Night by Elie Wiesel Lesson Plan: Activities, Writing Prompts, and Test Ideas

In roughly 120 pages, Wiesel wrote one of the most powerful books that students will ever encounter. And yet, it’s easy for them to read the book without actually taking much away from the experience. The straightforward language makes it easy for students to move quickly through his memoir, while the brutality of Wiesel’s experience can push them to distance themselves from what they’re reading. I want students to leave their study of this book with more than a

6 Tips for Media Bias & Fake News Lesson Plans

If you have students over the age of 16, they’ll be eligible to vote in the next presidential election. Will they have the information to make the best decisions for themselves and their country? If they’re making their choices based on fake news—or misinformation and disinformation—the consequences of those choices could hurt us all. You know that you need to teach your students to be more savvy consumers of digital information who are equipped with the correct tools for evaluating

Common Core: 3 Tips For Teaching Challenging Non-Fiction

Common Core: 3 Tips for Teaching With Challenging Non-Fiction

Whether I’m assigning an article about the relationship between a fixed mindset and the Enron scandal or I’m requiring students to read an essay about how basketball, race, and dreams are all intertwined, I have a few common goals when I choose challenging non-fiction to incorporate in my lesson plans. I want students to learn how to deal with difficult vocabulary, how to navigate complex sentence structure sentence structure, and most importantly, I want them to learn how to question

Common Core: Challenging Non-Fiction Texts For All Subject Areas

I admit to feeling resentful when I learned that the new Common Core standards would require teachers to incorporate more challenging non-fiction into their lesson plans. Really? Wasn’t I doing more than enough already? But I have since (reluctantly and grudgingly) found some great articles to use in class. In fact, one of my favorite new lessons revolves around a piece published in the New Yorker about the relationship between the Enron Scandal and fixed mindset. Since I decided to