Teachers’ Lounge

Addiction is a strong word, but it accurately describes the dysfunctional behavior exhibited by teenagers in my high school English classroom when I ask them to put away their cellphones. Continue reading →

Lauren Porosoff, a sixth grade English teacher in New York City, discusses how teaching about the Holocaust has changed since she was a child in the 1980s. Continue reading →

The Moton Museum in Farmville, Virginia, recently commemorated the 65th anniversary of the 1951 Moton Student Strike. A few years after the strike, Moton High provided a majority of the plaintiffs in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation case. Jeff Feinstein, a U.S. history teacher at West Potomac High School in Alexandria, Va., shares what it was like to introduce his students to a key civil rights event. Continue reading →

Last month, North Carolina’s lawmakers passed House Bill 2 which requires people to use the public bathroom that matches the gender on their birth certificate. How are students and school communities affected by so-called transgender “Bathroom bills”? Continue reading →

Presidential elections give teachers a chance to engage students in lessons about the electoral process, but some of the behavior exhibited during this primary season has posed a challenge for teachers. Continue reading →

Because of his students’ cultural identities, their responses to Donald Trump and the pro-immigration message of “Hamilton,” one teacher decided to create a project that would synthesize these ideas in ways that are culturally responsive while reaching far beyond the scope of Broadway and this year’s presidential race. Continue reading →

Comic books have had a long history of tackling social issues. Teacher Tim Smyth says comic books and graphic novels are powerful vehicles to engage students in both history and current events. Continue reading →

I wanted to believe in the science and social studies that I teach my students — that Flint’s water had been tested by scientists and there is a system of checks and balances that makes our public systems work, right? Continue reading →

Professor Wendy Pearlman of Northwestern University describes her experiences teaching refugee children. Despite the trauma caused by a conflict that has claimed more than 200,000 lives and created 4.39 million Syrians refugees abroad, the students demonstrated resilience and a hunger to learn. Continue reading →

A Human Rights Watch study states about 400,000 Syrian refugee children in Turkey are not in school because of such obstacles including language barriers, economic hardship and social integration. Ola Said, a Syrian refugee teacher who lives along the Syrian-Turkish border, describes what it is like to teach at a refugee school. Continue reading →