7 Ways to make the Black Death relevant for today’s students

Why teach the Black Death?

The Black Death is one of those topics that grabs students’ attention the moment you mention it. A pandemic that wiped out an estimated 60% of Europe’s population in just a few years? That’s the kind of history that practically teaches itself.

But beyond the dramatic details, the Black Death offers a rich opportunity to build critical thinking skills, draw connections to modern events, and explore how societies respond to crisis. Many of your students will have some memory of the COVID-19 lockdowns, or have at least heard about it from their parents and carers, which makes this topic especially relevant.

Whether you’re teaching a world history unit or looking for cross-curricular connections to science and English Language Arts, these seven activities draw on ClickView’s Black Death topic resources to help your students dig deeper into one of history’s most transformative events. While the activities below are designed primarily for middle school classrooms, many of them work just as well with high school students who are studying the medieval period or the history of pandemics.

Connecting the Black Death to modern pandemics

One of the most powerful ways to make this topic stick is to help students see the parallels between historical and modern pandemics. The activities in this section encourage students to compare, contrast, and analyze how disease has shaped human history, from the 14th century through to today.

1) Compare pandemics with Venn diagrams

This is a straightforward activity that works across grade levels and gets students thinking comparatively from the start.

Have your students draw (or provide) a Venn diagram with one side labeled “Black Death” and the other labeled “COVID-19.” In the center, they list the commonalities between the two pandemics. On either side, they note what was unique to each.

Before they begin, consider screening ClickView’s What is the Black Death? video to build foundational knowledge. For a broader look at how pandemics compare across centuries, the Pandemics video provides useful context.

Once students have completed their diagrams, reflect together as a class:

• Are there more similarities or differences?
• What can we learn from the similarities to prepare for a future pandemic?
• Why do some patterns repeat across centuries, even when technology has changed so much?

For high school students, extend this activity by adding a third circle for the Spanish Flu and asking students to identify the common threads across all three events.

2) Explore improvements in science and medicine

This activity pairs well with a science or health class and encourages students to think about how medical knowledge has evolved over time.

Start with a discussion prompt: what do doctors do today to treat someone who is sick? How do they test for disease, administer treatment, and protect themselves? Your students will likely rattle off answers quickly, because modern medicine feels obvious to them. That’s exactly the point.

Next, have your students research how people in the 14th century tried to combat bubonic plague. Based on what we now know about how disease spreads, what measures were likely effective? What clearly wasn’t?

Break your class into small groups and assign each group a specific focus area:

• Treatment then versus now
• Causes of sickness: what medieval doctors believed versus what we know today
• Prevention 101: how people protected themselves during the Black Death compared to COVID-19

Each group prepares a short visual presentation of their findings and reports back to the class. This works especially well as a cross-curricular project with your school’s science department.

3) Create comparative timelines

This activity is surprisingly effective for helping students visualize how pandemics unfold.

Have your students plot the key dates and events of the Black Death along one timeline and a modern pandemic (such as COVID-19) along another. To make the timelines more engaging, students can add illustrations, photographs, or printed images to represent significant events.

ClickView’s Impact of the Black Death video is a strong starting point for gathering key dates and understanding the scale of devastation.

Once both timelines are finished, display them somewhere prominent and give students time to walk around and compare:

• What events do the two timelines have in common?
• How quickly did each pandemic spread compared to the other?
• What factors contributed to the speed of the spread in each case?

For an added challenge, ask high school students to annotate their timelines with the societal changes that followed each pandemic. How did the world look different before and after?

4) Map the spread of the Black Death

Trade routes carried more than goods across the medieval world. They also carried disease. This mapping activity helps students understand how geography, commerce, and human movement contributed to one of history’s deadliest outbreaks.

Start by screening ClickView’s Spread of the Black Death video, which explains how the plague likely traveled from Asia to Europe via merchant ships and trade routes.

Then provide students with a blank map of Europe, Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. Using their notes from the video and any additional research, have them:

• Plot the likely origin of the outbreak
• Trace the major trade routes that carried the plague westward
• Mark the major cities and ports that were hit hardest
• Add dates where known to show how quickly the disease spread

This activity pairs naturally with geography lessons and gives students a concrete, visual understanding of how interconnected the medieval world already was. It also sets up a useful comparison: how does globalization today make pandemics spread even faster?

Exploring societal changes after the Black Death

The Black Death didn’t just kill millions of people. It reshaped entire societies. The activities in this section help students dig into the long-term political, economic, and cultural effects of the pandemic, building skills in source analysis, argumentation, and creative thinking along the way.

5) Engage with primary sources

Working with primary sources is one of the best ways to make history feel real, and the Black Death offers plenty of fascinating material to explore.

A quick internet search for “primary sources from the Black Death” will turn up dozens of written accounts, legal documents, and artwork from the period. Choose a few that are appropriate for your students’ reading level and examine them together.

Guide students with questions like:

• What is the author expressing in this document?
• What was the purpose of this text, and who was it intended for?
• What emotions come through in the language?
• How does this source compare to what we’ve learned from our ClickView videos?

For high school students, consider pairing primary source analysis with the Medieval Antisemitism video to explore how fear and misinformation during the plague fueled persecution. This connects powerfully to discussions about scapegoating and prejudice in both historical and modern contexts.

6) Stage a classroom debate

Here’s an activity that works brilliantly as a culminating project for your Black Death unit. As a bonus, it doubles as practice for public speaking and constructing evidence-based arguments.

One of the more contentious positions historians hold is that, despite the widespread death and destruction, the Black Death was ultimately a positive turning point for European society. The decimation of the labor force gave surviving peasants the leverage to demand higher wages and better conditions, weakening the feudal system and planting early seeds of social mobility.

Split your class into two groups. One argues that the Black Death’s long-term effects were beneficial for European society; the other argues against. Give both sides time to conduct research, gather evidence, and prepare their arguments. Then stage the debate.

After the debate wraps up, reflect together:

• Which arguments were the most convincing, and why?
• Is it possible for a devastating event to have positive long-term outcomes?
• What evidence would change your mind?

ClickView’s Impact of the Black Death video provides excellent background for both sides, covering the plague’s effects on religion, agriculture, labor, and daily life across Europe, Asia, and North Africa.

7) Run a feudal system role play

For a more project-based approach, have your students step into the shoes of someone living through the Black Death. Assign each student a role: peasant, merchant, noble, member of the clergy, or doctor.

Give students time to research and build out their character:

• What does their daily life look like before the plague arrives?
• How does the Black Death change their circumstances?
• What are their biggest fears and concerns?

Once students are comfortable with their characters, set up a “town meeting” where the plague has just arrived. Students take turns sharing the impacts they’re experiencing, voicing their concerns, and proposing what the town should do next.

Some concerns to consider, depending on their role:

• Personal safety and survival
• What to do with the bodies
• The rising cost of labor
• The power and influence of the Church
• Whether wages should increase for surviving workers

After the meeting, lead a reflection on how the Black Death reshaped the social class system of medieval Europe. How did the balance of power shift between peasants, nobles, and the Church? For broader context on the feudal structure before the plague, ClickView’s The Difference between Feudalism and Manorialism video is a helpful resource.

Tips for ongoing integration

The Black Death doesn’t have to be a standalone unit. Here are a few ways to weave it into your broader curriculum throughout the year:

• Use the plague as a case study whenever you’re teaching about cause and effect in history. The ripple effects of the Black Death touched religion, economics, art, science, and social structures, making it a natural anchor for discussions in almost any subject.
• Revisit pandemic comparisons when current events make them relevant. News stories about disease outbreaks, vaccine development, or public health policy all connect back to themes your students explored in these activities.
• Connect the Black Death to your Renaissance unit. The social upheaval that followed the plague helped create the conditions for the Renaissance, and ClickView’s The Medieval World and the Renaissance topic page offers video resources to bridge the two periods.
• Explore the wider history of disease with ClickView’s Crash Course video on Disease, which places the Black Death within the broader story of how pandemics have shaped civilization.

The bubonic plague is still with us today, though thankfully it’s far more treatable with modern antibiotics. As you explore the Black Death and its far-reaching consequences with your students, an evidence-based approach and sensitivity to the associations your students may have with pandemics will go a long way.

Sources

1. Benedictow, O. J. (2004). The Black Death, 1346-1353: The Complete History. Woodbridge: Boydell Press.
2. Byrne, J. P. (2012). Encyclopedia of the Black Death. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO.
3. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2024). ‘Plague: History’. Available at: https://www.cdc.gov/plague/history/ (Accessed: 6 May 2026).
4. DeWitte, S. N. (2014). ‘The Anthropology of Plague: Insights from Bioarcheological Analyses of Epidemic Cemeteries’, The Medieval Globe, 1(1), pp. 97-123.
5. World Health Organization (2023). ‘Plague’. Available at: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/plague (Accessed: 6 May 2026).