Final Project: Designing a Sustainable Community

For my final project I decided to combine a couple different things I have done in the past and significantly add to both using the digital resources of Teacher's Domain as well as the concepts we've studied in this class. There exist two "units" for this: first, an introduction of the Earth as a system and global climate change change and, second, a longer project where students research and design their own sustainable community. For the second part, I have done it in the past as an interdisciplinary unit with the social studies teacher on my team. It is a very time consuming project, but we effectively get twice as much time during the school day. I teach in the gifted and highly gifted program at Romig Middle School in Anchorage, so the audience for both of these are somewhat accelerated and also more self-regulating.

The philosophy of the first part (found in lesson plan format here) is to introduce students to the idea of a system, leading them toward the idea of Earth as a global system. There are a number of ways to do this, but the demonstrations in the lesson and the videos are ones that I think would work well. One could also use many of the videos (such as 1, 2, and 3) as jumping off points for inquiry. Asking students how a particular pollutant may show up in a food web (including in humans) thousands of miles away and letting them come up with ideas and questions to investigate those ideas, would work well. Once students have a general idea of systems, we move onto Earth as a system in terms of the greenhouse effect. The interactive in the lesson allows students to manipulate the amount of greenhouse gases in the system and see the effect on temperature. The remainder of the lesson gets into the science behind the greenhouse effect and how changes in temperature through an increase in greenhouse gases will result in changes in our Earth system, including big changes for some organisms, including people.

The second part of the project is heavy on research, application, and decision making. Students basically design their own sustainable community from scratch, showing their research and decision making process along the way. This project usually takes two full weeks and some of the less motivated students also research at home. It has been a lot of fun for the kids and facilitated some pretty heated discussions, especially during decision making time. But it has also been very difficult and it takes a lot of teacher probing and prodding to keep momentum going. I have made significant changes, including adding the final section on "Earth as a system" to the group tasks. The social studies teacher I designed this with is no longer at our school and I did not do this project this last year. However, looking it over again has got the fire going again and I hope to talk my new social studies teacher into working on it with me.

Here is the initial handout with all the research roles and questions. Students were also giving a sheet describing their island including climate and physical features. Some of these were subtly bent toward certain things, such as certain crops or energy sources.

Here are the group tasks, including thinking ahead a couple generations and thinking about their island as a part of the Earth system.

Here are the final wrap-up questions, which served as a summative assessment on the big ideas of the unit and an evaluation of how the project impacted student learning a.k.a. an evaluation on whether I was doing my job or not.

The resources and information provided in this course have brought both of these lessons onto a new level and really provided not only necessary additional content, but some much needed resources that show the scientific and personal side of our connected world, especially as it relates to sustainability and climate change. Like I mentioned earlier, I'm excited to get back into this project next year with these additional resources and think it will really help students get over that final speed bump.