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The Decision To Focus On The United Nations Global Goals For Sustainable Development
Last year we had a very successful first year of STEAM at the Ottauquechee School, with students really working to create growth mindsets, understand the Design Thinking Process as described by the Stanford d.school, and appreciate that perseverance and empathy are at the heart of what we do.
This year, we wanted to engage students in deeper learning by having a unifying umbrella under which we would operate for the entire year. Enter the United Nation Global Goals for Sustainable Development!
After learning about the Global Goals at last year's Dynamic Landscape Conference, we immediately felt that using the goals to give great meaning and cohesion to our STEAM units was going to create special learning opportunities for our students.
How Do We Get Students To Care About the Global Goals?
Driving Question: How do the Global Goals connect to my life? Why should I care about inequality?
In order to get the kids to care about inequality, the Global Goals, or anything beyond their day-to-day lives, we had to make them really FEEL it. So we tweaked a Pasta Design Challenge Becky had experienced at the Deeper Learning conference in San Diego, in which we orchestrated an inequity of resources for the students to make them feel what it means to be disenfranchised.
Pasta Design Challenge: We asked the students to create the "best" hotel they could out of pasta and marshmallows, which would also be able to hold up a small water balloon "aquarium" on the top floor. The class was split in half and sent to two sections of the library where they found materials waiting for them on the tables. Little did they know, some of them had merely spaghetti and tiny marshmallows to work with, while the others had a plethora of choices and options! When testing their designs, it became clear that the students who had access to more materials were more successful in holding up the water balloon, and that was our intention. We wanted the students to feel that outrage, that due to no fault of their own, they were set up to be less successful than their peers.
We then had a conversation about inequity and how it impacted their success. Students reactions (as written on our blog) were varied, but their reactions when the students with fewer resources saw what the others had were visceral and sometimes audible! That's exactly what we wanted--to start the year forcing students to put themselves in others' shoes, because even if they were the ones who had all the materials, we made them uncomfortable knowing that the playing field hadn't been fair.
Introducing the Global Goals
When students walked into STEAM the second week, they were given a handful of Legos and asked to create something AWESOME. They were very proud of what they created until they saw what I had built, with dozens of Legos. "That's not fair!" But I'm the teacher, I'm older, I'm smarter, I DESERVE these, I replied. A quick but impactful conversation about social inequality resulted, and the understanding that "some people on Earth have far more than they need, and most people don’t have nearly enough," as stated in the World's Largest Lesson was felt more sincerely than if they had simply watched the video.
So what are we going to do about it?
Becoming Goalkeepers
Who is responsible for meeting these goals? What do you want the world to look like in 2030?
After watching the World's Largest Lesson videos #2 and #3, students thought about their future selves and their possible professions, and which Global Goal might be most important to them in those roles. For example, we had future police officers who care about Global Goal #16 Peace and Justice, future marine biologists who care about Goal #14 Life Under Water, and future teachers who care about Global Goal #4 Quality Education. It helped to bring home the abstract theory of these goals to a concrete level. Then we turned them into Goalkeepers and displayed their grids next to their future selves drawings for powerful work at open house!
Unit 1: Squashed Tomato Challenge
Instead of simply using the Design Thinking model as did last year, we searched for resources and ideas for this year's STEAM program that we could tie in explicitly with the Global Goals. We quickly found the Practical Action website. Practical Action is a global innovator, inspiring people to discover and adopt ingenious, practical ways to free themselves from poverty and disadvantage. Their popular science, design and technology and STEM teaching resources focus on a whole range of global issues including energy, climate change and disaster risk reduction. These popular free resources for primary and secondary include lesson plans, PowerPoints, activities, posters, challenges, images, videos and games all set within a global context.
Driving Question: How can simple technology change people’s lives for the better?
Kickoff: Angry Birds Challenge
Students used boxes to create towers, and tennis ball "birds" and pieces of fabric for the slingshots to knock them down. Plenty of innovation and they were quite industrious!
See the blog post here
For this unit to be impactful, we needed students to understand what would happen if we could not engineer a solution to help food reach populated areas? How would this impact the population, our health, the variety of food we would be able to eat? Do we grow enough food locally to sustain our community? What about in cities? How does food get from market to you?
Assignment: Help farmers in Nepal solve their food transportation problem. Many farmers living on the mountainside grow fruit and vegetables, including tomatoes. To earn a living they need to sell these at the local market. The problem is getting to market involves a long, dangerous walk down the mountainside and across a river, and tomatoes need to be transported carefully because they can easily get squashed.
Challenge: To design and build a model that can move tomatoes without squashing them. We used the Innovator's Compass to brainstorm solutions to our challenge, keeping empathy and the people of Nepal in mind.
The students explored where we would be testing their designs to get an understanding of what features and obstacles they would be facing. We used a Padlet to brainstorm questions engineers would have when designing for this challenge.
Testing Their Tomato Carriers In The "Mountains" of "Nepal"!
The following week our students were finally able to see what Nepalese farmers really do to solve their tomato challenge.
Several adults then talked to students individually about their successes in this challenge using Hartford's Transferable Skills Critical Thinking & Problem Solving rubric. It was so great to be able to reflect on student learning with the students one-on-one!
We shared the rubrics with their classroom teachers.
Unit 2: Sustainable Communities in Minecraft
Driving Questions: If we could build an ideal city, what would be the master plan? What is important today? What is of value?
For this unit students stepped into the role of town planner, with each grade level designing their own community in Minecraft. Before we began designing, we needed to brainstorm a list of what we would need in our ideal community by using the Global Goal grid as a foundation. We created a list of buildings and resources such as a hospital, a school, green spaces, clean water, renewable energy sources, and then asked the students to figure out which community asset ties in with which Global Goal.
Bringing in an expert: What is a town planner? What do they do?
Third through fifth graders had the opportunity to meet a local town planner herself, Paige Greenfield from Two Rivers-Ottauquechee Regional Commission in Woodstock, Vermont. She talked to the students about the forethought and design thinking that is involved when making decisions for a community, from ideas such as accessibility for all to food sources and waste management.
The Planning Phase
Students used large grid paper to make a 1:1 model of the building they were responsible for making in their community. Then we laid out their plans as they would appear in the Minecraft world, making sure to make intelligent choices as to where everything is located based on our conversation with Ms. Greenfield.
Diving Into Minecraft: Things To Keep In Mind
- Establish student-led rules for appropriate online behavior, a great opportunity to discuss Digital Citizenship
- Understand how to use "cheats" to have more than 5 people join one world
- Mark which iPad is the "master"
- All the iPads need to be on the same Wi-fi for it to work
- Make roads before the students log on so they have somewhere to orient themselves. It's possible to make street signs or use different color rock to help them locate where they belong on the "street"
- Make note of defining characteristics to help students remember which construction is there, along with
Virtual Engineering!
Presenting To An Authentic Audience
Grade levels paired up and presented to the buddy grade, as well as their teachers, school and district administrators, and even community members! These adult audience members had a rubric and/or Google Form to assess the students on their communication skills in connection to Hartford's Communication Transferable Skills rubric.
Students gave a tour of their contribution to the community, explained its connection to the Global Goals, and then finally reflected on what they would've done if they'd had more time. Of course, many of them never wanted to stop!
How Did Minecraft Help You Learn?
Unit 3: Students Rebuild Challenge Ocean Conservation
Driving Question: What is one thing YOU can and will do for the ocean?
We partnered with Students Rebuild and the Bezos Foundation to help support ocean conservation efforts around the world in support of Global Goal #14, Life Below Water. We learned about ocean conservation, identifying what one thing our students can start doing right now to help preserve our oceans and save this habitat from pollution, while creating awareness and art to spread the word. The art was displayed at the school art show in March.
To launch this unit, we wanted students to appreciate how quickly a body of water can get polluted, as well as how difficult it is to properly clean it up. We filled buckets with all kinds of common plastic pollutants, as well as canola oil and glitter, which is really just tiny pieces of plastic! (Unit based on this lesson plan).
By the end, the students reached the consensus that it is certainly easier to keep plastics out of the ocean in the first place than to try to go clean it up after the fact! Throughout the unit they contributed to a Flipgrid sharing what one thing they can do to help the ocean, from limiting use of plastic bags, doing waterside cleanups, to bringing reusable cups with them instead of using cups and straws in restaurants. It was very important to us that they understood that what we do in Vermont makes a difference to the ocean, even if it is far away.
Kindergarten, first, and second graders worked to turn plastic and other recyclable materials into works of art that represent life in the ocean! We mailed these creations to Students Rebuild and earned $4 for every creature sent toward ocean conservation agencies! It was nearly $800!
Students in grades 3-5 spent three weeks deconstructing donated electronics, sorting the materials collected, and then reconstructing those materials into an art sculpture/creature that represented the ocean. They used tools, glue guns, and safety gloves. These electronic sea creatures and sea life raised awareness as art that expresses our belief that the ocean's ecosystem is valuable and we want to do our best to save it!
To share this outstanding learning, we used Flipgrid to capture each student's response to the driving question and shared with the school community and families! Their art was displayed at our school's art show with an explanation of Students Rebuild and the Global Goals.
Unit 4: Learning Through Play
Driving Questions: How does playing with these materials help you learn? How did it change your thinking?
In this unit we focused on providing an inclusive and effective learning environment for all students, regardless of gender. Harking back to our first unit of the year when we discussed social inequity, we introduced this three week unit where we let students explore and play with electronics in an effort to reflect on how this style of learning changes their thinking.
We told the kids that only one gender would have the opportunity to use these cool electronics, while the other gender would color quietly. We made broad generalizations to justify this choice (girls like art more, girls are quieter and like to do more fine motor activities or the boys get too rowdy so they need a quiet activity, the girls are already good at art so the boys need additional practice) and their responses were immediate, large, and indignant. I was really proud of some students of the opposite sex who stood up for their peers, pointing out that we were being unkind, sexist, and unfair. They were great, passionate discussions, and resulted in cheers when we told them everyone could use any materials they want!
Electronics/Manipulatives Worthy of Investment: LittleBits, Jimu Robots, Dash, Snap Circuits, Bloxels, Stikbots, Legos, Magnatiles, Zoobs
What the students thought of learning through "play"...
Unit 5a: Geodesic Domes
Driving Question: How can we use shapes to create structures?
To begin this final unit, we revisited the idea of sustainable cities and why they matter (urbanization, overpopulation, drain on resources in cities, impact on climate change). We learned about R. Buckminster Fuller (one of the world's first Goalkeepers!) and his geodesic domes. Finally, we learned how to make geodesic domes ourselves, and in a throwback to our very first STEAM project with the pasta and marshmallows, we created individual geodesic domes, but this time with toothpicks!
Lastly, the students took what they have learned about using shapes like pentagons and triangles to make strong structures outside in the forest, where they attempted to replicate their indoor success. The students loved it!
While kindergarten, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd graders learned about geodesic domes, 4th and 5th grade were working on a Diversity Audit in the OQS library with Mrs. Whitney. After collecting data on their focus topics, which ranged from LGBTQ representation in realistic fiction to racial diversity in graphic novels, students worked to create infographics on Canva to share their findings with the school community. In addition, this data will inform Mrs. Whitney on what books are necessary to make our school library a more representative and inclusive place.