Across the board, many administrators view high school curriculum development as one of the biggest issues in education today. Shifting educational requirements, ever-increasing workloads, and growing time constraints challenge high school teachers to engage in curriculum development without compromising existing classroom instruction, as well as their own sense of autonomy.

These challenges were compounded by COVID-19 as districts faced school closures and students moved between in-person and at-home classroom environments. Teachers used a patchwork of online learning resources, including free high school learning resources to support online instruction in social studies, English language arts and other electives. Lacking a cohesive strategy or appropriate high school teaching resources, student learning inevitably suffered.

As a result, the role of technology in education is changing to support more meaningful online learning engagement. Resources like Gale In Context: High School help shape consistent high school online learning environments through multifaceted, high-quality content and instructional support that gives administrators, librarians, teachers, and other educators the latitude and teaching support they need to address these challenges. And all these online resources are often accessible through your high school library.

SUPPORTING CLASSROOM INSTRUCTION FROM A TO Z

Gale In Context: High School

As a secondary school educator, you probably realize the significant role content plays in meeting national and state curriculum standards and college admissions. Revamping your curriculum to meet expectations of students, parents, and universities can feel daunting whether you are a board member, administrator, librarian, or school teacher. Gale In Context: High School delivers cross-curricular material and educational online high school resources designed to fine-tune and reinforce the critical thinking, problem-solving, communication, collaboration, creativity, and innovation needed for student success beyond middle school.

Students will benefit from a digital tool that:

Features an enhanced user experience with an intuitive navigation and design elements to help high school students quickly orient across Gale products to find what they’re looking for in support of their studies.
Delivers a tremendous variety of credible reference materials, including primary sources, multimedia, critical essays, academic journals, and more in a single-source solution.
Enables students to explore numerous topics within business and economics, geography, government, history, literature, science and health, social issues, and other subject areas.
Includes accessibility and readability features like translation, text-size adjustment and text-to-speech to meet students where they are and help drive learning success.
Encourages educators to collect, organize, customize, and share instructional materials in support of district objectives.

AWARD-WINNING ONLINE LEARNING RESOURCES

There’s a complete library of disciplines and topics within the Gale In Context series waiting for high schoolers to explore. And all of these resources are specifically designed to support in-person and distance learning. Read on to get a sampling of these online high school teaching resources and discover how you can use them to support students in their studies and help take their learning in new and exciting directions.

Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints

Is capital punishment just? Does my vote really count? High school may be the first time along the K-12 educational continuum a student is challenged to answer pressing, real-life social questions independent of rote learning beyond middle school. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints encourages deeper classroom discussions through resources offering informed, differing views that encourage learners to think critically and form their own opinions. The social issues resource is designed to help high school students navigate an impressive web-based collection of contemporary high school learning sources touching on today’s hottest social issues, such as capital punishment and voting rights.

Opposing Viewpoints is a rich resource for debaters that:

Offers quick and easy access to a wide range of content on frequently studied and discussed real-world issues to establish best practices that will help guide future research-based activities after graduation.
Inspires critical engagement on today’s hot-button topics both inside and outside of the classroom through a vast repository of credible learning resources, including articles, infographics, news, images, video, audio and more.
Delivers cross-curricular materials covering science, social studies, current events, and language arts.
Includes a bold, colorful site-navigation design consistent with the Gale In Context suite that supports an enhanced user experience through one familiar, intuitive, and easy-to-use tool set to help students “jump in” to learning.

Gale In Context: World History

There are common threads running through history that tie cultures together and help explain the relevance of current events in contemporary life. Gale In Context: World History represents a digital encyclopedia of history, stretching all the way back to the beginning of recorded history, capturing events impacting today’s headlines. The material supports teaching moments through high school learning resources that tie all those invisible threads together to help young researchers visualize the impact of history on contemporary life.

Students studying history can conduct research-based activities that give context to broader social considerations, such as the origins of the civil rights movement, the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and the history of democracy in America. The database enables project-based research across recorded history through rare primary source materials, e-books and other reliable reference and multimedia content aligned to national curriculum standards that is cross-searchable with Gale In Context: U.S. History.

Gale In Context: Science

Have you ever wondered how wind, solar and hydro power work? Or what the science of a virus is? Gale In Context: Science integrates millions of full-text national and global publications, prominent science experiments and interactive simulations, and multimedia and top reference materials that enable teaching across the science curriculum to answer these and other questions. Young scientists can find lots of educational resources designed to deepen their literacy in biology, chemistry, earth and environmental science, physics and more.

As with other Gale In Context databases, the Science collection helps teach high school students how to create connections between significant science topics and hot-button social issues to give context to disruptive events in contemporary life.

+ A SPECIALIZED TOOL FOR EDUCATORS

Contemporary high school classrooms challenge teachers to meet instructional goals within the context of school standards and student needs. More recently, teachers have also had to shift between in-person and remote learning environments to accommodate students due to coronavirus outbreaks. Gale In Context: For Educators supports curriculum-building through Gale In Context student resources as well as Gale eBooks where it counts the most—in the classroom.

Gale In Context: For Educators

This award-winning resource provides hands-on lesson plans and instructional tools to help teachers stay on track with their professional goals. Teachers can use it to find and personalize digital learning, plan virtual and in-person activities, and foster equitable learning environments—all with high-quality, standards-aligned digital content.

The Learning Center helps high school teachers take the lead in real-time lesson planning and remote learning activities, with access to videos, tips, and tricks as well as tutorials and sample content sets. Teachers will also get a better understanding of product features and tools as well as database functionality, and discover ideas to create high school lesson plans that drive better learning outcomes.

The tool also connects parents to the appropriate subjects, high school teaching resources and high school courses needed to develop a standards-based high school homeschool curriculum for self-paced distance learning at different grade levels.