Elizabeth Eckford’s First Day of School

Lesson Plan

Activity 1: Your First Day of School

Ask students to respond to the following prompt in their journals:  

Reflect on your first day at a new school, or your first day of a new experience (such as joining a sports team). What did you expect the day to be like? What did you fear? What did you look forward to? How did you prepare for the day? What surprised you? 

Encourage volunteers to share reflections with the whole class, and consider sharing your own personal experience. 

Tell students that they are going to learn what the first day of school was like for the first African American students to attend Central High in 1957, a group known as the Little Rock Nine.

Project a photo of the Little Rock Nine from the reading The Little Rock Nine: Student Profiles and read their names aloud. If time permits, consider engaging students with the extension activity “Introduce the Little Rock Nine” to provide them with more background information about each of the Little Rock Nine students. 

Activity 2: Read “I Am Elizabeth Eckford”

Distribute the image Little Rock, Arkansas, September 4, 1957. If possible, project the image for the class. 

Ask students to closely inspect the image. Then pose the following questions and elicit responses from volunteers:

• Describe what you see.
• Study the faces of people in the photo. What stands out to you? 
• If you were a reporter, who in this photo would you want to interview? Why? 

What questions might you ask?

Explain to the class that the subject of the photo is Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine. Tell students that in this lesson, they will learn about how she experienced her first day of school at Central High.

Distribute the reading “I Am Elizabeth Eckford” and ask students to listen to it as an audio recording narrated by Eckford herself. If technology is an obstacle, read the text aloud while students follow along. 

As students listen to the recording, have them use the S-I-T teaching strategy to reflect on what they’re hearing. Ask them write in their journals and identify:

• Something from the story that was surprising
• Something from the story that was interesting
• Something from the story that was troubling

Ask students to share their reflections with a partner, and then ask volunteers to share with the whole class. 

Activity 3: Give Students Time to Process Elizabeth Eckford’s Experience

Before continuing, clarify for students that the angry mob and the Arkansas National Guard prevented all of the Little Rock Nine from attending the first day of school at Central High. Then, to close the lesson, give students space to emotionally process Elizabeth Eckford’s experience by leading a class discussion centered around one or more of the following questions: 

• In 1987, Elizabeth Eckford said of her ordeal: “I remember this tremendous feeling of being alone and I didn’t know how I was going to get out of there. I didn’t know whether I would be injured. There was this deafening roar. I could hear individual voices, but I was not conscious of numbers, I was conscious of being alone.” What did Eckford mean when she said, “I was conscious of being alone”?
• How was it that a high school student could have been put in this situation? Based on what you have learned in prior lessons, what recent things had happened in Little Rock or in the nation that may have contributed to this situation? 
• What turns a group of people into a mob?  
• Who among the white people in the photo is participating in the mob and who is simply present? Does the difference matter? Does the presence of bystanders give the mob more force?