"Teaching Tolerance" website

One of the toughest challenged for teachers today is incorporating diversity into our lessons and curriculum. The website, Tolerance.org is a great tool and resource for teachers to pull ideas and lessons from. The site is sponsored by the Teaching Diverse Students Initiative (TDSI) and provides resources that are researched based, in hopes of improving the teaching of ethnically and racially diverse students throughout the country. This website provides teachers with professional development articles, classroom activities, lesson plans, teaching kits and resources centered on the topic of diversity. It has resources for all grades and subjects; however, the Social Studies resources are the most prevalent, with over 50 lesson plans and activities. The site is extremely easy to use and maneuver; I searched Brown v. Board of Education and found at least 12 lists of articles and lesson plans. It is a no-fuss website where one does not have to “dig” and search to get the content that they want.
A great benefit that this site offers is that once teachers are certified, they can sign to to receive as subscription to the site-sponsored magazine as well as to order free teaching lesson “kits” for certain events or topics. Most of the kits include primary documents, lesson guides, video and audio media and guided questions for teachers to use as a resource in their lessons. All a teacher has to do is sign up, order the kit, and will receive it in the mail within 7 to ten days. This is something that as beginning teachers, we can integrate into our lessons and use to help incorporate diversity into our classroom. The historical events and lessons focus on civil rights, diversity, and teaching about tolerance. Lesson plans range from teaching about the concept of beauty throughout the world to first-hand accounts from the Holocaust. This site would be a valuable resource not only for history classes, but sociology, psychology and anthropology courses as well, for it offers a lit bit of everything from the social sciences.