Join the Constitutional Democracy Project and the ABA Division for Public Education for an exciting professional development opportunity to empower educators in Illinois, particularly those serving in underserved communities as well as prospective teachers, with dynamic and inclusive resources on American government, history, and civic engagement. We provide the tools and knowledge to not only meet but exceed Illinois' inclusive history and civics instruction requirements. Become a part of our program to make a real impact in the classroom and shape the next generation of informed, active citizens!

SAVE THE DATES FOR AN INSPIRING SUMMER OF PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT!

CHICAGO: JUNE 10-14, 2024

SPRINGFIELD: JULY 22-26, 2024

BENEFITS:

• Professional Development integrated into current standards
• Ready to use classroom resources
• Innovative Curriculum
• Expert Instructors
• Numerous Networking Opportunities
• $2,500 stipend for teachers
• $1,000 stipend for pre-service teachers
• 30+ CPDU credits
• Complimentary Hotel accommodations provided

TEACHER COMMITMENT:

• Attend scheduled professional development in Chicago OR Springfield
• Participate in all surveys, reflections, and evaluations
• Participate in 3-4 workshops post PD (either on ZOOM or in-person)
• Bring 10 student delegates to Student Constitutional Convention
• Participate in the culminating Student Constitutional Convention in Spring 2025

Click here for more information and to apply.

Join the Illinois Democracy Schools Network on Thursday, February 15 from 4–5 p.m. CT for a FREE webinar with author and education influencer Shawn McCusker. We'll discuss Shawn's book, Becoming Active Citizens, winner of the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Gold Award for Education. 

Shawn is the Senior Director of Professional Learning at EdTechTeacher. He has 25 years of experience as a teacher and leader in public, private, and alternative schools. As an expert in technology integration, his lessons and student products have been featured in Educational Leadership and the Huffington Post. In 2006, he was recognized as a finalist for the Golden Apple Award for Excellence in Teaching. In 2016, he was named a Top Trailblazing Educator on Twitter by eSchoolNews. He regularly appears as a keynote and featured speaker at conferences across the U.S.

Register for the webinar here.

The Black History Month website is a collaborative project of the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Gallery of Art, the National Park Service, the Smithsonian Institution, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. This website provides ready-to-use lesson plans, activities, and collection guides that utilize primary sources spanning the course of American History.

Numerous civic learning providers have created resources to teach Black history this month and beyond. Here are several to explore:

• iCivics Black Americans: Movers, Shapers, Changemakers
• Center for Civics Education 60-second Civics
• PBS Learning Media Celebrating Black History and Culture
• Bill of Rights Institute Celebrating Black History Month
• Facing History and Ourselves: Resistance and Black History



Announcement for Illinois Educators! Beginning February 1, Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center is now offering a new experience to classrooms across Illinois with traveling trunks of wireless virtual reality headsets featuring the Museum’s VR films. Experience this engaging and immersive educational experience, which applies cutting-edge technology to engage students in stories of Holocaust survival. This experience, based on the award-winning Museum exhibition, The Journey Back: A VR Experience, is a global game-changer, revolutionizing the field of Holocaust memory through innovative technology and storytelling.

Scholarships are available for qualifying schools. 



LEARN MORE

Join Facing History & Ourselves for a series of three-2 hour workshops to learn more about how the principles behind Facing History’s programs and our approach to SEL, equity, and civic education can help you meet your goals and transform your school. We will explore flexible resources designed to help you get to know your staff and students as individuals, and to foster the process of creating an open, supportive, and reflective classroom community. This learning experience will offer resources and strategies designed to support educational leaders working to improve school culture, deepen academic engagement, and build schools where every student and every teacher feel that they belong.

Session dates:

1. March 5th, 2024 4:00pm - 6:00pm CT
2. March 6th, 2024 4:00pm - 6:00pm CT
3. March 7th, 2024 4:00pm - 6:00pm CT

During this workshop school leaders will:

1. Create an agenda for leading conversations with their faculty or other group at their individual schools that focus on the importance of building relationships and creating safe and inclusive classrooms and schools
2. Experience and learn how to apply strategies for staff meetings that can be applied by teachers in their classrooms as well. These will include: contracting, identity charts, whole group discussions, and exploring choice making in history to connect to today.
3. Understand how a focus on identity, choice making and student voice and engagement contributes to safe and inclusive school communities
4. Design an adult learning session that roots critical, challenging conversations in safe, brave, reflective learning spaces, and which also lead to more equitable practices and greater student outcomes as a result.

Find out more and register using this link!

With generous funding from the NEH, Full Spectrum Features will host a hybrid 15-day institute for 30 K-12 educators that will run online and in person in Chicago between July 8th - August 6th, 2024.

Focusing on the history of Japanese Americans’ resettlement in Chicago after WWII incarceration, the institute will invite teachers to consider how repeated displacement and forced assimilation into white American culture impacted the Japanese American community. 

Application deadline is March 5th, 2024 at 11:59pm PT. Accepted participants will be given a stipend to help cover travel and accommodations.

Click here for more information

Voting is more than just turning 18 and walking up to the voting booth. It requires thought and intent in order to make an educated decision. Think the Vote is a website run by the Bill of Rights Institute. The goal is to connect classrooms with resources to think critically about the things going on in the world around you. This will also equip students with the skills and information to engage in healthy civil discourse with fellow citizens.

BRI presents a new topic for students to engage with in Think the Vote. For a listing of issues, past and present, visit the Think the Vote site.

Disability Reframed featuring Judy Woodruff includes a series of full lesson plans on some of the challenges faced by people with disabilities that many students may not be aware of. These lessons are aligned with the Illinois mandate to provide instruction on disability history, people with disabilities, and the disability rights movement

Click here to review lesson plans

​Practice listening, problem solving, and civic engagement in a fictional community with our iCivics' game, Neighborhood Good.

Welcome to the neighborhood! Like your local community, our fictional one comprises great people and a few challenges. Can your students meet their neighbors, hear their concerns and ideas, and formulate a plan? 

iCivics brand-new game, Neighborhood Good, developed through a grant from DoD STEM's National Defense Education Program, creates space for upper elementary and middle school students to practice civic engagement in a safe, non-political environment. 

Your students will exercise their listening and problem-solving skills to address familiar challenges, such as reducing food waste in the cafeteria or developing creative ways for an overcrowded animal shelter to meet their needs.

The Neighborhood Good Extension Pack includes pre- and post-game activities to extend and deepen learning and ideas for how students can apply the skills they develop during gameplay in their local neighborhoods and communities.

Find out what a difference your students can make in the community!

Neighborhood Good Launch Webinar- February 7 at 7:00 p.m. ET

Connect with fellow educators and discover how to introduce your classroom to civic engagement with Neighborhood Good and iCivics.

Register for the webinar here!

​The DuPage County Election Division is asking for your assistance in providing student help for the upcoming March 19, 2024, General Primary Election.

Interested high school students should contact Charles Walker at the DuPage Clerk’s Election Division, (630) 407-5600, ext. 5618.

Students who are hired for this one-day job will report to the County Clerk’s Election Division Office on County Farm Rd in Wheaton on Tuesday, March 19 at 6:30 pm and will work until approximately 10 pm.

A Social Security number is required, as well as a driver’s license or school ID. These credentials must be readily available when students report to work.



​

The Western Illinois Museum is pleased to announce it has been awarded a grant from the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources Midwest Region Program. The grant funds a project developed in partnership with Cuba High School Educator, Joe Brewer, titled, Building Bridges to the Past: Teaching with Primary Sources and Public History Collaborations. The $18,500 grant will be used to offer workshops to educators in the region to explore how primary source documents can enhance their lessons while introducing local history to area youth.

To accommodate the busy schedules of teachers, the one-day workshop will be offered twice, first on Friday, April 19, and again on Wednesday, April 24, 2024. Teachers will receive a $150 stipend, reimbursement for transportation costs, as well as $80 to cover the cost of a substitute teacher. Participating in the lab sessions will also be compensated. To sign up for the workshop, teachers are asked to complete a short registration form online, by mail, or by phone.

For more information, contact the Museum at 309.837.2750 or info@wimuseum.org.



​The United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois and the Chicago Chapter of the Federal Bar Association (FBA) are seeking the help and input of Northern District of Illinois teachers and their students in a courthouse beautification initiative called Justice Inspired.

All Kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers are invited to engage their students in submitting quotes on behalf of their classes/classrooms that will be engraved and installed on walls inside of the Everett McKinley Dirksen United States Courthouse. Teachers may submit one quote per class or classroom. The Court and FBA are seeking quotes that inspire justice, peace, equality, fairness, inclusion, redemption, freedom, community, and other ideals, and/or reflect upon the significance of debate, the law, courts, and the constitution in relation to democracy and to our nation. Quote sources may include but are not limited to historical and contemporary figures, literary works, musical compositions, etc.

Classes that submit a winning quote will be awarded, c/o the teacher, a $450 Amazon gift card and a replica of their recommended quote. Submissions will be accepted Tuesday, January 16 through COB on Friday, February 16, 2024. Submissions should be emailed using the submission form.

Click HERE to download the entry form.

Email Submissions Forms to: Education@ilnd.uscourts.gov

Please note: Schools must be in the Northern District of Illinois. The Northern District of Illinois includes the following counties: Cook, DuPage, Grundy, Kane, Kendall, Lake, La Salle, Will, Boone, Carroll, DeKalb, Jo Daviess, Lee, McHenry, Ogle, Stephenson, Whiteside, and Winnebago. Teachers may submit one entry per classroom/class period. Quotes should be no more than 25 words, not including the source of the quote. If duplicate entries of a single quote are submitted by multiple teachers and that quote is selected as a winning quote, the quote with the best reason as to why it was chosen will be deemed the winner.

For questions, please contact Public Services Administrator, Lauren Thiel at Lauren_Thiel@ilnd.uscourts.gov.

​The question of whether ideas expressed in popular culture can be harmful to children has a history stretching back to Plato and Aristotle. In the 1950s, concern about crime, sex, and horror in comic books led to strict limits under the Comics Code Authority. Then, in the 1980s, a well-connected group of parents raised alarms over sex, drugs, and violence in rock lyrics, and the music industry responded with warning labels. 

Retro Report's updated 11-minute video and its accompanying resources explore meanings and forms of censorship and the beliefs that drive them, including “trigger warning” initiatives and what they may mean for free expression and academic freedom.

Included:

•  Lesson Plan and 📝 Student Activity for ELA, Social Studies and Fine Arts courses (grades 9-12)
• Lesson Plan and 📝​ Student Activity for U.S. History, Government/Civics and ELA (grades 6-12)

Explore new resources.

In order to bridge societal divides, young people must learn how to have productive conversations early on.

That's why Street Law is expanding its resources on teaching contested public issues to include elementary-level school deliberations.

The new deliberations are well-suited for upper-elementary school use and cover the topics of homework, space exploration, compulsory voting, and flag desecration.

Get the materials.

Project Looksharp has a mission to help K-16 educators enhance students’ critical thinking, metacognition, and civic engagement through media literacy materials and professional development. Project Looksharp's latest lesson plans include:

Comic Superheroes and Historical Context, where students analyze comic book covers for messages about historical context and book cover design techniques.

Vaccine Safety - Exploring Our Own Biases, where students analyze two short news videos about the safety and speed of creating the mRNA Covid vaccine, the sourcing and credibility of the videos and the scientific information presented, and their confirmation biases. 

For a full listing of resources, click here.

Called “an indispensable guide to good citizenship in an era of division and rancor," New York Times bestselling author and former diplomat Dr. Richard Haass’ new book, The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens, will be the focus of the NH Civics William W. Treat Lecture on Tuesday, February 6, from 10–11:15 am Join Dr. Haass for a virtual discussion about what the American people can do, both individually and collectively, to ensure our democracy not only survives but thrives.

This virtual event is free to the public, but pre-registration is required.  The William W. Treat Lecture Series has reached thousands of participants over the years with noted civic leaders discussing key issues of the day in locations throughout the state and online.

REGISTER HERE.

Join the ABA Division for Public Education and the Federal Judicial Center in Washington, DC for a unique teachers’ professional development using great federal trials as a lens to explore the judiciary, rule of law, and US Constitution throughout American history.

During the Summer of 2024, participants will explore Amistad, U.S. v. Gaiteau, and the Rosenberg trials.

When:  June 24–28, 2024

Where:  Washington, DC (travel and lodging costs included)

Questions?  Email catherine.hawke@americanbar.org for any questions.

Click here to find out more and apply!



Emerging Narratives and Technologies in Social Studies

2024 Illinois Council for the Social Studies Spring Conference 

University of Illinois-Springfield 

April 12, 2024

The Illinois Council for the Social Studies invites session proposals for the ICSS Spring 2024 Conference, being held on the campus of the University of Illinois-Springfield on Friday, April 12, 2024. 

In addition to the “traditional” call for session proposals, ICSS is working to integrate a wider diversity of voices into the ICSS Conference. We invite applicants from all levels of social studies to apply to present on our theme or other important topics in the social studies profession. Participant and vendor registration will open mid-February.

For more information, visit the proposal submission site.

The 2024 MyImpact Challenge is now open for submissions! The Bill of Rights Institute launched their national civic engagement contest on September 11, the National Day of Service, to continue the legacy of 9/11/2001.

The My Impact Challenge website contains the contest guidelines and a six-lesson curriculum that helps students design a locally targeted service project. 

Students ages 13–19 can submit Community Service Projects for a Change for a chance to win up to $10,000. A complete submission contains a project report, a principles essay, and photo or video documentation.  

The contest submission deadline is May 20, 2024. 



With its historic passage in April of 2021, the Teaching Equitable Asian American Community History (T.E.A.A.C.H.) Act amended the Illinois School Code, ensuring every public elementary and high school student in Illinois learns about the contributions of Asian Americans to the economic, cultural, social, and political development of the United States.

The Illinois Civics Hub is partnering with Asian Americans Advancing Justice to offer FREE PD hours to K–12 educators looking to deepen their own understanding of Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) history, and to gain classroom resources to support cross-cultural education for all students in Illinois, aligned with the revised social science standards.

Educators can click the links below to choose from the following webinar opportunities:

For Elementary Level

• March 14, 2024, 4:30–6:30 p.m.

For Secondary Level

• February 27, 2024, 4:30–6:30 p.m.
• April 24, 2024, 4:30–6:30 p.m. 

Be sure to visit the Asian Americans Advancing Justice site for more resources to implement the T.E.A.A.C.H. Act.



The Illinois Civics Hub has partnered with the Lou Frey Institute at the University of Central Florida to provide educators the opportunity to earn their microcredentials in facilitating simulations of democratic processes.

In this asynchronous 6-week course offered on Canvas, participants will learn from academic experts Dr. Joe Kahne & Jessica Marshall as you explore the purpose, role, and function of informed action through service learning as pedagogical tools to equip young people to be engaged citizens. This course will enhance the practice of educators with strategies and resources to create a classroom climate in which there are equitable opportunities for ALL students across the curriculum to create "a more perfect union."

The course begins February 19, 2024. Participants will complete one module per week and can expect to spend 2–3 hours per week on coursework.

Registration information is available on the Guardians of Democracy homepage. Those who successfully earn a Bronze Certified Guardian of Democracy Educator badge via Badgr earn 18 PD hours. Members of the Illinois Democracy Schools Network can also earn a $300 stipend.

There are three strands of courses for each proven practice of civics education. Graduate credit is available through the University of St. Francis for completing all three courses. For more information, please visit the Guardians of Democracy homepage.