Current Events In Your Classroom
Teaching Ideas, Activities, and Strategies for High School and Middle School Students
Teaching current events can be challenging: the news cycle moves quickly, the issues can spark strong feelings, and classroom time is tight. Yet engaging with current events is an essential part of educating young people to be informed and humane participants in a democracy.
Use our resources to foster thoughtful classroom conversations and build your students’ capacities for critical thinking, emotional engagement, ethical reflection, and civic agency.
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Use this Teaching Idea to help students learn about Shirley Chisholm’s ground-breaking career and the significance of Vice President Kamala Harris’s election.
Bring innovative instruction and reflection to your Black history curriculum with resources honoring themes of Black Agency & Black Joy.
View our checklist of things to consider before you start teaching current events, including recommended news sources, teaching strategies, and media literacy tools. This checklist was updated for the 2020 school year with remote and hybrid learning in mind.
In The News Now
Teaching Idea
Democracy & Civic Engagement
Reflecting on Amanda Gorman's "The Hill We Climb"
Use these activities to help students reflect on the themes in Amanda Gorman’s Inauguration Day poem and consider how their unique experiences and voices can help America “forge a union with purpose.”
Teaching Idea
Media Literacy
Where Do We Get Our News and Why Does It Matter?
Explore media bias using recent news coverage of controversial events and help students think about what healthy news habits they want to adopt.
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Democracy & Civic Engagement
Resources for Teaching After the Insurrection at the US Capitol
Find strategies, tips, and content to help you and your students learn from the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Teaching Idea
Democracy & Civic Engagement
COVID-19: How Can We Make Choices That Promote The Common Good?
This Teaching Idea features Google Slides with activities that prompt students to reflect on the difficult ethical questions we’re all facing during the coronavirus crisis.
About Our Current Events Content
What is a Teaching Idea?
Our Teaching Ideas help you address specific events and issues in the news. With a variety of accessible resources and engaging teaching strategies, they can be used for all or part of a class period.
What is an Explainer?
Our printable “Explainers” introduce key terms and ideas that are essential to understanding today’s news. View our latest explainers.
Going Deeper
Sign up below for our biweekly current events emails to receive links to additional videos, readings, historical sources and lessons to enrich your teaching of current events and connect to your curriculum.
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Everything you need to get started teaching your students about racism, antisemitism and prejudice.