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Freelance writer Ken Olsen gives tips for teaching Lewis and Clark from a Native American perspective.

Asian-American students give voice to the challenges of living in two cultures.

Our food supply depends on immigrant labor. Seven new Teaching Tolerance lessons bring this important message into the classroom.

I really should be practicing Aura Lee right now—or Merrily We Roll Along.I will soon be marching on stage, balancing my sheet music on the stand, wetting my reed, and playing the clarinet in front of parents, school board members, students, even the superintendent.How exactly did I get myself into this mess?It all started with a simple email.Pull out your instruments, Teachers, and join our Beginning Band students in their October concert….

I walked down the newly plowed row with my grandpa, feeling the warm, red clay on the soles of my bare feet and listened to his stories and words of advice. I held a tomato plant in my hands, the rich, black potting soil falling off of the small, vulnerable roots, as he knelt and dug a place for it in the garden. “Hey,” he’d often start, “here's something my daddy told me when I was little. ‘God gave you two ears and one mouth because He wants you to listen twice as much as you speak. If you do that, you'll learn something. If you don't, you won't.’”

We must teach conflict resolution, empathy and individual responsibility to students as deliberately as we teach math and science. Schools will not get better until we do.

As I head back to the classroom, I think about the last school year. In the second-to-last week of school, my fifth-grade classroom was 90 degrees, with no air conditioning. My students were sitting together, helping each other, laughing, struggling and having fun. At the beginning of the year, they were unsure of each other. They smiled politely but kept to themselves or the friends they knew and never asked for help. So what had changed?

This true story is about the internment of a Japanese American family during World War II.