It’s not unusual for the 7th graders in Sarah Kopplin’s civics and contemporary issues class to come in with questions about the news.
Over these past few weeks, the middle schoolers in Shorewood, Wis., have wanted to talk about Minneapolis.
Kopplin’s students have seen videos on YouTube and TikTok of raids conducted in the city by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, and of widespread protests against the agency. Federal agents have shot and killed two people in Minneapolis during protests, Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
A few of her students at Shorewood Intermediate School, located in a suburb of Milwaukee, have family members in Minneapolis, Kopplin said. Others worry that similar ICE activity might be coming to their neighborhoods.
“I had a student tell the whole class that she was terrified she would come home, and her mom would not be there, even though she is a naturalized American citizen,” Kopplin said.
Earlier this year, her students did a deep dive into the Constitution, learning about the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law, and the 4th Amendment’s protection from unreasonable search and seizure.
“The kids have this baseline understanding about how things are supposed to work, but then they’re seeing things on social media, and there’s a disconnect,” Kopplin said. “Kids are just kind of disappointed in adults right now,” she added.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the state of Minnesota have both filed lawsuits against President Donald Trump’s administration over ICE activity in Minneapolis. The ACLU has claimed that ICE enforcement activities have violated individuals’ constitutional rights, while the state, along with the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, have argued that the deployment of federal officers has violated Minnesota’s sovereignty under the 10th Amendment, which limits federal powers to those spelled out in the Constitution.
Kopplin has tried to stay prepared to field students’ questions, but it can be challenging in a fast-moving, and emotional, news environment. “There’s a firehose of information coming at us everyday,” she said.
Still, it’s far from the first time Kopplin has had to address tough questions from kids in a politically charged environment. She’s taught through both Trump terms, the COVID pandemic, the killing of George Floyd in 2020, and the Jan. 6th insurrection.
From the start of every year, she tries to build a classroom community of trust that can support hard conversations—co-writing a “classroom constitution” with each group of students, and having them practice agreeing and disagreeing with low-stakes either/or questions at the beginning of the semester.
“One of the things they all agree with is they should all have a voice to ask whatever they want, and they should all be able to express themselves,” she said. It’s important to give them an opportunity to do so, Kopplin said: “The classroom is a laboratory for later civic life.”
As teachers once again find themselves helping students make sense of unprecedented events, Education Week has gathered educators’ insights from our reporting on discussing confusing, scary, or controversial topics in the classroom.
Though all of these stories feature teachers responding to specific moments in time, many of the approaches they used—allowing students to ask questions, providing historical context, correcting misinformation—have broad application.
See below for some of our collected coverage.
