask any questions you have.” To do so, they looked up the bill number on govtrack.us (for federal bills), legInfo.legislature.ca.gov (for California bills), or on a regular search engine. “If this is challenging,” I added, “you can also use Google to laterally search and find out more about the bill.”
If the bill was not real, they should ask Gemini for another. If the bill was confusing, they could “ask Gemini (or Google) as much as you want about it to help you understand it.” To my knowledge, no students were led astray by fake bills, though sometimes confusion arose in bills from different years having the same number.
Students could also ask Gemini which politician to contact, and many chose from several excellent options – such as their State Assembly representative, the head of a Congressional committee, or a local school superintendent.
Interacting with the Bills
Now that it was easy to find legislation, every student could refer to a bill or law in their letter – for instance, by urging that a current bill be passed, asking that a bill that had died in committee be reintroduced, affirming their support for a bill that had become law, or suggesting a future bill.
Suddenly the letters were more sophisticated, research based and relevant. After thanking the politician for a specific impact in their community, the eighth graders wrote “asks” such as the following:
♦ “I am writing to convince you to provide financial support to families that have kids aged 4 to 14 because that is pre-school to middle school. This is so that no kid will fall behind in school just because they don’t have a fast laptop or books to read. By passing H.R. 2275: Support Children Having Open Opportunities for Learning Act of 2025, the bill would ensure that they would have everything they need to succeed until 14 years old.”
♦ “I am reaching out to you to urge you to vote YES on H.R. 4086. The Autism Family Caregivers Act of 2025 would provide training and information for new parents with children who have neurological disabilities. By passing this bill, parents would be more informed about ways to help their child with social and behavior skills in their everyday lives.”
♦ “I am writing to you regarding your vital bill, SB 478: School Accountability: Statewide School Library Lead. According to a CalMatters article from Feb. 2025, SB 478 was held in committee largely because of concerns regarding its funding. However, I believe that the cost of not having a School Library Lead is higher.”
Let Your Voice Shine Through
With the examples above, you might be wondering whether Google, being overly helpful, had given students language that they had deliberately or inadvertently used in their letters.
In editing students’ rough drafts, I did find some places where they needed to quote or paraphrase better, and at least one student ending up adding to their letter the caveat that “I was brainstorming with Google Gemini with the permission of my teacher.” Overall, though, students respected the line between getting research advice from Gemini and letting it write the letter for them.
From our regular current events presentations, too, students already had experience with my pointing out language that was insufficiently quoted or paraphrased, so they knew I would be looking for their voice to shine through on this assignment as well. Our rubric also emphasized this writing be “in your own voice,” as does every rubric I write now.
Pristine Proofreading
As the students finished drafting, I asked why these letters needed to be pristine in mechanics and grammar. Answers included that they wanted the politicians to take them seriously and wouldn’t if there were errors. I told them that before AI, I had painstakingly marked every parenthesis. Now, though, these eighth graders could learn about mechanics from AI and apply this knowledge to their papers.
Here’s the prompt they used:
Please list needed copyedits for the 8th grade letter below, for grammar and punctuation ONLY. Do not rewrite it, as I want it to stay in my own voice. Please just give a list of the parts I need to change and why.
Before turning in their draft, students copied into their Google Doc the list of copyediting suggestions and then made the updates in the text of the letter. If they thought AI was wrong in a suggestion, they could talk to me, which led to some fun conversations for this former English teacher about optional commas!
By the time the letters got to me, they were incredibly clean and students had done the painstaking copyediting work themselves.
A Win of a Project
In happy contrast to all the problems AI can cause for teachers, this project was a total win. My students are better thinkers. They used AI not only to find bills, but also to check assumptions and understand complicated topics such as state versus local funding or the importance of nonprofit status. As 13- and 14-year-olds, they punched above their weight by sorting through bills that affect the lives of those around them, from protecting water sources to translating health care documents.
And good news! Just two weeks after emailing and mailing the letters, about 20 percent have already received a response by email, in time to post replies on the community impact trifolds they’re about to display at our annual service fair.
Civic engagement in an AI age? These middle schoolers are all set.
Photo – Unsplash+
Sarah J. Cooper teaches eighth-grade U.S. History and is Associate Head of School at Flintridge Prep in La Canada, California, where she has also taught English Language Arts. Sarah is the author of Making History Mine (Stenhouse, 2009) and Creating Citizens: Teaching Civics and Current Events in the History Classroom (Routledge, 2017). She presents at conferences and writes for a variety of educational sites. You can find all of Sarah’s writing at sarahjcooper.com.
