Exploring the Possible Local Environmental Effects
The remaining seven weeks of the unit will be structured to facilitate an overall learning cycle approach that builds upon itself from week to week. Having the students introduce the topic each week will help heighten the interest of the students in the subject matter and may facilitate better questioning by the students. Content related lectures, labs and hands-on activities tied to the student presented information each week will clear up misconceptions about the topic and facilitate a better understanding of the content.
The weekly unit schedule will have a Monday presentation by the student group. Every student must pose at least one written question on an index card to the research group to answer about a topic addressed in their presentation. Students will then break into their research groups and look at selections from The Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore that will relate to the aspect of the environment they will be exploring for the particular week. A matrix that includes all of the selections based on the weekly topics is in the appendix. Student research groups will engage in discussion of the graphics, pictures, and reading that is relevant to the topic. I will facilitate the discussion with probing questions and provide limited assistance. They must develop a group synopsis of the information presented to them and prepare a concisely written memo to me on their analysis of the information.
Tuesday will start out with the distribution of the memos to all of the research groups to determine the overall consensus of the groups and what information the students would like to explore about the topic. When I use this strategy in my classroom I place three columns on the board titled: known, questions, and next steps. The students will give me feedback as to what things are known from the memos and they are added to the known section. Next the students are asked if they have any questions about the topic and those are added to, you guessed it, the questions section. Lastly the students are asked about the next steps we should take in order to find the answers to the questions they have or to substantiate the known information and that is placed on the board. You may want to also put this on an overhead so you can refer to it as you work through the unit. This is an excellent prep for the exploration phases of this weeklong learning cycle approach, talk about engaged minds! The remaining half of the period will be devoted to a map or aerial photograph related activity that the students will interpret and discuss.
Wednesday brings us to the sampling aspect of the week. Students will engage in the scientific process by collecting environmental data related to the weekly topic. Depending upon the weekly topic this may spill over to Thursday's period. Thursday will be spent analyzing the data collected and starting the concept development stage during which I will be developing the scientific principles and the implications of the measurements that are collected to clarify the concepts and discuss the prior activities of the week. Students will then engage in accessing similar data from the Internet to see what types of data have been collected in the local area. Students will construct some sort of data table and determine trends in data and discuss the current state of that aspect of their local environment.
Friday is the application of this data and phenomenon on a broader sense to the global environment. This period will involve discussion and the application and impact this is having on a global scale and what the possible consequences global warming may have on this aspect of the global environment.
Due to the limited number of pages within this unit, I will not be able to include all of the lessons in sequence for the remainder of the weeks. In the following sections I have identified relevant field experiences, data manipulation, and map interpretation exercises that I would use to help the students reach a level of understanding of the scientific basis for the possible environmental effects due to global warming.
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