Teaching Tips

• It would help for students to read about the Six Americas before the start of the lesson, but this is not essential.
• The educator may also have students play the Cranky Uncle game first to build their skills around dealing with misinformation, or watch some of the Cranky Uncle videos (Carbon Cycle, Past Climate Change).
• The educator may want to assign roles in each student group (facilitator, time-keeper, recorder, etc) to ensure student involvement, or allow students to assign roles depending on preferences/comfort with the material.
• To help support diverse learners in this activity, it could be helpful to provide sentence starters for ways these students can easily enter the conversation.
• It could be fun for students to have time to draft their arguments and use computers to research some of what they may want to say. At the end of the discussion, it could be interesting to review the sources to make sure that the sources folks used were not giving misinformation.

About the Content

• This activity is focused on scientific communication and how to engage with people of different climate change perspectives.
• The different student roles are realistic and well-researched, with references and links provided so students can research their positions better.
• The resource is affiliated with Yale University, therefore is scientifically reputable and accurate.
• All terms and vocab are explained with links to more in-depth information.
• Passed initial science review - expert science review pending.

About the Pedagogy

• The learning outcomes are clearly stated and go beyond understanding/memorizing aspects of climate change (affective domain rather than cognitive domain).
• There are multiple ways to organize groups depending on class size and student preferences, which lends itself to multiple scenarios to be played out.
• Well-organized activity with thoughtful prompts for students to think about and discuss while embodying their characters.
• It will likely have good engagement with students because it asks students to form an opinion and defend that opinion.

Technical Details/Ease of Use

• The links all work and no computers are needed for the role-playing activity.

Related URLs These related sites were noted by our reviewers but have not been reviewed by CLEAN