Tool 2b
Write Lesson Set 1
Tool Purpose
Support you to write your local lesson set 1 materials using the Anchored Inquiry Learning (AIL) instructional model.
What’s Included
This tool includes resources for drafting your local Lesson set 1 including:
Lesson type overviews for Anchor, Investigation and Synthesize lesson
Slide templates customized with routines for each lesson type
Student handout templates, portrait and landscape
Find additional support in the Tool 2a resources: AIL Writing Guidance and the Pathway Lesson Plans.
Importance for Unit Design
In the first half of the Climate Education Pathways unit, students explore the impacts of climate change and mechanisms causing problems. You localize Lesson so students can investigate a local climate change impact or problem, helping them understand that climate change is happening now in their own communities. This generates interest and establishes personal or local relevance before students explore global-scale climate mechanisms in the base unit. Lesson set 1 includes three AIL lesson types, each with their own purpose and set of routines:
Anchor lesson routines:
Explore a phenomenon or problem
Generate an initial AEMS (explanation, model, argument, or solution) from what we know
Define gaps in our understanding
Broaden to related experiences and phenomena
Ask questions
Navigate between lessons to maintain coherence
Investigation lesson routines:
Navigate between lessons to maintain coherence
Gather evidence through planning and conducting investigations
Generate an AEMS based on evidence gathered
Navigate between lessons to maintain coherence
Broaden to related experiences (sometimes)
Synthesize lesson routines:
Navigate between lessons to maintain coherence
Generate an AEMS
Broaden to related experiences (often)
Reflect and Connect on learning progress (sometimes)
Answer Questions
Investigation Lesson in Action
In the Base Unit Lesson 2.2 (Burning Fossil Fuels Lab), Tiffany (Flood Pathway) demonstrates how to engage students in planning evidence gathering, collecting laboratory data, and making meaning of evidence to revise their AEMS.
Synthesize Lesson in Action
At the start of the synthesize lesson, Tiffany (Flood Pathway) shows how to co-create a “Gotta Have It Checklist: with students, preparing them to revise their models to explain the local anchoring phenomenon.
Navigation to the Base Unit in Action
At the end of the synthesize lesson, Tiffany (Flood Pathway) demonstrates how to transition into the base unit after the class has investigated a local climate phenomenon. The key transition move is to help students puzzle about the underlying cause of rising temperatures.