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Fifty years after the Freedom Schools of 1964, today’s Freedom Schools continue the legacy.

Check out TT’s can’t-miss stories, blogs and PD resources from 2016!

"I'm done," I could have said. "Finished." I felt I had potential as a teacher during my master’s degree coursework. "You have the building blocks to make a difference in the lives of children," one of my professors wrote on an assignment. For two years, I have used the building blocks of compassion, courage and creativity to build my classroom.

It happens in every class. We’re discussing a text, a publication, a current event, a poem. The content doesn’t matter. It’s the phrase that counts. A student comments and uses the phrase “African American” or even “black people.” The student is white. The reaction of the class – almost all white – is swift. As if choreographed, all eyes turn to the one student of color. The spotlight of eyes shines down and he or she blinks back as if staring into the sun. The teacher should use this moment to open a discussion.

There are three questions students of history should always ask: What’s the context?What’s the context?What’s the context? Yes, I know, it’s a play on the old real estate joke (location, location, location), but the importance of understanding how a quote or an event sits in terms of what’s happening around it cannot be overstated.

Today, the North Carolina legislature debates what’s being called a repeal of the controversial “bathroom bill.” But is it really a repeal? Explore this question with your students.

Teaching Tolerance director Kelvin Datcher ponders the legacy of Brown v. Board.

Have you ever been the only (fill in category) person in the room? Race, class, gender, age, body type, marital status—any number of identifiers can place us outside the norm, depending on the room. Otherness is a specific experience, especially for those who don’t live it every day. A couple of my students unwittingly placed themselves squarely into the role of “other” in an assignment outside our classroom, and I suspect learned a more powerful lesson than I ever could have taught them in class. The assignment was to find, attend and write an article covering an event. When two students proposed attending a senior citizen fundraising fashion show on the other side of town, I immediately approved the idea.

When you say the word “bully” most people tend to think of the caricature of a bully. One of my students described the thinking of this stereotype perfectly. “They probably got on my nerves or I really just don’t like them, so I’ll try my best to make their life as miserable as possible.” But bullying takes many guises and is sometimes hard to identify. That is worth thinking about today as the Safe Schools Action Network observes 100 Days of School/100 Days of Bullying. If we really want to stop bullying, we need to see it clearly in its various forms.