Resources to accompany Reframing the Curriculum
While designed for use with my book, these resources can also be used on their own.
Facilitator Guide: This tool supports educators to plan and deliver professional development programs based on social justice and sustainability.
Integrating Sustainability and Social Justice Concepts Across Disciplines: Get started with reframing your unit or course using concepts such as equity, community, interdependence, and more.
Curriculum Self-Assessment Rubric: This document offers three rubrics to assess a unit or course to guide revisions that and strengthen themes of community, diversity, sustainability, and justice.
Unit or Course Assessment: This one-page checklist offers a quick way to evaluate a completed unit or course based on the principles noted.
Quick Reference: Aligning Social-Emotional Learning, Culturally Responsive Teaching, and Common Core: This short piece offers ways to incorporate important dimensions of learning
For authors of children’s books
Aligning Writing to K-12 Standards: What Teachers Need and Authors Should Know: This tool helps children’s book authors align their writing to K-12 standards, including Common Core. The documents includes links to standards in core subject areas, a set of alignment strategies, and tips to format alignments in clear and useful ways. I developed this tool for a webinar I provided through the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustration, Michigan Chapter.
Lesson Plans
The lesson plans below are a sampling of those I developed through Creative Change Educational Solutions, the nonprofit organization I founded in 1999 to support curriculum transformation in schools and universities. In 2020, I made the decision to close Creative Change given its work is now available to a wider audience through my book.
The lessons here focus on sustainability and ecological economics. They are just a few of the 100+ lessons in my portfolio. I’ll be adding more, so check back soon. Don’t see what you need? Contact me for more information or additional samples.
Introduction to Product Life Cycles: This lesson introduce young students (K-2) to materials use and product life cycles. Students learn basic traits of natural materials and simplified life cycle stages, including getting materials from the environment (e.g., wood), changing the materials to make things (paper bag), using these items, and disposing/repairing/reusing them.
Our Community’s Economic System: Early elementary learners explore the elements of their community’s economic system by touring the neighborhood and identifying important goods and services. Learners then explore how human capital and “natural capital” (i.e., the environment) work together to provide these needs. Student handouts contain vocabulary and graphics to aid comprehension.
The Biography of Three Potatoes (grades 6+): Through reading selections and graphic organizers, students compare and contrast the life cycles of potatoes grown and prepared in three different ways: French fries, a potato grown using traditional Peruvian methods, and a locally grown, organic potato. The lesson introduces the concept of the environment as the containing systems for the economy.
Introduction to Ecosystem Services (Grade 6+): A short reading selection, a classification game, and an outdoor activity introduce learners to the classification of natural materials and ecosystem services.
Human-environmental interdependence (Grades 6+): An interactive reading helps students understand ideas on human-environmental interactions. Key concepts include systems, inputs, outputs, chemical/physical change, waste, and resources. Formative assessments are provided throughout.
What counts? Measuring progress (grade 9+): Learners explore the Gross Domestic Product, evaluate it as a measure of true progress, and consider alternative indicators such as the Genuine Progress Indicator.
Sustainability vs. Overshoot: Regeneration of Renewable Resources (Algebra Version): Learners experience overshoot and regeneration of renewable resources through a simulation, then graph and interpret the data through an algebraic lens. Learners then explore slope, y-intercept, and equations of lines within the context of overshoot and regeneration.