Toolkit
Current Event
Current Events Toolkit
This toolkit provides flexible and adaptable tools and strategies for integrating current events into your teaching.
Subject
- Civics & Citizenship
- History
- Social Studies
Grade
6–12Language
English — USPublished
About This Toolkit
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.
Teaching Current Events: Educator Guide
This guide includes tools and strategies for organizing discussions about current events in your classroom.
Head, Heart, Conscience
This strategy uses reflection prompts to help students consider a complex or emotional topic through the lenses of head, heart, and ethics.
Journals in the Classroom
Create a practice of student journaling to help your students critically examine their surroundings and make informed judgments.
Color, Symbol, Image
Invite students to nonverbally communicate something they have read or watched, using a color, a symbol, and an image.
Graffiti Boards
Help students process their thoughts and emotions on a topic by engaging them in a written conversation with their classmates.
S-I-T: Surprising, Interesting, Troubling
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.
Four Corners
Get all students involved by asking them to show their stance on a statement through their positioning around the room.
Save the Last Word for Me
This discussion strategy helps students practice being both active speakers and active listeners in a group conversation.
Big Paper: Building a Silent Conversation
Students have a written conversation with peers and use silence as a tool to explore a topic in depth.
Barometer: Taking a Stand on Controversial Issues
Structure an active class discussion in which students express their opinions by standing along a continuum.
Learn to Listen, Listen to Learn
Educators will structure a discussion that uses journaling and group work to strengthen students’ listening skills.
Iceberg Diagrams
Encourage students to recognize the multiple causal factors behind an event from history, the present, or literature, using the visual of an iceberg.
Close Viewing Protocol
Teach your students to become critical viewers of film with this four-step procedure.
See, Think, Wonder
Guide students’ analysis of a photograph, artwork, or video with this simple critical-viewing strategy.
Crop It
Help students interpret an image by “framing” smaller portions of the image and analyzing them.
Text-to-Text, Text-to-Self, Text-to-World
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.
Connect, Extend, Challenge
Deepen students' understanding of a topic by having them connect to their prior knowledge.
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.
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10 Questions for the Future: Student Action Project
Students create a plan for enacting change on an issue that they are most passionate about using the 10 Questions Framework.
10 Questions for the Present: Parkland Student Activism
Students identify strategies and tools that Parkland students have used to influence Americans to take action to reduce gun violence.
The Power of Images
Students examine how identity and biases can impact how individuals interpret images and experience the challenge of selecting images to represent news events, particularly connected to sensitive issues.
Preparing Students for Difficult Conversations
Students establish a safe space for holding sensitive conversations, before introducing the events surrounding Ferguson, by acknowledging people's complicated feelings about race and creating a classroom contract.
Social Media and Ferguson
Students explore the role of social media in Ferguson, apply information verification strategies to social media posts, and develop strategies for becoming critical consumers and sharers of social media.
Verifying Breaking News
Students evaluate the differences among news accounts about Ferguson, develop strategies for verifying news and information, and understand the challenges facing journalists as they cover complex, fast-moving events.
Facing Ferguson: News Literacy in a Digital Age
Help students become informed and effective civic participants in today's digital landscape. This unit is designed to develop students' critical thinking, news literacy, civic engagement, and social-emotional skills and competencies.
The Importance of a Free Press
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.
Citizen Watchdogs and the News
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.
Confirmation and Other Biases
Students define explicit, implicit, and confirmation bias, and examine why people sometimes maintain their beliefs in the face of contradictory information.
Hands Up, Don't Shoot!
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.
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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.
Exploring ELA Text Selection with Julia Torres
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Listen to #DisruptTexts founder Julia Torres about taking a critical lens to text selection in ELA classrooms.
Working for Justice, Equity and Civic Agency in Our Schools: A Conversation with Clint Smith
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Listen to writer and educator Dr. Clint Smith as he shares his poetry and reflections on working for justice, equity, and civic agency in our schools.
Centering Student Voices to Build Community and Agency
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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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