Transatlantic Outreach Program

Join us in wishing TOP Education Projects Manager Mallory Bubar all the best as she transitions to a new role as Associate Director of the Holocaust & Human Rights Education Center in White Plains, NY! In her two years with TOP, Mallory has put so much heart into supporting our TOP Fellows and Alumni, taking the TOP Lessons Portal from a long-held dream to a reality, and launching our "Germany Today" speaker series. Thank you, Mallory, for your hard work and dedication! We will miss you, but know that you will continue to do great things in your new role.

As she parts, Mallory send this message to our TOP Alumni:

"I want to thank you all for making my time at TOP particularly meaningful. Working with all of you wonderful alumni (and of course Jenny!) has been a true highlight and something I will certainly miss. That said, education is a small world, and I have a feeling our paths will continue to cross. Again, thank you all for being so incredible and making my time at TOP so special."

Here at TOP, one of our favorite things is seeing how teachers translate their in into lessons and learning experiences for their students back home!

2026 TOP Fellow Rhonda O'Keefe shared how she made her 6th grade students a part of the experience by having them research Germany and create challenges for her to complete during the tour. Their challenges included ordering a Döner, finding examples of sustainability, and visiting historical sites.

Rhonda created a website where she documented completion of the challenges, as well as the lessons she created for her application and her post-tour lesson requirement.

Check out the website here: https://sites.google.com/view/top2026/home

Thanks so much for sharing your experience with us and with your students, Rhonda!

TOP 3 took part in a during their to this summer! Their photos show how sustainability is a lived value woven through Germany's culture, society, education system, economy, etc.

Here are a few of the photos they snapped while on their tour! do you remember any of these from your study tour? What other examples of sustainability did you learn about?

Over the night of August 12 to 13, 1961, the East German governmant began putting up a barrier of barbed wire and concrete slabs designed to stop its own citizens from fleeing to the West. Over the next 28 years, the Berlin Wall stood as a symbol of division and oppression, claiming at least 140 lives before it fell on November 9, 1989. Now 65 years later, the remaining parts of the Wall serve as a memorial to this time period and to its victims.

It is an honor for us to bring social studies educators to these memorials and historical spaces to learn about the division of Germany and to help them make connections to their own classroom instruction. Through them, their students are better able to understand the past and how those lessons can help us shape the world today.

, what were your experiences visiting the during your and how have you used this experience in your classroom?

Stiftung Berliner Mauer

The 2026 TOP Study Tours have concluded and as our cohort of social studies teachers begin the new school year, they are also reflecting on their experiences from this summer and the connections they can make to their own classroom instruction. In this article by Eric Erickson, he breaks down specific lessons from today's that can help his students better understand important concepts in their courses.

https://www.monitorsaintpaul.com/stories/modern-germany-takeaways-from-a-teacher-fellowship,173469

Modern Germany: Takeaways from a teacher fellowship - Midway Como Frogtown Monitor As a social studies teacher at Como Park High School, Germany enters the scope of my U.S. History course at a predictable time. You can’t study the 20th century without recognizing the outsized …

Today TOP 3 had the great honor to meet with a representative from the Stolpersteine project to learn more about the project and their important work to keep alive the memory of the victims of national socialism. We also visited a cross-generational housing project in and were able to learn more about initiatives to help people "grow old with vitaility."

It has been an inspiring ten days in 🇩🇪 and we have so much new information and so many new lesson ideas to bring home to our students and fellow teachers in the U.S.!

Yesterday TOP 3 had a fantastic visit at the Auswärtiges Amt in ! We were able to visit the archives to see some important historical documents and had the opportunity to meet with a representative of the Foreign Office to discuss the relevance of the -American partnership. 🇩🇪🇺🇸