The magnitude of the terrorist attacks last weekend in France and Lebanon sent students to class with questions yesterday morning, and teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District took on the task of explaining the tragedy to their students in a productive way.

Teachers throughout LAUSD told the Los Angeles Times how they did so.

According to ethics teacher Randall Bustamante, he learned that most of his students came to class Monday morning with information—often wrong information—learned from social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

To negate this, Bustamante had his students focus on media coverage versus the history that led to the attacks, the Times said.

Teacher Tommy Flanagan also did the same in his classroom, breaking his students up into groups and asking them to learn about the terror attacks not only in France, but also in Lebanon and in Kenya, where a terrorist attack in April left 147 college students dead.

Today, the groups will present their findings and a discussion will be had with the entire class.

Former teacher of the year and current history teacher Daniel Jocz told the Times he dedicated an hour of classroom time to the subject yesterday, choosing to focus on teaching his students what ISIS is.

"The students are currently studying U.S. foreign policy, so Jocz played a clip of President Obama’s press conference, then asked them what advice they would give Obama regarding America’s response to the attacks. They discussed drone strikes, bombings and diplomacy, but didn’t come up with any good solutions,” the article said.

This inconclusive result was partly what Jocz wanted—so that students could understand how complex a situation is despite social media making it seem to appear cut and dry.

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Article by Nicole Gorman, Education World Contributor

11/17/2015