In small groups and class discussion, students share knowledge about Christopher Columbus and his voyages, learn about the impact of Columbus, and consider some ecological and political results of the encounter.

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).

How do we, as youth, respond to gun violence in our communities? The Gun Violence webcast explores gun violence in Pakistan, Somalia, and the United States.

How can we, as youth, build a sustainable future while meeting the energy needs of today? The Path to Sustainable Energy (PaSE) curriculum explores sustainable energy as students investigate place-based energy resource and consumption issues, gather resources, and build leadership skills to identify and take action on shared challenges and impacts of energy usage.

As the situation in Syria worsens and the number of Syrian refugees increases, the Reimagine Syria curriculum addresses this need to understand the conflict and how this conflict has and will impact a generation of young Syrians. Through media and conflict analysis, students develop knowledge and skills to better understand the multiples ways conflict affects them and are able to address the driving question: "How can we, as youth, develop productive solutions to conflict in our communities?"

Global Citizens in Action is a civic engagement curriculum that focuses on cultural exchange, media literacy, and global citizenship. Through exploring the driving question, “How do we, as youth, engage our communities to create positive social change?”

In this lesson students use a structured format (an adaptation of Think-Pair-Share) to discuss and deconstruct complex text. The new core standards emphasize the importance of developing students' speaking and listening skills as well as helping them access complex text through reading, re-reading, re-thinking, and re-examining.The purpose of this lesson is to get the students to focus and stay on topic while they talk. As a result, students are required to think more extensively about a topic by repeatedly reading and discussing with others.

Social change, at its core, does not come from one event or incident, but the long, sustained work of individuals and groups in numerous sectors of society. How do we, as youth, participate in sustaining positive social change in our communities?

How does global warming affect humans? The Climate Change Webcast explores the causes and effects of climate change as students work together to create an international climate change proposal to present at the United Nations Climate Summit.

In this module, students engage with literature and nonfiction texts that develop central ideas of guilt, obsession, and madness, among others. Building on work with evidence-based analysis and debate in Module 1, students will produce evidence-based claims to analyze the development of central ideas and text structure. Students will develop and strengthen their writing by revising and editing, and refine their speaking and listening skills through discussion-based assessments.

Students will play a written version of the game telephone, and will determine what sorts of communication is effective with limited information, if any.  This lesson is part of a media unit curated at our Digital Citizenship website, "Who Am I Online?". 

A study of the resettlement of Japanese Americans after WWII and the ongoing hardships and discrimination they experienced in the postwar years. This project was made possible through generous support from the National Parks Service Japanese American Confinement Sites program.

In this module, students will read, discuss, and analyze contemporary and classic texts, focusing on how complex characters develop through interactions with one another and how authors structure text to accomplish that development. There will be a strong emphasis on reading closely and responding to text dependent questions, annotating text, and developing academic vocabulary in context.

How do we, as youth, engage our communities to positively address human rights issues? The Rights of the Child curriculum explores human rights in an effort to foster cultural awareness, bring to light the rights of the child, and activate global citizenship among youth through international dialogue and collaboration.

Youth worldwide are in danger due to small arms and conventional weapons. How do we, as youth, participate in the global debate on gun control?

The ocean's resources are slowly being depleted. This curriculum examines the issue of overfishing and its impact on both the environment and human life. In developing sustainable solutions, the students address the driving question: "How can we as youth, sustain the future of the world's ocean through our actions today?"

This 5-day curriculum teaches digital storytelling and media literacy skills through engaging youth to think critically on issues relevant to their life and future. This unit is guided by the question, "How does media contribute to positive social change?”

GIST is a strategy to help students write brief, accurate, and complete summaries of material they read. In this lesson students work together summarizing larger and larger portions of text, but keeping their summaries at 25 words or fewer. Students will be able to summarize portions of informational or literary text. Students will be able to work in small groups to think critically about and discuss text.

Below I have included a link to a Problem Based Learning Lesson for learning and understanding the authenticity and importance of varying dialect in society. Both of the acitivities that are included in the lesson will challenge students to build on their prior understanding of other dialets but will also allow them to express creativity in the process. Language Dialect Lesson

Often compared to modern day slavery, human trafficking has become one of the world's largest hidden criminal industries. How do we, as youth, combat all forms of human trafficking?