Nearly every day since she first received her teacher’s resource guide from Echoes and Reflections this spring, Becky Henderson-Howie has used it to teach her students in northern New York about the Holocaust.

The middle- and high school English, Holocaust and Public Speaking teacher met Echoes and Reflections educator Jennifer Goss at the Belfer National Conference for Educators at USHMM in November 2015, and Goss encouraged her to sign up for Echoes and Reflections’ free online professional development courses.

Echoes and Reflections is a partnership between USC Shoah Foundation, Yad Vashem and Anti-Defamation League. It includes 10 lessons that include everything educators need to teach the Holocaust, including survivor testimony clips, primary source documents and discussion questions. Its free online professional development courses each month introduce educators to the entire program.

Since taking the course, Henderson-Howie has used it to support her teaching of the book Yellow Star, by Jennifer Roy, which is about a young girl who survived the Lodz ghetto. Echoes and Reflections’ images, texts and testimony clips about Lodz help bring the book to life.

Henderson-Howie appreciates that the testimony clips are embedded within the lessons and that they are short and focused, which makes them useful to illustrate a point within a lesson. Her students love seeing people tell their stories, especially local survivors who have come to school to speak to them.

“The visual testimony is a great way to help kids prepare to hear stories in person,” she said. “It further helps them to understand what a gift it is to meet those folks face-to-face since we know survivors will pass on, too. Having the visual testimony affords them the opportunity to hear from those who experienced the Holocaust first-hand.”

Henderson-Howie said her reason for teaching the Holocaust is short and simple.

“I want to complicate my students' thinking,” Henderson-Howie said. ‘There are no easy answers to most of their questions. Each topic is deep and multi-layered. In teaching about the Holocaust, I can help kids see that rarely are things clear-cut. They must be informed to make sense of the circumstances, and to move on and try to do better in the future.”

Echoes and Reflections resources are authoritative and credible, Henderson-Howie said, and useful immediately – not just for Holocaust educators, either. And, of course, the fact that it is completely free is also a bonus.

“I especially like the early lesson about the difference between natural and human catastrophes,” she said. “This is a lesson that is transferrable.”