Fires, Floods, and Droughts: Impacts of Climate Change in the U.S.

Rationale

This unit is written for 8th grade science classes and Biology for high school credit at East Central Middle School (ECMS), a part of Tulsa Public Schools (TPS) in Tulsa, Oklahoma. TPS is the largest district in the state with 33,211 students. ECMS will host 6-8^th grade in the fall with an expected enrollment of 1000. The school is ethnically diverse: 61% Hispanic, 14% African American, 8% Multiracial, 8% White, 6% API, 3% Native American. A common feature at the school is poverty; 95% of the students live below the poverty threshold with 100% receiving free or reduced lunches. A huge portion of the students score below grade level in both reading and math. Of students from last year, 89% scored below the 50^th percentile in reading (average percentile: 21^st) and 60% were classified as current or former English Language Learners. Utilizing diverse teaching strategies and learning activities is essential for achieving learning goals. This unit seeks to embed diverse learning activities into the lessons to maximize student engagement and provide scaffolding for students who often struggle with reading.

The TPS pacing calendar for science aligns with the Oklahoma Academic Standards for Science which are based on NGSS 2020 standards. In 7^th grade, students learn about the effects of human activity on climate and the impact of climate change. In 8^th grade, a major focus is on biological unity and diversity. Students learn about evolution by means of natural selection and how genetic traits are selected for based on how adaptive the trait is to the organism’s environment. We have a considerable focus during this unit on how evolution has occurred in the past by examining the fossil record, morphology, DNA similarity, etc. We discuss how past changes in the environment have led to extinction events (e.g., Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event: the meteor that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago). There is a need and opportunity to bridge student understanding of modern-day anthropogenic climate change with the process of evolution and the resulting effect on biodiversity. Animals have evolved adaptations for the climate conditions of their ecosystem, but climate change threatens to upend their fitness. This unit seeks to build student understanding of how current and future climate change will impact biodiversity moving forward. It also seeks to help students understand that natural selection is not just something that happened in the past, but a process that continues to unfold today and into the future. The unit will:

1. Consider how climate change is unfolding, focusing on the impacts regionally in the United States.
2. Examine specific animals more in depth, highlighting the structural and behavioral adaptations evolved by nature in the past.
3. Encourage students to predict the outcomes for the animals as they face changing climate, potential food scarcity, and changing ecosystems.

It should be noted that this unit was written with the intention of being taught in 8^th grade general science, but it could be easily adapted for High School Biology. The standards and content covered in the unit strongly overlap with the NGSS standards for Biology.

See appendix for NGSS standards and disciplinary core ideas.