Watch Amanda Gorman, poet, writer, and the Inaugural National Youth Poet Laureate, recite her original poem "Talking Gets Us There" from the "PBS KIDS Talk About: Race and Racism" special.

Share this with your kids and talk about celebrating differences and speaking out against racism today and every day.

At the start of a new school year, let's all recommit to working for equity in schools. Members of the Teaching Tolerance Advisory Board suggest some ways to get started.

New: Anti-bias, anti-racism lessons in The Newsela SEL Collection

Bringing culturally and linguistically relevant literature into the classroom embraces the language practices, cultures, and identities of bilinguals. Such texts also help bilingual students draw upon their background knowledge to comprehend their reading.

Each theme provides an elementary, middle and high school lesson on that topic. Handouts for each lesson are available to download for students. The handouts are fillable PDFs and can be used virtually with students.

Before working with students, please read the background information on the theme you will teach. We also recommend reading the Creating Brave Spaces document.

This resource is intended to help educators understand how they might address the interplay of race and trauma and its effects on students in the classroom. After defining key terms, the guide outlines recommendations for educators and offers a list of supplemental resources. This guide is intended as a complement to two existing NCTSN resources—Position Statement on Racial Injustice and Trauma and Child Trauma Toolkit for Educators—and it should be implemented in accordance with individual school policies and procedures.

Being culturally responsive is a critical and necessary feature of our interactions with one another. It is also vitally important in the context of education. Culturally responsive teaching is an approach that “empowers students intellectually, socially, emotionally, and politically by using cultural referents to impart knowledge, skills, and attitudes” (Ladson-Billings, 2014). The following practices provide five essential strategies for how educators can make their learning environments more culturally responsive.