Katherine Schulten
Katherine Schulten builds classroom-ready lesson plans that turn news, parenting dilemmas and teen culture into exercises in ethics, literacy and student voice for The New York Times Learning Network. She is a longtime editor with the Learning Network, working on the site since 2006 after many years as a high school English teacher and literacy consultant in public schools. Her work focuses on helping educators use Times coverage as structured prompts that invite teenagers to connect events and everyday life to their own ideas, questions and arguments.
Lesson plans on parenting and life skills
Schulten’s parenting-related coverage sits within a broader strand of life skills lesson plans that ask students to think about everyday decisions and dilemmas. In her lesson plan on an ethical dilemma in parenting, she presents a family decision as a classroom exercise in judgment and responsibility, positioning parenting as a relatable context for exploring how choices affect others. She also uses short “15-minute lesson plan” formats on themes like food and community, giving teachers quick, structured activities that tie personal and family life to wider social questions.
Across these pieces, she writes in a clear, directive style that breaks complex situations into steps teachers can follow, framing discussion questions and activities that keep the focus on how young people reason through real-world scenarios.
Teen media literacy and digital life
Schulten devotes significant attention to media literacy and the digital lives of teenagers, designing lesson plans that foreground how young people encounter information online. In “Memes and Teens: A Media Literacy Lesson Plan,” she uses internet culture as an entry point to questions about how messages are created, shared and interpreted, encouraging students to analyze seemingly light content with a critical eye. A lesson plan on social media protections looks at how platforms and policies affect teenagers, turning current debates about safety and regulation into guided classroom inquiry. She extends this approach to emerging technologies in pieces like “Fears of ‘Rogue Machines,’” where she uses concerns about advanced systems as a way for students to grapple with risk, responsibility and the language used to describe innovation.
These articles consistently pair explanatory context with close-reading prompts and writing tasks, aiming to build both awareness of digital issues and the skills to articulate thoughtful responses.
Pop culture and student voice in the classroom
Another distinguishing thread in Schulten’s work is her use of pop culture to invite student voice and participation.
In “Taylor and Travis Sentence Scramble,” she turns a high-interest celebrity story into a playful grammar and structure exercise, using familiar names to draw students into close attention to language. “Your Classroom’s Current Top Songs” asks teenagers to share and reflect on the music they listen to, providing teachers with a framework to connect classroom discussion to the cultural references that matter to their students.
On the Learning Network, she supports daily opinion questions and contests that solicit thousands of pieces of teen writing, art and multimedia work, giving young people regular opportunities to respond to news and culture in their own words. Across these pop-culture pieces, she treats student enthusiasm as a resource, shaping it into assignments that practice analysis, argument and reflection rather than simple fandom.
Teaching current events and complex issues
Schulten also writes lesson plans that help classrooms engage with significant news events and complex topics over time. In “The 25th Anniversary of 9/11,” she creates a structure for teachers to address a major historical event, guiding students through timelines, testimony and media coverage so they can consider how remembrance and narrative work in public life.
Articles like “Gathering and Eating” and a 15-minute plan on food and community use everyday activities as bridges to discussions of culture, tradition and social connection. In “Space Origami,” she connects hands-on creative work to coverage of space exploration, showing how science reporting can be translated into tangible classroom experiences.
Across these diverse topics, her format is consistent: she selects a piece of Times journalism, distills its key questions, and builds a sequence of reading, discussion and writing tasks that help teachers bring complex coverage into age-appropriate, participatory lessons.
Taken together, Schulten’s body of work is defined by its combination of parenting and life skills scenarios, teen-centered media literacy, pop culture hooks and news-driven lesson structures. Her articles serve educators who want to use Times reporting as the basis for conversations about how young people live, learn and make decisions, with a particular emphasis on amplifying student voice in the process.
4 more parenting journalists.
Abigail Shrier
Abigail Shrier is a journalist, columnist at The Free Press, and bestselling author whose work centers on parenting, family relationships, and the cultural forces shaping childhood. She writes the weekly “Tough Love” advice column, where readers send hard personal and family dilemmas and she focuses on concrete situations and practical choices for parents, partners, and adult children. She also publishes essays and reported features on parenting that examine how institutions and professionals influence everyday family life, including criminalization of ordinary parental decisions and therapeutic advice that leads to “no contact” with parents. Her books “Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up” and “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters” extend her reporting on therapy, gender medicine, and youth. She also covers education, gender, speech, activism, and censorship, approaching these subjects as reported arguments.
Alesandra Dubin
Alesandra Dubin uses parenting to examine how travel, independence, and everyday logistics shape family life. She is a digital travel and lifestyle journalist with more than 15 years’ experience covering parenting, travel, food, events, fashion and beauty, entertainment, home, and viral content for consumer and business outlets. Her work has appeared in Insider, Good Housekeeping, Parents, Esquire, Woman’s Day, Prevention, Glamour, Shondaland, AFAR, and TODAY. Her parenting beat centers on family travel, including flights, camps, hotels, destinations, and the ways parents protect their identity and relationships while caring for children. She also covers practical planning, from room layouts and prices to crowds, tickets, transit, pacing, and family-friendly dining. She reports through candid first-person stories, then draws out clear service advice and emotional insights about care, autonomy, stress, and family dynamics.
Alyson Krueger
Alyson Krueger is a freelance journalist who covers how people live, parent, gather and chase status in contemporary culture through reported narratives anchored in specific communities, events and social scenes. She writes for The New York Times and other publications and has contributed to The New York Times since 2013. Her parenting work centers on fatherhood and family rituals, using observed behavior and everyday routines to show changing family roles. She often reports on urban social life and leisure, including how people socialize and find rest in demanding environments, from city winters to shifting ski seasons. Her business and fashion stories examine the social meaning of wellness practices, marketing with superheroes, playful luxury food and gifting. She also covers major events, weddings and fan culture, paying attention to atmosphere, crowds and what draws people together.
Amie Windsor
Amie Windsor links parenting and everyday family life directly to local policy, community crises and governance decisions. She is the Opinion Editor at The Press Democrat and is described by the masthead as the Community Journalism Team Lead, drawing on nearly a decade in community journalism with sustained coverage of city hall and school boards. She writes opinion columns and reported pieces on parenting under democratic stress, wildfire displacement, transportation planning, law enforcement technology and major energy infrastructure decisions. Her parenting work treats raising children as part of civic life under political instability, showing how structural shifts enter routines, emotional labor and family conversations. Her reporting on biking and walking projects, hybrid police cruisers and dam decommissioning keeps policy and infrastructure grounded in specific projects, residents and public processes, emphasizing civic engagement, community resilience and resident-first coverage.