Resource Library
Find compelling classroom resources, learn new teaching methods, meet standards, and make a difference in the lives of your students.
We are grateful to The Hammer Family Foundation for supporting the development of our on-demand learning and teaching resources.
Introducing Our US History Curriculum Collection
Draw from this flexible curriculum collection as you plan any middle or high school US history course. Featuring units, C3-style inquiries, and case studies, the collection will help you explore themes of democracy and freedom with your students throughout the year.
Shifting Public Opinion
Students examine the factors that led many northerners to turn against federal policies passed during the Reconstruction era that protected freedpeople.
Understanding Class
Students explore class, status, etiquette and hierarchy to deepen their knowledge of the social expectations and values which guide the world in which the characters live.
Understanding Mr Birling
Students study the character of Mr Birling, critically assessing Priestley’s presentation of him, before using the character to reflect on how identity can influence people's views and behaviour.
Understanding Mrs Birling
Students consider what factors impacted Mrs Birling’s treatment of Eva Smith, and create a universe of obligation graphic representation for her character.
Reflecting on the Danger of Silence
Students use Clint Smith’s talk “The Danger of Silence” to create “blackout poems” that express their ideas for how they can use their voices to empower themselves and others.
Understanding Sheila
Students use the character of Sheila to further understand the interplay between identity and choices, before going on to analyse Priestley’s presentation of Sheila in Act One.
Political Violence and the Overthrow of Reconstruction
Students learn about the period of violence in the South from 1873-1876 and examine its role in influencing elections and ending Republican control of Southern state governments.
The Unfinished Revolution
Students explore the legacies of the Reconstruction era today, reflect on the idea of democracy as a continuous process, and consider how they can best participate in the ongoing work of strengthening our democracy.
The Costs and Benefits of Belonging
Students learn about group membership and explore the range of responses available to us when we encounter exclusion, discrimination, and injustice.
Defining Human Rights
Students create a definition for a "right" in order to explore the challenges faced by the UN Commission on Human Rights to create an international framework of rights for all human beings.
Taking Ownership of the Law
Students learn about Mum Bett and Quock Walker, who successfully sued for their freedom, and reflect on what their stories illuminate about democracy today.
The Rule of Law and Why It Matters
Students explore what it means to respect the rule of law and consider its importance in a democracy.
What Does It Mean to Belong?
Students identify the range of actions they can take when confronted with exclusion. The term upstander is introduced, as well as key terms such as bystander, perpetrator, and victim.
What Makes Memphis a Community?
Students connect what they have learned about communities to their knowledge of Memphis,TN, by analyzing images of historical and local importance to the city.
What Shapes Your Identity?
Through a poem-writing activity, students broaden and deepen their understanding of identity.
Who Am I?
By asking the question "Who am I?" students explore the role that identity plays in forming their values, ideas, and actions.
Who Are We?
Through a gallery walk activity, students learn that communities consist of a collection of people with unique identities.
Moral Growth: A Framework for Character Analysis
Students connect the moral development of To Kill a Mockingbird's central characters to the moments in their lives that have shaped their sense of right and wrong.
Say Something
Encourage students to stop and engage with a text as they read with this comprehension strategy.
What Lessons Can We Learn?
Students address the essential question of the unit in a people's assembly, reflecting on the lessons that we can learn from An Inspector Calls.
Creating Student Projects
Help students develop a larger understanding and appreciation of the Jewish resistance movement during the Holocaust.
Sonia Orbuch: Becoming a Partisan
Explore the choices of Jewish partisan Sonia Orban, and gain a deeper understanding of the complexities that young people faced during the German occupation of Poland.
Vitka Kempner: Identity and Resistance
Explore the choices of Vitka Kempner, a Jewish partisan who chose to resist the Nazis.
Introducing Antisemitism and Antisemitic Tropes
Students explore the roots of antisemitism, reflect on its human cost and impact on those who experience it, and start thinking about the process of standing up against antisemitism.
What Is “Normal”?
Through quote and poetry analysis, students will consider the ways in which our desire to fit in can impact our identities and the choices we make.
Frank Blaichman: Ethics in a Time of Genocide
In this lesson, students explore moral and ethical frameworks in relation to teach actions of Frank Blaichman.
Understanding Resistance
Understand the many forms that Jewish resistance to fascism, antisemitism, and Nazism took.
How Do Others See Me?
Students will define key concepts and discuss the impact that labels, assumptions, and stereotypes have on their identity development.
Feeling Seen: A Matter of Perspective
Students will engage in perspective-taking activities to consider what it means to belong and how experiences and interactions with others can shape our identities.
Finding Belonging in the World
“Students create “pearls of wisdom” and consider the value of forming relationships that help us feel seen and secure in our sense of belonging.
Making Myself Proud
Students will read and analyze a poem that focuses on what it means to practice celebrating identity, both by loving who you are and by imagining who you can be.
Reexamining History: How Can We Engage with the Stories We’re Told?
This lesson prepares young people to be critical consumers of stories they are told about the UK’s past and encourages them to consider how unpicking historical narratives can be an act of justice and a catalyst for action.
Exploring Antisemitic Tropes in Further Depth
Students explore antisemitic tropes, their troubled history, their evolution and their present manifestation in further depth, and consider the harm that their circulation can cause.
Addressing Antisemitism Online
Students reflect on how they consume and share information they encounter, how antisemitism is spread online and the potential consequences of being exposed to antisemitic content.
Standing Up Against Contemporary Antisemitism
Students to reflect on the consequences of allowing antisemitism to go unchallenged for Jews and for wider society, and explore ways in which they and others can challenge antisemitism.
The Persistence of Hate: What the 2017 Unite the Right Rally Revealed about Contemporary Antisemitism
Students develop an understanding of contemporary antisemitism in the United States through the case of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.
Toolbox for Care
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.
Connecting the Past to the Present Using Oral History
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.
The Targeting of Uyghur Muslims in China (UK)
Help students understand the Chinese government’s violations of Uyghur people’s human rights, hear the voice of a young Uyghur woman, and consider the international community's response.
The 1968 East LA School Walkouts
Students learn about education, identity, and activism through an exploration of the East Los Angeles school walkouts, when thousands of students protested unequal educational opportunities for Mexican American students.
California Grape Workers’ Strike: 1965–66
Students explore the first year of the Delano grape strike, when grape workers in California's San Joaquin Valley went on strike to demand higher wages and better work conditions.
Why Identity Matters
Students reflect on how aspects of their identities are more visible or felt in certain situations and read an informational text to help them consider the interplay between individual identity and social identity.
Enacting Freedom
Students consider what it means to be free by learning about the choices and aspirations of freedpeople immediately after Emancipation.
Think Aloud
Model for students how proficient readers make meaning of a text by verbalizing your thinking as you read.
Sketch to Stretch
Ask students to visualize a passage of text and interpret it through drawing with this reading comprehension strategy.
Western Imperialism and Nation Building in Japan and China
Students are introduced to the history of Western imperialism in East Asia and its influence on the identities and ambitions of Japan and China.
Telling Our Histories
Students connect themes from the film to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's concept of “single stories," and then consider what it would take to tell more equitable and accurate narratives.