This resource includes multiple lesson plans developed by Washington State teacher John Zingale and can be taught as part of in-person, hybrid, or remote instructional settings. The core content areas include social studies, civics, and media literacy and are designed for use with students in grades 6-12. Additional integrations include ELA, world languages, mathematics, physical education and science. These lessons integrate both state and national civics instruction using project-based and collaborative learning strategies. Features of these lessons include:student researchcollaborative learningdigital learning strategieslateral readingdesign and creation of infographicsTo support these lessons, additional resources are provided to help educators and families with understanding and teaching information and media literacy to young people. Resources include:introductions to media literacyeducator guidesparent guidesstudent learning standards

This collection of lessons represent adapted and remixed instructional content for teaching media literacy and specifically civic online reasoning through distance learning. These lessons take students through the steps necessary to source online content, verify evidence presented, and corroborate claims with other sources.

The original lesson plans are the work of Stanford History Education Group, licensed under CC 4.0. Please refer to the full text lesson plans at Stanford History Education Group’s, Civic Online Reasoning Curriculum for specifics regarding background, research findings, and additional curriculum for teaching media literacy in the twenty-first century.

This social media literacy unit introduces students to foundational skills in analyzing images and social media posts. It also reenforces critical thinking questions that can be applied to various forms of media. This unit was taught to 9th grade students but is easily adaptible to a range of secondary classrooms. It was also taught in conjunction with another unit focused on social media platforms and content.

Using historical texts, information texts, and historical fiction, this module explores the migration experiences in America. It is designed to be flexible. It can be combined with information on Critical Race Theory from Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education by Sensoy and DiAngelo for the upper grades or for “Critical Texts in Literacy: Living Inquiries into Racial Justice and Immigration” by Riley and Crawford-Garrett (NCTE) for the middle school grades. The teacher can choose any or all of the text sets. There are a number of possibilities for optional literature circles with suggested full-length texts. Each text set includes pre-reading, during reading, and post-reading strategies.

This lesson combines Oedipus the King and Aristotle's Poetics. Students will look at both pieces and write an argumentative essay as their assessment.

This lesson invites students to use multiple forms of media, including their own Instagram accounts, to explore their on-line identities.  The lesson culminates in a personal, visual essay.  In the essay, students will use their own images as evidence. Then, students will reason about that evidence to compare what they see on their Instagram posts to their “real world” self. Using information from resources explored in class, students will include a discussion of “authenticity” and properly weave in quotes from those resources.

Students will be learning about the practices of regenerative agriculture and how regenerative agriculture is a solution to climate change. Embedded in the storyline are scientific concepts relating to carbon cycling and soil microbial activity. The storyline culminates with students creating an infographic that is intended for educating the community about regenerative agricultural practices. 

This is a solutions-oriented storyline that leads students through a series of investigations to quantify and qualify the ecosystem and social benefits of an urban forest. At the end of the storyline, students will be able to design, evaluate and refine a chosen solution for urban forest ecosystem benefits.

Using published writers' texts and students' own writing, this unit explores emotions that are associated with the artful and deliberate use of commas, semicolons, colons, and exclamation points (end-stop marks of punctuation).

This resource contains integrated tasks, assessments, and skill building exercises to continually push language learning forward. In these integrated examples, the content of the the text is the vehicle that drives skill development; it simultaneously deepens our understanding of the world around us.

This resource contains integrated tasks, assessments, and skill building exercises to continually push language learning forward. In these integrated examples, the content of the the text is the vehicle that drives skill development; it simultaneously deepens our understanding of the world around us.

Students summarize and reflect on the implications of climate change and argue their perspectives on the issue after reading and viewing multiple sources with varying perspectives

In the first bend of this unit, students will closely read multiple perspectives on the “American Dream” in
order to collect information to use and integrate that information into an evidence-based perspective.
Students will examine primary and secondary source documents to make informed decisions about
what information to collect that may inspire their writing about “The American Dream.”

In the second bend of this unit, students will engage in a short-research process to create a draft of
argumentative speech on the “American Dream” with a specific purpose, audience, and tone in mind.
They will use their inquiry research questions from bend one to begin analyzing search results and citing
and gathering relevant, accurate, and credible information.

This unit is centered around an anchor text that may be common among content area teachers in a high school setting. Although this unit may be incorporated into any high-school English class, it is aligned with Common Core standards for 9-10. This unit will primarily focus on informational and argumentative texts, and can be used to incorporate more informational texts (as directed by the Common Core) into English classrooms at the high school level. This unit is best suited to a collaborative model of development in which ELA and content area teachers share an anchor text (The Universal Declaration of Human Rights) and communicate about how to connect diverse skills to common texts and essential questions.

This is a short quiz on CCSS.RI.9-10.1, featuring an excerpt from Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail". The passage has a Dale-Chall difficulty level of 9-10, and a Flesch-Kincaid level of 10.7.

This lesson is designed for students in adult basic education grade level E (low and high adult secondary education). The purpose of this lesson is to develop student proficiency in reading and analyzing text. The lesson topic is the issue of an individual’s right to privacy as balanced with the government’s responsibility for security of its citizens.

The Dialog & Respect module, from the Supporting Readiness through Vital Civic Empowerment (SRVCE) curriculum, focuses on exploring current issues from multiple perspectives, with respect for people’s lived experiences, and reflecting on how civil discourse strengthens democracy.

The 15 lessons include video, student-facing slides, a teacher toolkit and handouts. Resources are aligned with the C3 Framework for Social Studies State Standards, National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) Core Principles of Media Literacy Education, and Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) Social and Emotional Learning Competencies.

SRVCE blends inquiry-based civic learning, media literacy education, and exploration of public service careers to prepare students to be active citizens and thrive in the workforce. All SRVCE materials are free. These materials are intended solely for educational purposes. Educators may modify the materials to suit the specific needs of their students. This may include adapting the materials for various settings and purposes, provided that such changes are made within the scope of the specific educational use.
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An introduction to emotional and logical appeals, using To Kill a Mockingbird and the Civil Rights Movement as context.

In 1862, Congress passed and President Lincoln signed the Pacific Railroad Bill, which granted public land and funds to build a transcontinental railroad. The Central Pacific Railroad would lay tracks from California heading east, and the Union Pacific Railroad would lay tracks from the Missouri River west. The photograph taken in Placer County, "Grading the Central Pacific Railroad," shows some of the construction. Work on the railroad was physically difficult and at times dangerous, and attracting workers was a challenge. The majority of the Central Pacific's laborers were Chinese. A Chinese worker is shown in the image "Heading (top cut) of East Portal, Tunnel No. 8." Both railroad companies actively recruited Chinese laborers because they were regarded as hard workers and were willing to accept a lower wage than white workers, mostly Irish immigrants. As construction progressed, the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific competed to see which could lay the most track each day. A photograph of a sign near Promontory Park, Utah, commemorates the day that Central Pacific crews laid an unprecedented 10 miles of track. The meeting of the two sets of tracks ? the "gold spike" ceremony ? took place on May 10, 1869. Several photographs and drawings depict this historic moment. Now the country was connected as never before: a journey between San Francisco and New York that previously took up to six months now took only days. The photograph "High Bridge in Loop," from Views from a Trip to California, shows a train passing quickly through a mountain pass. The transcontinental railroad allowed people to travel more, farther, and in pleasant conditions, as reflected in the photograph "Commissary Car, 'Elkhorn Club.'" The photograph "Knights of Pythias at the Santa Fe Railway Station, Anaheim" shows an example of the popularity of trains. Even as the transcontinental railroad brought the new country together, it brought change to the world of Native Americans. The tracks ran through a number of tribal territories, bringing into conflict cultures that held very different views of the land and how it might be used and lived on. The painting The First Train, by Herbert Schuyler, depicts three Indians pointing past their encampment at a train in the far distance. The railroad also brought an increasing number of European Americans west. One consequence of this influx was the depletion of the buffalo herds, a major food source for Plains Indians. European Americans would often shoot buffalo for sport from the train; by 1880, the buffalo were mostly gone and Plains Indians had been gathered onto reservations. Millions of acres of open grassland were being settled by the people moving west. Eventually, much of this land became the farmland that fed a growing nation. The transcontinental railroad opened up the West to the rest of the country, even if they never made the trip themselves. A Currier & Ives hand-colored lithograph depicts a train running along the Truckee River in Northern California. The San Francisco publishing firm of Lawrence & Houseworth hired photographers and published photographic tourist catalogs containing views of the West, which they sold commercially. The railroad took hold in popular culture, as shown by sheet music for the song "New Express Galop [sic]." There was even a railroad board game illustrating "Railroads Between New York and San Francisco, California, with Scenes on the Way."

The corrupting influence of slavery on marriage and the family is a predominant theme in Solomon Northup's narrative Twelve Years a Slave. In this lesson, students are asked to identify and analyze narrative passages that provide evidence for how slavery undermined and perverted these social institutions. Northup collaborated with a white ghostwriter, David Wilson. Students will read the preface and identify and analyze statements Wilson makes to prove the narrative is true.