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This week’s statement from Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos on historically black colleges and universities is a prime example of whitewashing U.S. history. Classroom teachers for grades 6-12, however, can use this moment as a teaching opportunity.

A new use of the word accomplice pushed this educator to rethink her activist approaches inside and outside the classroom.

On August 28, 1963, at the March on Washington, Dorothy Height sat on the speakers’ platform and listened to Martin Luther King, Jr. deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech. She had helped organize the rally that brought about 250,000 people to the National Mall. In fact, she’d been in the forefront of the civil right struggle for decades as the president of the National Council of Negro Women.

When you teach this classic text, are your students surprised by the injustice portrayed in it? This teacher’s students aren’t—not anymore.

On March 7, 1965, millions of Americans sat watching their television sets in horror. Grainy black-and-white news images from Selma, Ala., showed about 600 mostly African-American protesters trying to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. They were marching to the state capital, Montgomery, to win voting rights in the Jim Crow South.

Let’s uncover implicit bias—together.

What comes to your students’ minds when they hear the word Africa? If it’s mostly civil war and famine, you’ll like the diversity of these recommended texts.

With all the talk about Cam Newton’s celebrations—and less than a week to go before Super Bowl 50—educators can take advantage of this teachable moment.

My students are too young to remember the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Just four years before their birth, they refer to them as something from “back in the day.”But the themes of police brutality, poverty and racism are all too familiar. And most drew an immediate connection between the Rodney King verdict that sparked those riots and the 2009 fatal shooting of Oscar Grant. Grant was shot in the back by Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer Johannes Mehserle less than one mile from our school in Oakland.

When a neighbor makes a racist comment, Annie and Beth must find the courage to speak up.