Best Practices: Creating an LGBT-inclusive School Climate

Through inclusive policies and nurturing practices, administrators, counselors and teachers have the power to build an educational environment that is truly welcoming to all students.

Schools are places of learning and also miniature societies. The climate of a school has a direct impact on both how well students learn and how well they interact with their peers.

Best Practices: Engaging Limited English Proficient Students and Families

ELL Best Practices

Fueled by two decades of historic immigration, American demographics are changing.

Beyond the Golden Rule

Beyond the Golden Rule cover

Beyond the Golden Rule: A Parent’s Guide to Preventing and Responding to Prejudice offers practical advice about the challenges and rewards of parenting in today's diverse world. Psychologists, educators and parenting experts offer practical, age-appropriate advice to help you integrate lessons of respect and tolerance in day-to-day activities.

Civil Discourse in the Classroom

These tools lay the groundwork for productive, reasoned and lively discussions on a variety of topics. They also will give students “training wheels” for learning how to have reasoned arguments outside the classroom.

Civil Discourse in the Classroom—based on lessons tested in diverse classrooms across the United States and proven effective with a wide range of students and topics—will introduce educators to bas

Civil Rights Activity Book

Civil Rights Activity Book

The Civil Rights Activity Book uses puzzles, songs and photos to teach children about martyrs and events of the civil rights movement.

Explore the History of ‘Loving’

The Augusta Films documentary The Loving Story recounts an important and often-overlooked element of the struggle to end racial segregation in the United States. Mildred and Richard Loving, married in 1958, were arrested because he was white and she was part African-American and part Native American. In Virginia, where they lived, their marriage was illegal. Their desire to live together as husband and wife in their home state led to a Supreme Court ruling that declared state laws that prohibited inter-racial marriage unconstitutional. 

The Augusta Films documentary The Loving Story recounts an important and

Gender Doesn't Limit You

Six lessons that address a particular form of gender bullying that help students to take a stand against gender bullying.

Educators at St.

Injustice on Our Plates

Injustice on Our Plates

In 2010, the Southern Poverty Law Center interviewed 150 immigrant women who left Latin American nations in search of a better life in the United States. Most of them landed in physically crippling, low-paying jobs that make our lives easier but have rendered them voiceless and invisible.

Their stories, and the circumstances in which they live and work, are profiled in the report, Injustice on Our Plates: Immigrant Women in the U.S.

One World Posters

The One World posters featured in Teaching Tolerance magazine are a reader favorite, which is why we’re making them available for download.

Prom Night in Mississippi

Prom Night in Mississippi

The new documentary Prom Night in Mississippi takes us to Charleston, Miss. - where high school students held their first racially integrated prom. Teaching Tolerance has teamed up with director-producer Paul Saltzman and HBO to create a teacher's guide to help you use the film in the classroom.

Watching the film is a powerful learning experience in and of itself.

Responding to Hate and Bias at School

Your school has plans and protocols in place to respond to fires, severe weather, medical emergencies, fights and weapons possession. But what about school incidents like those listed above that involve bigotry and hate? Are plans in place to respond to a bias incident or hate crime? Too often these plans are created in the moment during the actual crisis. Bias incidents are far too complex for on-the-fly planning; an early misstep can heighten tension and damage chances for long-term success.

A noose is found hanging from a goalpost on a high school campus.

A swastika, 20 feet in diameter, is burned into the pavement at a junior high school.

Sergio

Sergio

Teaching Tolerance is proud to present this teacher’s guide designed to support and supplement the HBO documentary Sergio. The film chronicles the extraordinary life and tragic death of United Nations diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello. Vieira de Mello was a Brazilian humanitarian who served the UN for more than thirty years in a variety of roles all around the world. He was killed in a hotel bombing in Iraq in 2003.

Teaching Tolerance is proud to present this teacher’s guide designed to support and supplement the HBO documentary Sergio. The film chronicles the extraordinary life and tragic death of

Speak Up at School

Speak Up at School

This guide offers advice about how to respond to remarks made by students and by other adults and gives guidance for helping students learn to speak up as well. We believe that modeling the kind of behavior we want from students is one of the most effective ways of teaching it.

Many of the questions we receive for our magazine column “Ask Teaching Tolerance”
are from educators seeking advice about how to respond when someone—a student, a

Speak Up!

Speak Up cover

The Southern Poverty Law Center gathered hundreds of stories of everyday bigotry from people across the United States. They told their stories through e-mail, personal interviews and at roundtable discussions in four cities. People spoke about encounters in stores and restaurants, on streets and in schools. No matter the location or relationship, the stories echo each other.

Teaching the Movement: The State of Civil Rights Education in the United States 2011

The National Assessment of Educational Progress—commonly called “The Nation’s Report Card”—tells a dismal story: Only 2% of high school seniors in 2010 could answer a simple question about the U.S.

Teaching the Movement: The State Standards We Deserve

Teaching the Movement: The State Standards We Deserve

In this paper, we move from diagnosis to treatment. We drew from an array of state standards to identify best practices and provide four sets of model standards. We hope that policymakers and interested advocates will use these model standards to push for reform of the history standards
in their own states.

Our September 2011 report, Teaching the Movement: The State of Civil Rights Education in the United States 2011, was prompted by the news that

The Mountaintop

Taking place on April 3, 1968, “The Mountaintop” by Katori Hall is a gripping reimagining of events the night before the assassination of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

What is the Truth About American Muslims? Questions and Answers

This publication provides answers to some of the frequently asked questions about religious freedom and American Muslims.

Editor's Note: This publication, produced by the Interfaith Alliance and Religious Freedom Project of the First Amendment Center, provides answers to frequently asked questions about relig

Writing for Change

Raising Awareness of Difference, Power and Discrimination

Language is a paradoxical tool – we use it consciously to shape our thoughts and experiences, yet patterns and structures in the language itself can shape us in return.