PreK-12 Resources
The Paul D. Coverdell World Wise Schools program fosters an understanding of other cultures and global issues by providing online educational resources based on the Peace Corps experience and facilitating communication among U.S. learners and current and returned Peace Corps Volunteers.
"Teachers cannot be silent during this time," said Patrick Harris, a 6th and 7th grade English and social studies teacher at the Detroit Achievement Academy. "Teachers have to take a stand. Students are absorbing this, [and] they're going to ask themselves later on in life or even now, 'What was my teacher doing during this time?'" (Schwartz, 2020)
The Social Justice Standards are a road map for anti-bias education at every stage of K–12 instruction. Comprised of anchor standards and age-appropriate learning outcomes, the Standards provide a common language and organizational structure educators can use to guide curriculum development and make schools more just and equitable.
Early in my career, it was a white woman that gave me access in the field. She opened the doors for me and made space for me at different tables. She brought me along and put me on different platforms. It was a Black teacher that gave me skill, training, and courage to walk through those doors, sit at those tables and stand on those platforms. If I am honest, my entire career has been this way. There was always someone white that gave me access and a person of color that encouraged me and nurtured me and built my skill. I was asked by Chris, another one of our Conveners, “how do we lay the planks on this bridge of trust?” I say we need both the white ally and the person of color. We need the access and the courage to go through the door. Simply put, in this journey of reimagining we need each other. But we need to deconstruct and reconstruct what we look like when we are together. What would the table look like if power were not the construct? (Norwood, 2020)
Use the strategies in this resource as you prepare to facilitate difficult conversations about race and racism. You can also use them to build competency when discussing other types of discrimination, such as gender bias, ableism, and religious or anti-LGBT persecution. We hope you find the resource useful, and that you will share it with colleagues. And don’t forget to check out the list of additional PD suggestions and classroom activities starting on page 13.
This site provides resources for teachers around strategies and preparation for intergroup learning, icebreaker activities, and introspective activities.
A timeline of two millennia of world-shaping individuals and momentous events that define Black history.
Black Lives Matter at School Resource Toolkit (Recognized February 17th)
As educators, we need to have courageous, honest dialogues about race, and about what is happening in our society and in our students’ lives. Building strong relationships with students and colleagues is a critical component of our work to know “Every Student By Face and Name. Every School, Every Classroom. To and Through Graduation.” This document is intended to provide you with resources to use in preparing to participate in this day of affirmation. Thank you for partnering with us in this work to improve the Rochester community.
For example, Singh suggests that becoming an anti-racist as a white person means taking responsibility for your power and privilege, acknowledging the feelings you have to increased multiculturalism, cultivating a desire for understanding and growth, etc.
Becoming an anti-racist as a person of color means recognizing that there are important class differences between people of color, understanding that all racial groups are struggling in some way under White supremacy, realizing that people of color groups are not always united in solidarity, and challenging internalized White supremacy, etc. (Wheaton College Massachusetts)
A regular map shows you how large countries are. Bouncy Maps take a different angle. They transform the map to show how large countries would be if not area were the key, but another criterium. For each dataset different countries will be large or small. Bouncy Maps visualize these new proportions.
Countries (or states or provinces) are exactly as large as their weight in the dataset. They can therefore be compared. A country which is twice as large on the map as another country has a value that's twice as large as the other one's.
This type of map is called a cartogram, or anamorphosis. Traditionally, cartograms show countries as contiguous shapes, attached to their neighbors. Because of the changes in size, distortion of the country shape will be necessary. For Bouncy Maps we choose to safeguard the shape of a country, detaching it from its neighbors. Our algorithm calculates positions for all countries to maintain as much as possible the angles and distances between them.
Today we celebrate the lives and work of Rep. John Lewis and the Rev. C.T. Vivian. We’re eternally grateful for their lifelong, courageous activism. As we remember these leaders’ relentless pursuit of equality, we hope educators will join us in continuing to work for justice and liberation for all. And we hope young people will join us in holding Representative Lewis, the Rev. Vivian and other change makers as models for who we can be when we decide to make “good trouble.”
Civil Rights Done Right offers a detailed set of curriculum improvement strategies for classroom instructors who want to apply these practices. In five discrete steps, we identify specific suggestions and procedures for building robust, meaningful lessons that cultivate a deeper understanding of modern civil rights history.
We invite you to begin the process and thank you for your efforts to teach effectively about this great movement for freedom, opportunity and democracy. By using this tool, you can give students the tools they need to create a better future and to continue the march.
Find below selected lessons and resources from the upcoming edition of Putting the Movement Back into Civil Rights Teaching. Some resources are already available for online access.
Do you have the 2004 edition? Here are the companion handouts.
There are no doubt complexities that come with White Americans working for racial justice. White privilege can lead to a chronic case of undiagnosed entitlement, creating poor listeners, impatient speakers who talk over others, and people unaccustomed to taking orders. Nevertheless, the movement for racial justice needs more White Americans to get involved. And it’s our responsibility to help each other get involved–and get involved productively. (Greenburg, 2015)
On this page you will find links to suggested lessons, films, books, readings, and general teaching guides for Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action and beyond.
The Teaching Tolerance Social Justice Standards are the anchor standards and learning outcomes created to guide educators in curriculum development and to make schools more just, equitable and safe. Our standards are designed to be used alongside state and Common Core State Standards in all content areas to reduce prejudice and bias and advocate for collective action.
These standards are divided into four domains: Identity, Diversity, Justice and Action. This PD Café is the third in a series walking educators through the domains of the Social Justice Standards. Please see PD Café in the Spring and Fall 2019 issues of Teaching Tolerance for more information about the Identity and Diversity domains. Read on to learn more about our Justice domain—and how you might share it with students.
We share here articles and ideas that parents and teachers can use to help children develop critical literacy skills that will help them as citizens and consumers for years to come.
Find resources to help build an inclusive school community for students from different cultural, socioeconomic, and linguistic backgrounds and for children with unique instructional needs.
This page includes many resources for educators related to Black Lives Matter guiding principles for young children, lessons, videos, and general teaching guides.
This list contains vendors who provide various forms of professional development that address educational equity, diversity, and/or culturally responsive practices.
Imagine if the teachers of those officers who responded to the call on May 25 had been in classes where racial literacy was explicitly taught. If they would have had the opportunity to talk about race and racism in their instruction, could George Floyd’s life have been spared? Students need to feel that the classroom, no matter what it looks like next year, is a safe space to discuss the complex feelings that the recent events may elicit. By doing the work now to examine our implicit biases, teachers can be better equipped to have tough conversations and make concrete changes to curriculum in the fall.
This cooperative learning strategy increases student engagement, encourages collaboration, and results in better learning. Learn how to use the basic Jigsaw method, another variation called Jigsaw II, and get tips for troubleshooting, like what to do if you can't divide students evenly.
In asserting personal authority, the key is not to look to change who you are. Instead, there are certain areas one can focus on to seek solutions when problems arise. For example, turning a directive into a question -- "Would you like to sit down now?" or "Isn't it time to put the scissors away?" -- is a polite form of speech that is a mainstream, particularly female, structure. Many kids will not respond to that structure because commands are not couched as questions in their home culture. Rather than asking questions, some teachers need to learn to say, "Put the scissors away" and "Sit down now" or "Please sit down now."
This issue is complex, but, in brief, many of the difficulties teachers encounter with children who are different in background from themselves are related to culturally different discourse styles and interactional styles. (Delpit, 1998)
Use this graphic organizer to think ahead about how you can create emotional safety in your classroom. The suggested strategies are general; use your knowledge of yourself, your students and your classroom culture to create a specific and personalized plan.
And right now, they aren’t getting it. In a recent report titled The Opportunity Myth, TNTP researchers observed nearly 1,000 classrooms across a diverse set of districts and charter networks. They found that students were only asked to meet grade-level expectations on their assignments a mere 17% of the time. We can and must change that by first giving students the opportunity to read and respond to knowledge-rich challenging texts.
Exposure to complex text engages readers. So, in first grade, that might mean reading aloud books such as “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind,” by William Kamkwamba. In fourth grade, students might read compelling works of literature, such as “Walk Two Moons” by Sharon Creech. Later, in seventh grade, a memoir like “Farewell to Manzanar” by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston is captivating.
Considering and discussing the ideas, words, and experiences found within pages of these books draw students in and prepares them to read widely both works of literature and technical non-fiction by teaching them how to navigate complex texts. Students reading lower level texts are denied these opportunities. (Schmidt, 2020)
Just because we’re facing an uphill battle doesn’t mean we shouldn't take those first steps. To integrate multicultural education in your classroom and your school, you can:
- Integrate a diverse reading list that demonstrates the universal human experience across cultures
Encourage community participation and social activism
Go beyond the textbook
By supplementing your curriculum with current events and news stories outside the textbook, you can draw parallels between the distant experiences of the past and the world today.
Creating multicultural projects that require students to choose a background outside of their own
Suggest that your school host an in-service professional development on multi-cultural education in the classroom (Garcia)
Native Land Digital is a Canadian not-for-profit organization, incorporated in December 2018. Native Land Digital is Indigenous-led, with an Indigenous Executive Director and Board of Directors who oversee and direct the organization. Numerous non-Indigenous people also contribute as members of our Advisory Council. The Board of Directors govern finances, set priorities, and appoint staff members as required.
This map does not represent or intend to represent official or legal boundaries of any Indigenous nations. To learn about definitive boundaries, contact the nations in question.
Also, this map is not perfect -- it is a work in progress with tons of contributions from the community. Please send us fixes if you find errors.
If you would like to read more about the ideas behind Native Land or where we are going, check out the blog. You can also see the roadmap.
Click here to access the Teacher's Guide on how to use the map
The NASA Modern Figures Toolkit is a collection of resources and educational activities for students in grades K-12. Each educational activity and resource includes a brief description, as well as information about how the activities and lessons align to education standards. Resources highlighted include videos, historical references and STEM materials.
We are thrilled that teachers across the country are meeting, collaborating, and building curriculum based on Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi. This YA book is based on Kendi’s 2016 Stamped from the Beginning.
Both books center the lives of key individuals to help readers sort out both the origins of racist ideas and to differentiate between segregationist, assimilationist, and antiracist positions. These individuals — Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Angela Davis — offer examples that we’re happy students will encounter in the project of antiracist education.
We hope educators supplement these texts with an equally rich people’s history of racism and antiracism. Toward that effort, we have suggested lessons that complement key chapters and moments in Reynolds’ and Kendi’s Stamped. In most cases, we’d recommend doing these lessons before having students listen or read the chapter, since many of our activities leave the “what really happened” unanswered until the end.
Say Their Names: A toolkit to help foster productive conversations about race and civil disobedience
This includes suggestions and strategies for educators and parents on having conversations with young people in school and at home about race, racism, racial violence, understanding biases, and how to take action for racial justice.
Our searchable library of short texts offers a diverse mix of stories and perspectives. This multigenre, multimedia collection aligns with the Common Core's recommendations for text complexity and the Teaching Tolerance Social Justice Standards.
Choose from informational and literary nonfiction texts, literature, photographs, political cartoons, interviews, infographics and more. You can also filter by text type, grade level, subject, and topic.
“The leveled texts have really helped me engage students and introduce them to complex topics in a way they can understand.”
This Teaching Idea is a guide for teachers to begin conversations with their students about George Floyd’s death and the events that surround it. Such conversations are always difficult for teachers to facilitate, and distance learning presents added challenges to teaching sensitive material. Despite these challenges, it’s critical to make space for students to process the difficult and deeply painful events of the past week.
As Melinda D. Anderson points out in her latest post, it is crucial for educators to understand how race and racism can impact our students of color. And in a school system with students who are increasingly diverse but teachers who remain majority white, it’s especially crucial for white teachers like me to seek out productive ways to talk about race and racism with my students.
So even though these conversations sometimes make me nervous, I try to signal to my students that it’s okay to talk about race and racism in our classroom. It means I end up facing some really difficult and important questions from my students. Questions like “Are white people afraid of black people?” and “Why is it mostly white people in the suburbs?” It also means that we can begin to articulate the ways that racism impacts us and start to look for ways to address it. Students share stories of teachers who have misunderstood them, of police officers who have made painful assumptions about them, of media messages that malign them.
Training for Change is a training and capacity building organization for activists and organizers. We believe strong training and group facilitation is vital to movement building for social justice and radical change.
On their website, they feature various free articles and tools falling under a variety of categories.
Note: Educators and community members, below you’ll find links to role plays, mixers, and other teaching materials for use in the classroom and elsewhere related to Teaching for Black Lives. Just click on the article you’re hoping to find teaching materials for. For some of the materials, you’ll need to be a member of the Zinn Education Project. If you’re not already, it’s free and easy to sign up!
In 2014, the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Eric Garner in New York City, Tamir Rice in Cleveland and too many others caused waves of nationwide protest and appeals for stronger protections against police brutality.
These events—along with the lack of accountability for the police officers who shot and killed these unarmed victims—also prompted educators to seek resources on how to address these subjects in the classroom.
The resources below can help spur much-needed discussion around implicit bias and systemic racism, but they can also empower your students to enact the changes that will create a more just society. (Teaching Tolerance, 2020)
Last week, Chicago middle school teacher Xian Barrett had his students insert their voices into conversations about these cases by creating a special activity: After reviewing and discussing the details of each case in class, tweet about them. He then shared these tweets on his own Twitter feed (while maintaining students’ anonymity) (Teaching Tolerance Staff, 2014)
Self-paced courses to help you understand how systemic racism operates.
Crisis after crisis reveal the racial inequities baked into our national systems.
And in your still quiet moments, a small voice reminds you that we don't need to live this way. Something different, something better is possible. You dream of equitable societies that fearlessly face the sins of their past to create a healthy foundation for their future. You dream of societal systems that are trauma-informed, joy-filled and center the needs of those who are hurting the most.
You were made for these times.
But before you can build a solution, you have to understand the problem. Learn how racism is embedded in United States' systems and our individual psyches, so you can build a world where we all can thrive.
This resource covers this the following topics.Resources/Tools on STTP (School-to-prison-pipeline)
- Why Racial Equity & Justice?
- Talking Race
- Tools for Assessment, Strategic Planning, and Action
Racial Justice Tools and resources
Differences… they’re a cause for joy and sorrow. We celebrate differences in personal identity, family background, country and language. At the same time, differences among people have been the basis for discrimination and oppression.
Yet, are we so different? Current science tells us we share a common ancestry and the differences among people we see are natural variations, results of migration, marriage and adaptation to different environments. How does this fit with the idea of race?
Looking through the eyes of history, science and lived experience, the RACE Project explains differences among people and reveals the reality –and unreality – of race. The story of race is complex and may challenge how we think about race and human variation, about the differences and similarities among people (RACE Project).
On this page you will find Vermont Projects and Organizations, History Resources (Vermont and National), Booklists, and Resources.
Write to the Source performance tasks and rubrics ask students to rely on textual evidence when responding to writing prompts about identity, diversity, justice and action.