Teaching Activity. By Nick Palazzolo. Rethinking Schools. 2025. 74 pages.
A dilemma-based, problem-solving lesson on the history of the fight for queer liberation in the United States.
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Teaching Activity. By Matt Vriesman. 60 pages.
A three-day lesson that engages students in historiography, primary sources, pop-up debates, and blackout poetry to explore the profound hopes, losses, and legacies of Reconstruction.
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Teaching Activity. By Jeanne Theoharis and Jessica Lovaas. 2026. 10 pages.
Reading, discussion questions, and activity about Martin Luther King's activism in New York on labor rights, police brutality, housing, and education. The reading is from a chapter in King of the North: Martin Luther King’s Freedom Struggle Outside of the South.
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Teaching Activity. By Nicolle Fefferman. 2025. Rethinking Schools.
The director of the Young Workers Education Project and a Prentiss Charney Fellow describes a high school simulation based on recent Starbucks workers’ organizing.
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Teaching activity. By Freda Anderson. 2023. Rethinking Schools.
A high school teacher has students problematize the conditions of their school to learn about funding disparities and the disastrous effects of district debt.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. 17 pages.
A role play allows students to examine issues of race and class when exploring both the accomplishments and limitations of the Seneca Falls Convention.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow with contributions from members of the Taíno Community. Rethinking Schools. 13 pages.
A trial role play asks students to determine who is responsible for the death of millions of Taínos on the island of Hispaniola in the late 15th century.
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Teaching Activity. Essay by Howard Zinn and lesson by Bill Bigelow. Rethinking Schools. 18 pages.
Students research and write stories about unsung heroes in U.S. history.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. Rethinking Schools. 7 pages.
A companion lesson to the Eyes on the Prize segment on school desegregation.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. Rethinking Schools. 11 pages.
In this lesson, the act of reframing real-world events with fictional countries and individuals allows students to authentically discuss what qualifies as terrorism, what doesn’t, and what responses may or may not be appropriate, without bringing real-world stereotypes and preconceptions into play.
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Teaching Activity. By Julie Treick O’Neill and Tim Swinehart. Rethinking Schools. 16 pages.
A role play on the Indigenous Peoples' Global Summit on Climate Change asks students to develop a list of demands to present to the rest of the world at a climate change meeting.
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Teaching Activity. By Linda Christensen. Rethinking Schools. 20 pages.
Teaching about racist patterns of murder, theft, displacement, and wealth inequality through the 1921 Tulsa Massacre.
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Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca, Bill Bigelow, and Andrew Duden. Article by Ursula Wolfe-Rocca. Rethinking Schools. 15 pages.
A role play helps students recognize the issues at stake in the historic struggle of the Standing Rock Sioux to block construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline.
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Teaching Activity. By Alma Anderson McDonald.
A teacher looks back on her childhood to discover the meaning of environmental racism. Linda Christensen offers ways to teach about this story with students.
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Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca.
In this lesson, students analyze who is to blame for the illegal, mass deportations of Mexican Americans and immigrants during the Great Depression.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. Rethinking Schools.
A role play introduces students to 24 individuals around the world — each of whom is affected differently by climate change.
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Teaching Activity. By Adam Sanchez. Rethinking Schools.
This lesson and accompanying article teach about the largest civil rights protest of the 1960s was in New York City, when hundreds of thousands of students stayed home to protest school segregation.
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Teaching Activity. By Say Burgin, Jeanne Theoharis, and Ursula Wolfe-Rocca.
Students learn to “talk back” to official accounts of the Detroit Uprising of 1967 by focusing on its root causes. They also get a fuller sense of Rosa Parks’s life and politics, and the Black freedom struggle outside of the South.
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Teaching Activity. By Jessica Lovaas and Adam Sanchez. Rethinking Schools. 2021. Updated in 2023.
A lesson with case studies from Los Angeles; Birmingham, Alabama; Brooklyn; Detroit; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Albany, Georgia; and Cambridge, Maryland — to introduce students to the diverse struggles across the United States that were represented at the March on Washington.
Teaching Activity by Adam Sanchez
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Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca. 3 pages.
This timeline activity builds on students’ viewing of the 2022 film, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, and involves collaborating on a new timeline of Mrs. Parks' life.
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Teaching Activity. By Matt Reed and Ursula Wolfe-Rocca.
A mixer activity, inspired by the 2016 Democracy Now! documentary Thirsty for Democracy, introduces students to the struggle of residents to access safe water for drinking, cooking, and bathing in the majority-Black cities of Flint, Michigan; Jackson, Mississippi; and Newark, New Jersey.
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Teaching Activity. By Matt Reed. Published by Rethinking Schools. 2023.
This mixer activity helps students uncover the radical legacy of Ida B. Wells.
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Teaching Activity. By Adam Sanchez. Rethinking Schools.
A high school social studies teacher describes a classroom simulation where students experience the effects of decades of racist federal housing policies.
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Teaching Activity. By Jesse Hagopian. 2025. 40 pages.
This lesson explores major examples of laws passed to suppress Black education in the wake of major victories for the Black Freedom Struggle, highlighting the historical context and motivations behind these legislative efforts.
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Teaching Activity. By Suzanna Kassouf. 2023. Rethinking Schools.
To imagine a better future, high school students role-play activists at a visioning conference and then create murals.
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