Teaching in today’s ever-changing classroom environment presents many challenges, including teaching civics, a complex topic that can quickly stir up emotions. Read more for 7 Tips & Ideas to navigate teaching the latest civics guidelines in engaging, informational, and practical ways.

Today's teachers know that civic education has taken a backseat for decades due to the increasing demands on instructional time, which has had enormous consequences. How do teachers ensure students have access to quality civic education? Here are four practices for building civic engagement, found embedded within iCivics Readers, that you can use in your classroom right now.

It is imperative that now, more than ever, we intently focus on building and fostering positive relationships with our students and among our students. While there are many ways to build relationships in the classroom, here are five tried and true strategies that can be utilized.

Have you ever wondered why students often struggle with problem solving in math? Well, problem solving is… challenging! And, if problem solving is difficult, then teaching how to solve problems is even more demanding. There are some common reasons we believe teachers struggle to support students in developing problem solving skills.

With many of today’s standards calling the use of HOTS, or higher order thinking skills, it can feel really overwhelming at times. So, this may seem a bit oversimplified at first, but I have found it extremely valuable in giving students a concrete way to break down their thinking. In fact, even the most able students have responded to this strategy with, “Well, I already knew the answer, but this helped me see how I got there.” Cool, right?!

The very best teachers we ever had as students involved us in the learning process. They drew us in and got us making our own connections to what they were teaching. They may have also created a sense of cognitive dissonance, or mental discomfort, that we wanted to resolve. Creating an environment of active learning that engages students promotes deeper understanding and long-term retention of the concepts we are teaching.