Download the FREE Take Action Lesson Series
Guide your students in taking informed action today!

Take the steps to equip your students with the skills to lead active civic lives. The strategies and insights shared in this series of robust lessons are intended to assist you in facilitating important civic lessons in the classroom. We are confident that you will find them extremely valuable!

Each module provides educators with practical examples, exercises, and real-world scenarios to support students to take action in their communities.

Take Action Mini Series Overview

01: Take Action: Young Changemakers

Middle and high school students will gain inspiration and guidance from historical and current young changemakers. They will begin by hearing what a well-known Generation Z Young activist has learned about successful changemaking and empowering a generation. Students will then analyze multiple bi-partisan examples of historical or recent youth-led movements from a diverse range of geographies and topics. After learning from the inspiring stories of others, students will either share their own young changemaker story or research and share a local young changemaker story.

02: Take Action: Our Community's Assets

Middle and high school students will analyze community assets that can be leveraged to better serve community members in response to needs that students see around them. First, students will conduct their own assessment of their community’s assets and sources of resilience. Then, students will work in groups to do in-depth research to create a Community Resource Guide and develop a plan for how they envision this resource being disseminated and used. Finally, they will set their own goals for how they themselves would like to take action in their community using the resource they have built.

03: Take Action: Write an OpEd

Middle and high school students will take concrete action and engage in our democracy in a meaningful way by sharing their thoughts, experiences, and ideas in an OpEd. They will begin by learning how OpEds can be a powerful tool for elevating issues in their community and advocating for change. Students will read real, published, student-created examples of OpEds to learn about the four main elements that make up a strong OpEd. They will then examine an issue that they care about, decide what they want people to know about this issue, and draft their own OpEd.

04: Take Action: What is an Ordinance?

Middle and high school students write their own local law in order to better understand some fundamental questions about local governance: Why do ordinances exist? Where are they recorded? What do they mean? They will start by piecing together their own fill-in-the-blank ordinance and describing the consequences it might have on their city or town. Then, after learning some basic vocabulary related to local laws and the structure of codes of ordinances, they’ll develop their own ordinance based on an issue they see in their own community. At the end of the lesson, students will share their proposed ordinance on social media and are encouraged to tag some or all of their local representatives in the post.

05: Take Action: Removing Voting Barriers

Middle and high school students analyze historical and contemporary examples of barriers to voting, and brainstorm ways to advocate for greater access to voting for all. They will start by discussing the implications of voting—why does voting matter? What impact does voting have on our lives? Then, students will learn about historic and contemporary barriers to voting, and how civic participation and advocacy helped overcome those barriers. Utilizing this knowledge, students will learn from local experts about how they can participate in advocacy to overcome these barriers and increase access to safe voting in the next local election.