High School · US History Since 1877 · §113.41 · Problem-Based Learning
The Progressive Era — Should We Regulate Big Business?
A Problem-Based Learning unit. Students step into the industrial America of 1906, take on a stakeholder's point of view, and work a real, ill-structured question about business, government, workers, and reform — building from surface to deep to transfer learning. The teacher is a guide, not the answer key.
Driving question: It is 1906. Industrial America is booming — and breaking. Should government step in to regulate big business and protect workers and consumers, and if so, how far?
The three-phase path (do them in order)
Problem-solving is a transfer move — it only works once students have knowledge to reason with. So the problem in Phase 3 is deliberately gated behind Phases 1 and 2.
⛔ Gate: don't open the Phase 3 problem until students have finished the surface and deep activities. Meeting the problem too early turns inquiry into guessing.
Big idea & objectives
Big idea: Societies weigh economic freedom, public welfare, and the reach of government when they decide whether and how to regulate powerful private interests — and the choices Americans made in the Progressive Era reshaped business, democracy, and public health while leaving out or harming some of the very people reform claimed to serve.
Know: the problems industrialization created — monopolies, unsafe factories and food, child labor, urban poverty, political machines — the muckrakers who exposed them, and the reforms that followed (the Pure Food and Drug and Meat Inspection Acts of 1906; the 16th–19th Amendments).
Understand: the same reform question looks profoundly different from each stakeholder's point of view — journalist, business owner, labor organizer, politician, immigrant worker, and consumer alike.
Do: run the problem-solving and decision-making process end to end — identify the problem, gather information, list and weigh options, choose and defend a solution, and evaluate it (§113.41(c)(31)(B)).
Standards this unit is aligned to (§113.41)
TEKS SE
Where it lives in the unit
(c)(5)
Effects of reform and third-party movements; impact of Progressive Era reforms — Surface facts, Deep concept map
(c)(5)(A)
Analyze the impact of Progressive Era reforms (initiative, referendum, recall, direct election of senators, suffrage) — Surface, Deep, Transfer
(c)(28)
Source analysis, points of view, claim + evidence — Deep & Transfer
(c)(29)
Communicate findings in written and oral form — Deep argument, Transfer brief
(c)(31)(B)
The problem-solving & decision-making process — the entire Transfer phase
Teacher prep & materials
Print the facilitator guide (teacher moves, map of possibilities, role cards, debrief prompts) and the assessment pack (rubric + individual-in-group).
Chart paper or a projected space for three shared columns: Hunches · Know · Need-to-Know (the KWHL chart).
Vetted sources for investigation (district-approved). Suggested public-access sources are listed in the facilitator guide.
No logins, no accounts — every page runs in the browser. Student writing and products live on paper or in tools your district already vets.
⚠️ Honest history: this unit teaches the Progressive movement's real gains — food and drug safety, direct democracy, woman suffrage — alongside its blind spots, directly, factually, and respectfully (TEC §28.0022). Many reforms excluded or actively harmed Black Americans, and segregation deepened in this same era; some Progressives embraced eugenics and immigration restriction. Progress and injustice ran side by side.
Aligned to (not reproduced from) 19 TAC Ch.113 §113.41; effect sizes from Visible Learning MetaX. The Meet-the-Problem narrative is a teaching fiction grounded in the documented events of 1906.