Adriana Guzman

Who are you? You may be asking this when looking at all the new faces in your classroom at the beginning of the school year. You may also be asking: How can we, as a classroom community, encourage each other to answer this question authentically, peeling away the many layers that comprise who we are? 

Who are you? You may be asking yourself this when looking at all of the new faces in your classroom at the beginning of the school year. You may also be asking: How can we, as a classroom community, encourage each other to answer this question authentically, peeling away the many layers that comprise who we are? 

Students reflect on their feelings about winter, including its challenges, and share their coping strategies through a poem, a circle, and exploration of the "wheel of holistic health."

In honor of the brave ones who have left behind everything they know, for an uncertain search of a chance to survive and, ultimately, thrive, I invite you to think of this: In times of crisis and desperation, how can one find joy?

This start-of-the-school year reflection invites students to connect to their natural surroundings. With a focus on gratitude, students explore how nature positively impacts them.

Students explore terminology around power in light of Tyre Nichols' life and death, and then reimagine power through a positive lens.

Students celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month by uplifting - and making a gallery of - all things Hispanic in our lives.

Students anonymously share their anxieties about the new school year, consider how to support each other, store their findings in a "time capsule" that they revisit later in the year – and pass on their wisdom and encouragement to the next class.

Students experience how a range of Latinx illustrators touch on language, identity, and self-expression through their comics – including an exploration of the meaning and significance of terms such as Latinx, Hispanic, Latino, and Latina.

Students discuss the land where they live, and the Indigenous peoples who once lived there. Then they get to know each other by reflecting on four aspects of their lives, using Native American teachings on the Medicine Wheel. 

Students collectively gain an understanding of a new monument, the artwork, the artist’s intentions, and some of the history influencing the work. 

Students work in small groups to create a collaborative piece of art as a response to photographs from the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. 

Students deepen their understanding of an aspect of Indigenous peoples' relationship with the earth through two short films about peoples’ resistance to the loss of access to clean drinking water.