Current Events in Your Classroom

Teaching current events can be challenging: the news cycle moves quickly, stories are complex, and the issues can spark strong emotions. But engaging students with current events is a crucial part of their development as informed and humane citizens in a democracy.

Join us throughout the school year for:

• Tips for making meaningful connections between current events and your curriculum
• Strategies for navigating partisan politics in diverse classrooms
• Teaching ideas for addressing breaking news and ongoing issues, from global migration to the health of democracy

Teaching Ideas

We know lack of time is one of the biggest challenges educators face. We've created new easy-to-implement teaching ideas that can be used for a portion of a class period. Each teaching idea also includes ways for your students to explore topics in greater depth in class or for homework.

Throughout the 2018-2019 school year, many teaching ideas draw connections between different elements of two broad themes, "Voting, Elections, and the Health of Democracy" and "Global Migration," and recent current events. Learn more below.

A crowd of women standing in line at a polling station in the Weimar Republic in 1919, the first year women were allowed to vote.

Voting, Elections, and Health of Democracy

Throughout the 2018-19 school year, we will share a series of teaching ideas that help students understand the challenges democracies are facing around the world. We will also include articles and activities that explore the ways individuals and groups can raise their voices and take action to strengthen democracy, with a special emphasis on the importance of voting.

Get the New Teaching Idea

Other recent teaching ideas on Voting, Elections, and Health of Democracy:

• A New Generation of Young Voters Emerges
• Voting Rights and the Midterm Elections
• The Kavanaugh Hearings
• When Reporters Are Arrested
• Understanding #TakeaKnee
• Assessing the Health of Democracy

Refugees arrive on the Bangladesh side of the Naf River on October 1, 2017, after fleeing their village in Myanmar.

Global Migration

Today, as in the past, global migration raises questions for both individuals and nations about identity and belonging. Join us throughout the school year as we examine many aspects of global migration that help to contextualize and humanize what your students are seeing in the world around them.

Recent teaching ideas on Global Migration:

• The Many Faces of Global Migration
• Family Separation at the US Border