Although this series of lessons utilizes sources from the Civil Rights Movement, the topic of focus could be changed to better support student needs or to better align to your topics of study.

Every unit of the Reform to Equal Rights: K-12 Disability History Curriculum includes an introduction to the topic of disability, including strategies to address disrespectful vocabulary. 

Explore primary sources connected to the Civil Rights movement.

The English Learner Collaborations project of the Massachusetts Council for the Social Studies commissioned the development of lessons to illustrate applying English Language Development (ELD) teacher resources to History and Social Studies content.

By the end of the sequence of lessons linked below, students should be able to explain the principles of non-violent civil disobedience, and will be able to provide examples of non-violent civil disobedience.

On this page, we feature resources for teachers of History, Social Studies, and Civics who are designing curriculum in the context of the pandemic, both for students who may be learning from home, and for students navigating a changing environment no matter where teaching and learning happens. 

Among these resources are many that provide guidance for increasing the accessibility of digital teaching resources.

This lesson has a sharable ready-made album of primary sources with an introduction essay by the author!

“I Can’t Even Get To The Back of the Bus” – Disability, 504 and the Power of Protest

This lesson investigates why and how people take action to make a difference. Building from an inquiry-based RAN chart, the lesson explores the context of the 1977 protests calling on the Federal Government to actually implement 504 access legislation. Featuring a variety of primary sources, including testimony of activist Ed Roberts.   

Organizing a rich text set of primary sources requires that students analyze and make sense of several sources on a topic. In this case, they seek to answer a focused guiding question. Students sort through about a dozen images, letters, forms, and political cartoon. In practice, a teacher could offer fewer sources, though it is a valuable sometimes to require students to choose among sources. The primary sources are also give context by a secondary source narrative from the Veterans Administration. 

Wendy Harris, a teacher at Metro Deaf School in St.

Teachers strive to engage all learners. A 'best practice' is to create multiple ways for students to communicate what they need, and multiple ways to check in to see how students are learning. Simple online survey tools can provide an avenue for students to communicate how they are doing.