After seventh grade teacher Rebekah Lang taught the Holocaust for the first time last year, she wasn’t satisfied with her performance. So, she turned to Echoes and Reflections to improve her and her students’ learning experience the next time around.

Lang, who at the time was teaching at The Swain School in Allentown, Penn., had recently started teaching social studies (her background is English) and had never taught the Holocaust before. Unsure of where to turn for guidance, she used the few materials she could find to teach it to her students but knew she hadn’t done the topic justice.

“I had shocked them with a few statistics and pictures but not really given them anything meaningful to benefit them for future studies or the rest of their lives as humans,” Lang said. “So I knew I wanted to do something more.”

Lang found Echoes and Reflections online and remembered a colleague praising it, so she signed up for a three-week online professional development course for teachers, hosted each month by Echoes and Reflections staff and educators.

Echoes and Reflections, a no-cost professional development program for secondary educators, offers primary sources, informational texts, and visual history testimony from witnesses to help teach about the Holocaust and address academic standards, including Common Core Standards. It incorporates testimony from the Visual History Archive and USC Shoah Foundation’s IWitness.

After getting her master’s degree online, Lang said she is well-versed in online courses – but was very impressed with the Echoes and Reflections course.

“This was so engaging and so interactive,” she said. “I felt like I was meeting the people there and really having this conversation with them. The format was really powerful. It showed a lot of great techniques that we can use with our students and it gave us time to really experience them for ourselves.”

After taking the course, Lang used Echoes and Reflections to introduce the basics of the Holocaust, including pre-war life, Kristallnacht and propaganda, to her students before they read Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl and Maus part one. Historical images and testimony clips from the Visual History Archive helped enrich her students’ understanding of the Holocaust as they read the texts, Lang said.

“The students understood the basic details of the Holocaust but this was the first time it really came alive for them,” Lang said. “This was the first time they were able to admire the strength of the people in the testimonies. They connected with it more meaningfully.”

"[Echoes and Reflections] was so engaging and so interactive."

She was also amazed to discover how deeply her students connected with the themes of the Holocaust, like discrimination and propaganda, because they have experienced and observed it in their everyday lives. The discussions the class had about this, Lang said, were profound.

“At that point I realized I didn’t have to make the Holocaust relevant to them, they understood hatred and all of that,” Lang said. “I more had to show there was hope and a way of surviving. And Echoes and Reflections had good materials for that too.”

Next year, Lang will be moving to a different school, Abundant Life Christian School in New Jersey, and plans to use Echoes and Reflections to teach her all of her classes, which will include grades 5-12.