Where to find free ready-to-use Google Doc lesson plans and videos for secondary social studies
It’s 7:12 a.m. on a Tuesday, I’m leaning against the copy room wall, cold coffee seeping into the cuff of my sweater, and my whole planned lesson for 10th grade civics just went off the rails. The district’s new textbook streaming site is down for maintenance, the printed handouts I left on my desk are still sitting on my kitchen counter, and my fourth period – the one with half the varsity soccer team still running on post-tournament sugar and three kids who didn’t get their homework done because of the storm the night before – will be walking through my door in 18 minutes. I texted the three other social studies teachers in my building, begging for a backup, and my friend Lila sent back a one-word reply: Retro Report.
I’d heard the name before, but I’d never gotten around to looking it up. I pulled it up on my work laptop while the copy machine warmed up, and what I found stopped me: a library of short, journalist-made documentaries, every single one paired with a free, ready-to-use Google Doc lesson plan. No paywall, no 45-minute account setup, no asking for your school’s budget number. I searched “civil rights” to match what I was supposed to cover that day, clicked on the 12-minute video about the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike, and one click later I had my own copy of the lesson plan saved to my Google Drive. I dropped it into Google Classroom, wrote a quick bell ringer on the whiteboard, and made it to my room before the first kid showed up.
I expected the video to be the cringey, overly scripted thing most educational videos are, with stilted narration and outdated footage. But this had actual interviews with surviving strikers, archival clips from the marches, context I’d never even thought to include in my own lessons – like how two workers died because the city wouldn’t fix broken garbage truck machinery, how the strike was as much about working class poverty as it was about segregation. When the video ended, I pulled up the discussion questions from the Google Doc, and the first hand up was Mia, the quiet kid who barely speaks even when I call on her. She said her grandma was a teenager in Memphis in 1968, and she’d never heard her grandma mention this strike, even though they’d talked about MLK’s assassination before. By the end of the period, half the class was talking about how the garbage collectors in our own town still don’t get paid sick leave, something they’d read about in the local paper the month before. That’s the kind of conversation I spend hours trying to plan, and it just happened, with zero prep from me.
I’ve been teaching for 8 years, and I homeschool my 8th grade nephew two days a week this year while his mom finishes nursing training, so I’m always on the hunt for good free materials. Most of the time, free means you’re spending an hour converting a PDF to an editable doc, cutting out the outdated questions, and aligning it to your state’s standards before you can use it. The cheap lesson plans on Teacher Pay Teachers are hit or miss, and the good ones cost more than I want to spend out of my own pocket most weeks. Retro Report’s lesson plans are all already aligned to national and state standards, they have primary source excerpts built right in, extension activities for kids who want to go deeper, and everything is already in Google Docs so you can cut whatever you don’t need, add your own bits, and go. It’s all totally free, even for parents who don’t work at a school.
A few weeks back, my nephew was complaining that his school’s lesson on the opioid crisis only lasted two days and didn’t explain how it all started. I pulled up Retro Report’s lesson on the origins of the crisis, we watched the 14-minute video after lunch, and the discussion questions were right there in the Google Doc. We didn’t do the whole writing activity, just talked through the questions, and he ended up staying an extra 20 minutes asking questions about why pharma companies got away with lying for so long. For parents who want to supplement what their kids are learning at school, or who homeschool and don’t have a big district curriculum budget, that’s perfect – no prep, just something to spark a real conversation.
Other teachers I tell this to always ask what the catch is. The only downside I’ve found is that most of the materials are built for middle and high school, so if you teach elementary you won’t find as much to work with. There are no ads on the videos, no weird pop-ups, no selling your email to textbook companies. Retro Report is funded by journalism nonprofits, so all the content is free to use forever, no strings attached.
I still plan my own lessons when I have the time. There’s nothing like building something that fits exactly what your class needs that week. But some weeks, I’m grading 120 research papers, my own kid has a fever, I spent the whole night at a school board meeting arguing for more classroom supplies, and I just don’t have the energy to build something from scratch. Retro Report doesn’t fix the fact that most of us are overworked and underpaid, that we’re asked to do more every year with less. But it takes one thing off your to-do list. It gives you a good lesson, a good video, good questions that get kids talking, for free, in two minutes.
I’ve been working my way through their collection slowly – there’s lessons on everything from the history of hip hop to the 2008 financial crash to the early days of the COVID pandemic. Last month one of my colleagues used a Retro Report lesson for her annual administrator observation, and she got a glowing review. I still pass the link along to every new teacher I meet, and every parent who asks me for good at-home learning materials. It’s not a solution to every problem in education, but it’s a really good thing to have in your back pocket for the mornings when everything goes wrong.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Where to find free ready-to-use Google Doc lesson plans and videos for secondary social studies