Stories from the Climate Crisis: A Mixer

Notes from our reviewers

The CLEAN collection is hand-picked and rigorously reviewed for scientific accuracy and classroom effectiveness. Read what our review team had to say about this resource below or learn more about how CLEAN reviews teaching materials.

• Teaching Tips
  Providing a few sentence starters could be useful to help guide students in their discussions. The lesson suggests having the teacher play a character to get a sense of the amount of time students will need. Allow students enough time to read about their roles and discuss them with someone next to them before moving about the classroom. Teachers could extend the investigation of the impacts of climate change on the various regions represented by including bio-sketches. There are sensitive topics included in this activity (e.g gentrification, immigration) so teachers should be prepared to facilitate discussion around those topics. Teachers should be mindful of students depicting stereotypes & biases.
• About the Science
  A very interesting and engaging role-play activity based on the perspectives of real people on how climate change is impacting their lives. Teachers may want to look for additional resources to support this activity and to discuss climate change. Passed initial science review - expert science review pending.
• About the Pedagogy
  Prerequisites include a basic understanding of the causes and effects of climate change. Students are given a role to embody and questions to answer as they engage in conversations with classmates. Teaching tips are included at the beginning of the activity. There are a few basic directions for educators and there is a paper available that discusses how this was used in the classroom. Teachers should be aware to spend extra time building scaffolding for ESL students or diverse learners. If there are many ESL students who speak the same language, it could be helpful to allow students to discuss in the language they are most comfortable with and/or switch languages as they are comfortable if there is a thought they are attempting to articulate. Since the activity calls for moving around the classroom and discussing with others, teachers may need to make accommodations for disabled students. This is a conversation-based activity with a lot of flexibility for teachers to adapt to their classroom, and an ideal activity to encourage student discussion.
• Technical Details/Ease of Use
  Teachers should print out the roles (one for each student) and questionnaires ahead of time. Name tags are optional, but recommended. Account/log in required, but the resource is free once logged in.