Popular sovereignty allowed the settlers of a federal territory to decide the slavery question without interference from Congress. This lesson plan will examine how the Kansas"“Nebraska Act of 1854 affected the political balance between free and slave states and explore how its author, Stephen Douglas, promoted its policy of popular sovereignty in an effort to avoid a national crisis over slavery in the federal territories.

The Romans developed the alphabet we still use today. In this lesson we will introduce the Romans and ask how their alphabet got to us.

What was life like for women in the first half of the 19th century in America? What influence did women have in shaping the attitudes towards slavery? Towards women's suffrage?

Students evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of different mediums and then compare and contrast the structure of the texts they have viewed/read to consider how the texts use different structures to convey similar ideas.

Students often assume that websites ending in .edu are always reliable, while those ending in .com are automatically suspect. This lesson will challenge some of the assumptions that students commonly make about websites based on their top-level domains and provide a chance for students to practice using the clues that domains provide.

When evidence takes the form of statistics, infographics, or other data presentations, it can be particularly tempting to accept it without fully evaluating whether it is reliable and relevant to the claims being made. This lesson builds on the “Intro to What is the evidence?” lesson and offers students specific practice in evaluating the relevance and reliability of data evidence.

This lesson gives students a chance to practice evaluating varied forms of data as evidence. Students discuss why data and infographics can be particularly tricky to evaluate, and then work in groups to evaluate several examples of online evidence.

Wikipedia contains a vast supply of information and is the 5th most trafficked website in the world. Still, it continues to be a controversial site, and many teachers advise students against using it. If students learn to use Wikipedia wisely, it can be a powerful resource for lateral reading, verifying claims, a starting point for research, and a springboard to more resources.

This lesson introduces students to Wikipedia’s standard of verifiability, which requires article authors to provide reliable citations to support any claims they make. By following these citations, students can verify the claims in Wikipedia and locate a variety of reliable resources with which to continue their research.

Photographs and other images circulate rapidly online and are often gripping, persuasive forms of evidence. It is difficult to tell if these images accurately depict what their posters claim they do, and it is often tempting to take these images at face value. If we trust images without verifying their accuracy, we risk believing false claims and narratives.

This lesson introduces students to a strategy for learning more about online images: the reverse image search. Students can use this tool to learn more about an image, including where else it has been posted online and what (if any) stories have been written about it. Students practice this strategy in groups, using the Internet to learn more about a single image posted within it.

Evidence presented via video is becoming an increasingly popular way to make political arguments online. However, videos can be especially challenging to evaluate effectively. Too often, we are convinced by what we see (or think we see) and do not carefully consider how the video could be edited, distorted or misrepresent its subject. This lesson helps students practice analyzing video evidence and debunks the myth that if it's on video, it must be true.

This lesson introduces students to lateral reading, a strategy for investigating who's behind an unfamiliar online source by leaving the webpage and opening a new browser tab to see what trusted websites say about the unknown source. Students watch the teacher model lateral reading and then have a chance to practice the strategy to determine who is behind a website and, ultimately, whether that website is trustworthy.

Lateral reading is challenging, and an approach that may work for one type of source might not work for another. This lesson is designed to provide students with the opportunity to practice lateral reading with a variety of sources.

This lesson is designed to be taught after the Intro to Lateral Reading lesson.

When trying to determine who is behind online information, students may be inclined to read vertically—to make judgments based on features internal to a website like its URL, design, functionality, or content. However, these features are not effective ways to evaluate a site and need to be explicitly challenged. This lesson asks students to evaluate a website and a post on social media by engaging in both vertical and lateral reading to see how they compare.

This lesson is designed to be taught after the Intro to Lateral Reading lesson.

Once students have completed the Intro to Lateral Reading lesson, they need opportunities to practice the strategy and develop flexible approaches for using it. This lesson is designed to provide students with focused practice reading laterally with articles from fact-checking organizations. Students are briefly introduced to fact-checking organizations and then practice reading laterally about a website using a fact-checking site.

This lesson provides students with opportunities to practice reading laterally with news stories. This lesson is designed to be taught following the Intro to Lateral Reading lesson.

In this lesson, students are introduced to using Wikipedia as a resource for lateral reading. This lesson is designed to be taught following the Intro to Lateral Reading lesson.

In order to navigate news effectively, students need to understand how the genre of an article affects its reliability. Editors of reputable publications hold news articles and opinion pieces to different standards, and savvy readers consider these differences when evaluating online information. This lesson will teach students how news articles and opinion pieces differ.

In Tocqueville's discussion of how the majority in America constrains freedom of thought, he makes some of the most extreme criticisms against democracy. For example, he says "I do not know any country where, in general, less independence of mind and genuine freedom of discussion reign than in America"; and, "there is no freedom of mind in America."

Different approaches to teaching the reading comprehension strategy of inferring in K-5 classrooms are identified in this article. The article appears in the free, online magazine Beyond Weather and the Water Cycle, which is structured around the essential principles of climate science.

Students listen to a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., view photographs of the March on Washington, and study King's use of imagery and allusion in his "I Have a Dream" speech.

This unit engages students in a variety of activities that analyze and reflect on the role of social media in our everyday lives. This includes options for collaborative group work, reading nonfiction articles, a design challenge and presentations to communicate ideas. The unit also includes a formal writing assessment option that aligns with the Common Core State Writing Standards. Activities can be adapted or combined in a variety of ways to support student reflection and analysis. These lessons were piloted in 9th grade English classes but are suitable or a range of secondary students.