Before Your Students Walk Back In, Pause

This is the challenge Or Initiative addressed head-on when we joined the Institute for Curriculum Services (ICS) and a passionate group of educators for the digital workshop "The Digital Front Line: Navigating the Arab-Israeli Conflict in an Age of Viral Information" last month.

Why We’re Working With ICS

Because of our experience in the classroom, as well as our research, curriculum development and anti-bias work at Facing History & Ourselves and the Anti-Defamation League, we have a keen eye for identifying skillful approaches to teaching complex histories.

What drew us to ICS is the quality and integrity of their historical scholarship. ICS works with K–12 teachers to ensure accuracy and depth in instruction about Jewish history and antisemitism. Their curriculum on the Arab-Israeli conflict is among the most rigorous and multi-narrative options available to secondary educators.

We believe that together, we address what the field needs most: an approach that connects deep content knowledge with the skills to navigate how students have been encountering related content; in fragments, in their feeds, before the bell rings.

The Problem We Discovered Together

Imagine this: You are a high school history teacher, preparing a new unit on the Middle East conflict. Even though you are focusing on history, the topic is very much alive in today’s headlines, in protests on college and high school campuses, and in the comment sections your students read between third and fourth period. You expect that many of your students are already forming beliefs and feelings about the conflict before you have introduced a single primary source. You are not sure whether you should address it at all. What do you do?

ICS brought the high-quality historical framework for answering that question with depth and care. Or Initiative brought tools to address the reality that the classroom curriculum is far from the only place — or even the first place — that young people are hearing about contentious topics and contested histories.

Our advice to the educators in the workshop and, more generally as they prepare for next year? Don't ignore what your students are experiencing online. Help them build the skills and dispositions to integrate it into an understanding of the world grounded in evidence, self-awareness, and empathy. The first step in that process is learning how to pause.

The Pause Tool

The Pause Tool is the first lesson in Or Initiative's upcoming Social Media Toolbox. Using it requires something many teachers instinctively avoid: bringing social media into the classroom. But it also means experiencing social media posts differently than we normally do: as a collective and on a shared screen rather than individually on our own devices. We believe this is a meaningful shift that can subtly unlock different ways of feeling, thinking, and talking about online content. And it does not require that students have their phones in class.

At the workshop, Or Initiative followed ICS's deep dive through their rich and rigorous historical investigation of the Arab-Israeli conflict with a TikTok video. The group watched a young woman sing about the history of Palestine — a version including several contested claims — to the melody of a sea shanty (trending audio on the platform) while applying her makeup. The content, style, and tone of the video produced a range of strong reactions.

Then we turned to the reflection prompts at the heart of the Pause Tool:

• Before you react to the content you just watched, observe your emotions. Try not to make judgments or analyze your thoughts yet, but just write down your initial feelings.
• What did you notice in your body when you viewed this content? Did your heart race, jaw tighten, stomach turn, eyes widen, or something else?
• What choices does the content creator make that you think are trying to shape how you think or feel?
• What would you still need to know in order to form an opinion that is truly your own about the content?

As the workshop participants experienced, engaging with prompts like these slows students down before they react to emotionally-charged content by guiding them through noticing how they're feeling, examining their reaction honestly, getting curious about what they don't know, and then making a conscious choice about how — or whether — to engage.

The Zoom room really showed up. Cameras came on, mutes came off, and when it was time to close the breakout rooms, teachers needed every last second. They were finally in a space that took seriously what their students are living every day.

One theme surfaced again and again: social media is not going away. It is not a phase, a distraction, or a problem that more restrictive parenting or stricter phone policies will resolve. It is an integral part of the information environment students are growing up with, and it is time to treat it that way. One middle school teacher we interviewed put it directly:

"My students live online in a way that I don't, not at all… It's like they're coming from another country. I'll say to the kids, 'I have no idea. Teach me what you're looking at. Explain this meme to me.' That has to be part of it; teachers have to say: 'Show me what you're seeing online.'"

When educators in this workshop named that truth, the energy shifted. Because acknowledging social media as part of students' lives makes it possible to stop treating it as an irritant to good instruction and instead, start using it as an asset.

What We are Building

The fact that more than 200 educators registered for this workshop—on a weeknight, in the closing weeks of the school year—confirmed something Or Initiative's research has documented consistently: teachers are hungry for guidance on how to address the ways that students' digital experiences have reshaped how they learn, relate, and make meaning. That hunger is not going away in September. It may well be more acute.

We are designing Or Initiative's Social Media Toolbox to support teachers through this process. The Pause Tool is the first of many we are developing to help educators and students:

• Analyze how social media content is designed to amplify emotions
• Separate the claims made in a post from the evidence offered to support them
• Transform memes, slogans, and rage bait into claims or questions that can be examined and discussed
• Imagine how online exchanges would translate into face-to-face conversation

We are also building the partnerships the field needs to make this work real at scale. In addition to the work with ICS, we will be piloting Sway Classroom— an AI-scaffolded tool that prepares students for one-on-one dialogue across genuine disagreement — as part of our Professional Learning Community.

None of these organizations is doing the same thing, and that is the point. The field is fragmented. Or Initiative's goal is to be the integrating force that connects deep content knowledge, digital discernment practice, and civil discourse skill-building into a coherent approach that teachers can easily use.

We will be rolling out early versions of the tools in our Social Media Toolbox over the coming months, and we are pleased to continue our partnership with ICS through at least four additional workshops in the 2026–27 school year. Summer is the window. We hope you will use it to get ready — and that you will build with us in the year(s) to come.

Watch this space. Find out more now at orinitiative.org. And please follow our WORks in Progress blog here on LinkedIn.

Dan Sigward is Director of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning at Or Initiative. He previously served as Editorial Director at Facing History and Ourselves. Rachel Sato is Research, Teaching and Learning Manager at Or Initiative and former Education Director at ADL San Diego.