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Celebrate Mix It Up this fall by making your school’s big event better than ever.

Abel Barrera Hernández has worked tirelessly to bring justice to some of Mexico’s most marginalized communities. For his work as founder and director of the Tlachinollan Center in southern Mexico, Hernández received an award from the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights last month. That, coupled with the fact that Friday is Human Rights Day, got me thinking how I, as a teacher, must also fight for human rights.

Inspired by an article about cyberbullying, I asked my fifth-graders to write podcast scripts. They wrote about teasing, cyberbullying, gossip, intention vs. consequence, advertising, digital footprints and the lack of facial cues in electronic communication. Working mostly in collaborative groups, my students recorded complete “'casts” on our informal laptop studio.

In Oakland, Calif., there are a lot of homicides especially for a fairly small city of about 400,000 people. Last July, there were seven homicides in seven days. Victims ranged in age from 15 to 84. Six of them occurred near the school where I taught. One was a friend of many of my former students and a cousin of a little girl I mentor.

Want to do your part to make schools safer? Use National Youth Violence Prevention Week as a starting point for year-round planning.

This middle school teacher empowered his students to lift their voices in discussions about Ferguson and Eric Garner—by assigning them to tweet.

Cyberbullying happens in code. Break it.

This teacher is often asked, “Why can’t you let ‘social justice’ go?” Here’s her answer.

As “Girls, Interrupted” documents, girls now account for 30 percent of juvenile arrests and 15 percent of juvenile incarceration—making them the fastest-growing demographic in the juvenile justice system. But they are the least talked about. This toolkit offers a list of resources that educators can consult to expand their knowledge about at-risk girls and build gender-responsive practices to support their needs.

To best serve LGBTQ students, GSAs should not exist in a vacuum. Schools and school districts should implement a host of other practices to complement the efforts of a GSA.