How to address Climate Change
Climate change is a very broad and complex topic and this has led to a lot of online misinformation.
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It is essential when presenting the topic to introduce the main ideas but also to allow students to do their own research based on trusted resources.
It is important for teachers not to be biased and they should allow students to critically review information and form their own opinions in regard to the information presented.
Students should be aware of local and global impacts and how their actions matter.
Using different teaching strategies
Dealing with a complex topic like climate will require a clear strategy, either start from small items that help build the entire picture with your students, allowing them to fill in the gaps. Or teachers may prefer to start from the big picture and slowly break the topic down into small pieces.
FLIPPED CLASSROOM
One of the teaching strategies that can be used is to do a flipped classroom activity, in which prior to the lesson students will read some information provided by the teacher, and later participate in class discussions.
By using different types of activity in the lesson their knowledge and understanding can be assessed.
YouTube videos can be used as a starting activity with either the teacher stopping the video in order to ask questions provide a series of questions prior to the lesson.
TED ED ZONE
A tool that may assist you when using videos is the TEDEx Educator (TED Ed) zone.
TED Ed allows you to present video content in a format that is short and understandable, it provides questions with answers that can be checked as well as a section in which you can add more information for students to dig deeper.
Activity: Explore the TED Ed activity.
Visit the TED-Ed Web site and identify suitable videos to use from the Web site and questions for students to answer.
MAKING LIFESTYLE CHOICES
There are many different approaches to climate change education.
If you want to find out more about the possible approaches download the Teaching the Future Report.
Asking students how specific problems might be solved may lead to many ideas that can be innovative. Different perspectives and opinions can also be established.
Activity: Look at the Lifestyle Choices sheet and consider how you could use these approaches to engage your students