Teaching Tips

• Teachers can use this resource to introduce the idea of infrastructure planning for the future, where the teacher specifies the lens for this planning exercise is sustainable communities.
• This activity could be a way to pull together the end of a unit on sustainable planning where students incorporate what they learned into a final product.
• Note that this resource references the Resilient Colorado Framework, which is not linked in the lesson.
• Teachers may want to find supporting resources, or banks of resources, for students to understand the current day obstacles and provide context for the topic and for their infrastructure sector.

About the Content

• The driving question for the activity is to answer "What do you want your community to be like in 20 years?". Students discuss their visions for the future in different sectors such as Economic, Community, Health/Social, Housing, Infrastructure, and Watersheds/Natural Resources, and come back together to continue the discussion.
• The activities are vague enough to allow for a lot of creativity, and teachers should be careful to ground the discussion in evidence-based reasoning.
• The science is vague and resources are not built in for students to consider the current issues with the way our current communities are designed. Teachers may want to supplement background information to help the discussion.
• The resources provided do not assist in making ties to sustainability, such as issues with modern agriculture, transportation emissions, and the need for GHG reductions. Teachers may need to supplement with some background information.
• Passed initial science review - expert science review pending.

About the Pedagogy

• This solution focused activity is to encourage discussion between groups to develop an ideal future and learn about resiliency. This is a broad discussion that can go many ways, developing their ideal future in the Economic, Community, Health/Social, Housing, Infrastructure, and Watersheds/Natural Resources.
• Learning outcomes are reached based on the discussion from questions given to the groups.
• This lesson is really dependent on how your class participates in group discussion assignments, but can be really successful if the students are engaged. This could be difficult for quieter or ELL learners, but writing the ideas on sticky notes to share with the class can help with this.

• This resource engages students in using scientific data.
  See other data-rich activities

Technical Details/Ease of Use

• All resources are online and in easy-to-use formats, and could be relatively easily revised by educators to meet their unique teaching needs.
• This activity could be easily adapted to being completed entirely online creating a digital timeline, or in-person creating a physical timeline.
• The activity includes embedded Google Sheets and Docs, as well as PDFs.
• Chart paper, and a projector for the pre-made slide deck are needed. Minimal preparation time and background are needed for this activity.
• Background materials are provided to create an in-depth discussion for the students.

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