Download our free Take Action Mini Series so that your student can begin to Take Action now!
We're thrilled that you're taking steps towards providing your students with the skills to lead active civics lives. The strategies and insights shared in this mini series are designed to help you facilitate important civic lessons in the classroom. We're confident that you'll find them incredibly valuable!
![](https://lwfiles.mycourse.app/644fc45d8f0d2cbbd4b4969f-public/b2f647e494e98efad90d154025343967.jpg)
Contents
Each module will provide educators with practical examples, exercises, and real-world scenarios to support students to take action in their communities.
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.