Toolkit

Current Event

Current Events Toolkit

This toolkit provides flexible and adaptable tools and strategies for integrating current events into your teaching.

Published: July 25, 2022

Toolkit

Language

English — US

Subject

Civics & Citizenship
History
Social Studies

Grade

6–12

Democracy & Civic Engagement

Overview

Our current events toolkit offers tools and strategies to help teachers organize discussions on current events in their classrooms. We recommend that teachers who are just getting started addressing current events with their students—or who are looking to learn new strategies for engaging students in discussions about the news or controversial topics—begin by exploring the resources in the toolkit.

This toolkit is designed to be flexible. You can use all of the resources or choose a selection best suited to your classroom. It includes:

Tools for organizing discussions about current events
Recommended teaching strategies

Inside this Toolkit

Guide

This guide includes tools and strategies for organizing discussions about current events in your classroom.

Photo of students seated in a classroom.

Guide

The ideas and tools in this guide will help you prepare students to engage in reflective conversations on topics that matter, whether you are in a remote, hybrid, or in-person setting.

Mini-Lesson

Journals provide students with space to process their thoughts, feelings, and uncertainties during this difficult time. Use the tips and writing prompts in this resource to help your students establish a practice of journaling.

Teaching Strategy

This strategy uses reflection prompts to help students consider a complex or emotional topic through the lenses of head, heart, and ethics.

Teaching Strategy

Develop a classroom contract to create a community of mutual respect and inclusion.

Two students discussing and looking at a paper

Teaching Strategy

Educators will create a practice of student journaling to help their students critically examine their surroundings and make informed judgments.

Teaching Strategy

Invite students to nonverbally communicate something they have read or watched, using a color, a symbol, and an image.

Teaching Strategy

Help students process their thoughts and emotions on a topic by engaging them in a written conversation with their classmates.

Students adding post-it notes to a white board.

Teaching Strategy

Use this quick way for students to demonstrate their engagement with a text, image, or video by having them identify what they find surprising, interesting, and troubling.

Three students sitting in a classroom with one of the students talking.

Teaching Strategy

Get all students involved by asking them to show their stance on a statement through their positioning around the room.

A students talks with other students in a classroom

Teaching Strategy

This discussion strategy helps students practice being both active speakers and active listeners in a group conversation.

Four students sitting at a table with one student talking and gesturing.

Teaching Strategy

Students have a written conversation with peers and use silence as a tool to explore a topic in depth.

Group of students writing on large piece of chart paper.

Teaching Strategy

Structure an active class discussion in which students express their opinions by standing along a continuum.

Students discussing in pairs facing each other

Teaching Strategy

Students mimic a town hall meeting as they share their perspectives on a topic.

Three students sit together in a classroom

Teaching Strategy

Educators will structure a discussion that uses journaling and group work to strengthen students’ listening skills.

Teaching Strategy

Encourage students to recognize the multiple causal factors behind an event from history, the present, or literature, using the visual of an iceberg.

Teaching Strategy

Teach your students to become critical viewers of film with this four-step procedure.

Teaching Strategy

Guide students’ analysis of a photograph, artwork, or video with this simple critical-viewing strategy.

A white board with photos of different locations from around the world

Teaching Strategy

Help students interpret an image by “framing” smaller portions of the image and analyzing them.

An illustration with portions framed with post-its.

Teaching Strategy

Use text-to-text, text-to-self, and text-to-world comparisons to help students connect ideas in a text to their own lives, current events, and history.

A close-up of an open book in someone's hands

Teaching Strategy

Deepen students' understanding of a topic by having them connect to their prior knowledge.

Teaching Strategy

This teaching strategy invites students to think about the “tools” they have access to that can help them take care of themselves and their community in the wake of traumatic news.

A student in a grey sweatshirt looks down at a paper with a pencil in hand.

Teaching Strategy

This strategy helps students engage with oral histories in order to deepen their understanding of how past events impacted individuals and communities, and to gain new perspectives on the present.

Mini-Lesson

Reading “laterally” is a key media literacy strategy that helps students determine the quality of online sources. This mini-lesson trains students to use this technique to evaluate the credibility of the news they encounter on social media feeds or elsewhere online.

Two high school students look at a laptop screen in a school library

Collection

Use these resources on voting, media literacy, polarization, and bias to talk about US elections with your high school and middle school students.

Abstract red, white, and blue painting with thick brush strokes.

Collection

Explore classroom resources for making connections between current events and your curriculum, including activities and discussion strategies for high school and middle school students.

A student speaks while another listens attentively.

Collection

Access all the teaching strategies and additional resources referenced throughout the guide From Reflection to Action: A Choosing to Participate Toolkit.

Lesson

Students create a plan for enacting change on an issue that they are most passionate about using the 10 Questions Framework.

Person holding a sign at a Global climate change strike

Lesson

Students review the First Amendment, understand the importance of a free press, and consider how that freedom can conflict with other societal needs through journalists’ experiences in Ferguson.

Newspaper front page featuring story about protests and police in Ferguson.

Lesson

Students identify the responsibilities of citizen watchdogs, summarize strategies for combatting confirmation bias and responsibly consuming and sharing news and information, and complete a culminating essay.

Lesson

Students define explicit, implicit, and confirmation bias, and examine why people sometimes maintain their beliefs in the face of contradictory information.

Lesson

Students review the US Department of Justice report, revisit how confirmation bias impacts our understanding of events, and consider how to bridge the gap in understanding that often surrounds events like Ferguson.

Darnell Taylor marches with his daughter, Lauren, 4, on his shoulders down Market Street to Kiener Plaza as part of a march against police violence downtown St. Louis, Mo., on Saturday, Oct. 11, 2014. (AP Photo/St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Cristina Fletes-Boutte)

Lesson

Students experience the challenges to reporting objectively by writing a news piece and watching a video about how journalists counteract bias in the newsroom.

Lesson

Students begin thinking about civic engagement in terms of their own passions and identities as they are introduced to the 10 Questions Framework.

High school students participate in class.

Unit

This unit uses the 10 Questions Framework to explore two examples of youth activism: the 1963 Chicago schools boycott and the present-day movement against gun violence launched by Parkland students.

Facing History and Ourselves Bullying Summit September 29th 2012 in Los Angeles CA

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Facing History & Ourselves is designed for educators who want to help students explore identity, think critically, grow emotionally, act ethically, and participate in civic life. It’s hard work, so we’ve developed some go-to professional learning opportunities to help you along the way.

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Listen to #DisruptTexts founder Julia Torres about taking a critical lens to text selection in ELA classrooms.

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Issues of equity and education have long existed in our country and continue to manifest today. How can writing and the power of one's voice help us respond to these disparities? Listen to writer and educator, Dr. Clint Smith, where we hear his poetry and reflections on working for justice, equity, and civic agency in our schools.

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Explore approaches to centering student voice, building authentic relationships and cultivating community with Molly Josephs, the creator of This Teenage Life, a youth-driven, story-sharing podcast that started as a school club.

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Most teachers are willing to tackle the difficult topics, but we need the tools.

— Gabriela Calderon-Espinal, Bay Shore, NY

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Current Events Toolkit