Commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2025 with Microsoft Education

Celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day with Microsoft Education tools. Discover creative ways to teach about Dr. King's legacy and lasting impact.

On January 20, 2025, the United States honors Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s significant contributions to civil rights and equality. Martin Luther King Jr. Day serves as a reminder of the ongoing journey towards justice and the role we all play in it. With tools like Microsoft Copilot and Learning Accelerators, you can take meaningful steps to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day at school and integrate his teachings into your classroom.

Dr. King's legacy inspires generations to strive for a more just and equitable world through reflection, education, and service. This day isn't just about remembering-it's about taking action. It's an opportunity for students and educators to reflect on his impact and engage in meaningful service to their communities. Learn how you can create impactful learning experiences by connecting reflection and action with help from Microsoft Education.

Design inspiring experiences with Microsoft Copilot

You have the unique ability to connect ideas, themes, and resources to spark lifelong learning while honoring your students' interests and passions. With Copilot, you can enhance the process of designing these experiences, saving time and effort. In minutes, you can refresh lessons or begin to develop new activities.

Use these prompts in Copilot to create more impactful lessons to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day at school:

• Foundational resource curation - Create a multimedia text set for [grade/age level] students that explores the theme of community through Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s life and work. Include a brief description of 2-3 sentences summarizing its content and connection to the theme of community. Include external links to speeches, letters, images, and videos. Also include 1-2 reflection questions per item for students to use. Put this text set into an easy-to-read table.
• Skill-building activity design - Create an activity based on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous speeches for [grade/age level] students to practice analyzing themes across texts, synthesizing ideas through writing, and constructing arguments. Include speech excerpts that are at least 5 sentences long each, with accompanying themes and guiding questions for reflection. Also include links for where students can access the full original speeches.
• Innovative mini-unit development - Create a mini-unit for secondary school students that explores lesser-known aspects of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s activism, including his stance on economic justice, labor rights, global human rights, and opposition to the Vietnam War. For each lesson, provide open-ended questions to encourage student reflection and discussion. Additionally, include project ideas and multimedia resources to enhance engagement.

Use this prompt to spark ideas for impactful service projects:

• Empower changemakers - Design a [grade/age level] activity that encourages students to create or join a community movement focused on civil rights, social justice, or community service in their communities. Encourage creativity, collaboration, and actionable planning. Keep the activity age-appropriate, engaging, and inspiring, ensuring students feel empowered to make a difference. Provide clear steps, examples, or frameworks to help them succeed.

Use these follow-up prompts with Copilot to delve deeper into other perspectives or adapt the activity to better fit your classroom needs:

• Make it manageable - How can I structure this activity into manageable steps or sessions that fit within a [length of time] over the course of a [set time period: week/month/semester]?
• Provide inspirational guidance - Can you provide examples of successful youth-led community movements that might inspire my students?
• Help build momentum - What are some examples of small, actionable steps students can take to start their movement and build momentum?

Copilot can offer you tools and flexibility to adapt activities for your unique classroom, ensuring your students feel empowered and equipped to make a difference.

Explore how Copilot can help you design learning experiences:

Bring Learning Accelerators to your classroom to enhance information literacy

Help your students explore Dr. King's life with Search Progress and Search Coach.

• Search Progress is a powerful tool designed to build next generation information literacy skills. Educators can gain visibility into each student's progress by evaluating how they search, assess sources, and collect citations with Microsoft Teams and Search Progress.
• Search Coach builds next generation information literacy skills to help students find reputable, timely, and relevant sources for assignments.

Get started by creating a Search Progress assignment in Microsoft Teams for Education. After giving your assignment a title, you can add details like specific learning objectives and instructions. You might consider asking students to reflect on Dr. King's social justice work by having them research historical or contemporary examples of civil disobedience.

With Search Progress, you can customize the assignment by including:

• Sources - Set the number of sources you'd like your students to collect.
• Explanation - Ask students to describe why they chose and saved a particular source.
• Reflection - Ask students to reflect on all of their sources and which ones were most helpful.

Then, once your students start their assignments in Search Coach, encourage them to share their search tips and as a class discuss why those tips are key for finding reliable results. This will help reinforce their learning around information literacy and Dr. King's life.

Learn how you can expand students' information literacy skills with these resources:

Celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day at school by honoring his leadership

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s message of unity and equality continues to inspire us. With innovative tools like Copilot and skill-building Learning Accelerators, you and your students can explore and honor Dr. King's visionary leadership. By incorporating Dr. King's teachings into your curriculum, you can create a meaningful learning experience that resonates with students and encourages them to take positive action in their communities.

Join us in celebrating Dr. King's legacy, and commit to building a more just, inclusive world.

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