Educator Resources

Prepare Your Students. Hearing from a descendant of a Holocaust survivor will be a profoundly moving experience for your students.

We have created a list of resources you can use for teaching the Holocaust, preparing your students for a speaker, and complementary webinars and professional development opportunities.

Get Your Class Ready for Our Speakers

  • These two lesson plan options are designed specifically to help facilitate students’ engagement with a speaker.

  • Encourage the students to write a thank you letter and be specific about what they learned from the speaker.

  • When the conversation continues at home, the lessons are even stronger. See the draft letters below and feel free to use the prompts included.

    Draft letter: PDF version

    Draft letter Google doc template: (to download as a Word document and edit directly)

Helping the Speaker’s Story Stick

Why Do We Remember

  • See the suggested prompts for a class discussion.

  • 8:54-MINUTE VIDEO

    This video provides an overview of the Holocaust, and why we remember the Holocaust as a Nation. (USHMM)

Prepare Students to Empathize

  • This guide from Facing History and Ourselves, provides a framework to think about the significance of a single story and how experiences shape identity.

    In this classroom video, students view, react to, and discuss first-person accounts of the Holocaust. Read the transcript of the video.

    Facing History and Ourselves

Teaching the Holocaust and Antisemitism: Educator Resources and Guidelines

Students’ Hardest Questions

  • When you, as an educator, take the time to consider the rationale for your lesson on the Holocaust, you will be more likely to select content that speaks to your students’ interests and that provides them with a clearer understanding of a complex history.

  • Students have questions while learning about the Holocaust. The USHMM has created these answers to help you.

  • From Echoes and Reflections, as students study the Holocaust, they will have many questions. Answering and engaging in discussion about these questions that arise in the classroom is a valuable opportunity to refute incorrect information, add additional content and context, and deepen learning.

Lesson Planning and Prep

  • The following videos are helpful guides to prepare for classroom instruction. Each video is roughly 15 minutes long and provides historical context, methodological and pedagogical suggestions.

  • The videos share Museum-created classroom-ready lessons and digital learning tools and include guidelines for teaching about the Holocaust, appropriate pedagogy, and classroom strategies.

  • These tools provide a variety of ways to learn and teach about this important history.

Guidelines and Video Resources

  • Ask a Museum Educator: Fill out a short form and an educator will answer you.

  • These guidelines reflect approaches appropriate for effective teaching in general and are particularly relevant to Holocaust education.

  • Resources from the USHMM for lesson plans and training materials that match your curricular needs

Classroom-Ready Content

  • IWitness Activity Librarywill engage students of all ages with standards-aligned activities that navigate diverse subjects and universal themes.

  • This library of comprehensive Holocaust content is classroom-ready and prepared with today’s students and classrooms in mind. 

  • USHMM: Museum historians and educators have curated these videos and accompanying lesson plans for use in middle and high school classrooms

  • The Museum offers a wide selection of online resources about the Holocaust and other genocides and mass atrocities.

Teaching Antisemitism

  • In this activity, students will develop an understanding of what it means to be a bystander and its impact.

  • This activity will focus defining antisemitism historically and exploring the contemporary features of this of hatred.

  • This activity allows students to explore the basics of Judaism and to understand antisemitism as more than a hatred, but an age-old conspiracy theory rooted in history, that relies on stereotypes and tropes to continue.

  • This activity defines antisemitism and contemporary antisemitism, and focuses on Denmark's collective pride around the Holocaust-era rescue of its Jewish citizens and how this pride was reinvigorated after a 2015 attack on a synagogue in Copenhagen, Denmark.

  • This video editing activity examines antisemitism in historical and contemporary settings.

  • The following resources promote effective teaching about antisemitism and the Holocaust. 

Professional Development for Educators

Echoes and Reflections

  • Echoes & Reflections’ one-hour webinars are a great tool for both those looking to be educated and those looking for guidance in educating.

    Check out their catalog as well as their list of upcoming webinars.

  • These professional learning opportunities are led by experienced facilitators and cover both basic concepts and specific themes as they relate to Holocaust education.

  • Echoes and Reflections offers mini classes and three part classes that are great resources for supporting your student’s understanding of Holocaust history.

  • Advanced Learning Courses are for educators who want to deepen their own understanding of the Holocaust and gain skills and tools to bring into their classrooms.

US Holocaust Memorial Museum

  • Attend a free, virtual three-day professional learning conference designed to support accurate, meaningful teaching about the Holocaust.

  • Learn about the Museum's national corps of skilled educators leading efforts to promote quality Holocaust education.

  • These short videos, produced by Museum educators and historians, guide how to teach about the Holocaust. They cover Museum resources, guidelines for teaching about the Holocaust, appropriate pedagogy, and classroom.