This unit is designed to help 4th grade students foster an understanding of the effects climate change in Connecticut. Students will learn about specific species native to Connecticut, that depend on salt marshes, that are experiencing heavier precipitation and loss of habitat due to the changing climate. The unit focuses on these main questions: How is climate change and the greenhouse effect related? What is happening to the animals on our coastline? Why is there so much flooding occurring in my neighborhood? Students will explore and research species in Connecticut who’s survival has been negatively impacted by climate change, specifically the rise in sea level.

This unit focuses on the history and impact of United States imperialism. However, rather than relying on the dominant narratives that justify and defend the militarism, expansionism and capitalism associated with interventions, this work centers the voices of resistance. I have developed this unit for a 12th grade International Issues seminar with a focus on human rights. Through the use of counter narratives, I have addressed some misgivings about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the colorblindness associated with contemporary human rights discourse. Throughout the unit, students will analyze sources and find evidence of the dominant and counter narratives in the study of international issues. For example, while learning about the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary, students will study the life and work of Cuban revolutionary José Martí. While learning about the U.S. overthrow of the democratically elected leaders in Central America, they will investigate the Black Panthers’ presence in international politics. While learning about the origins of the War Resisters’ League, they will read the work of Latina women resisting war on their own terms. By engaging with primary sources in this way, students will uncover lost alternatives and recognize the impact of the work of historians in times of crisis in the past and present.

Over 1,200 types of animals have the ability to walk on water. They do so due to surface tension, a physical property of liquid matter. Particles of solid matter are not locked in place, but actually vibrate around their central position. If not limited by a container, gaseous matter will expand endlessly. Furthermore, matter in the plasma state is uncommon on Earth, but the most common phase in the universe because it is a major component of stars.

Everything we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch is matter. Matter is all around us. Learning about matter is learning chemistry. Chemistry is the study of all aspects of matter including the composition, structure, properties, and changes of matter. Solids, liquids, gases, and plasmas are states, or phases, of matter. On our planet, along with matter, there is energy. Thermal energy, or heat, is intrinsically related to states of matter as well as the phase changes of matter.

This curriculum unit promotes the study and investigation of matter as well as phase changes. A hands-on approach is encouraged and suggestions are made in reference to discourse, demonstrations, activities, and experiments. The unit is designed for physical science and chemistry teachers. It should run approximately one month.

In this unit I lead my Language Arts class through a reading of the classic American novel The Outsiders from a Critical Race Perspective (CRP). Starting with the introduction of the terminology associated with CRP, combined with discussions of some examples of institutionalized inequality in our country, I challenge students to look at the novel from a more critical, and fair minded point of view. In order to help students see the relevance of the novel in today’s world, I will lead them through an examination of some of the unfair and often brutal histories of “outsiders” in our country beginning with the dissemination of hundreds of Native American tribes, the sterilization of thousands during the eugenics craze, and the crisis on our southern border in which thousands have been labeled “outsiders” as others have for centuries. Through discussions, journal writing and projects meant to prompt empathy and understanding in my students, this unit will attempt to bring a new interpretation of The Outsiders to light.

This unit is designed to help eighth grade students build a working definition of identity, first by exploring their own identities. Deepening awareness of identity, students will identify different internal and external characteristics to heighten their understanding. This is intended to be a simple way to parse the complex topic of identity. For many students, family and cultural expectations have already predetermined their future. Depending on the structure of their family, these expectations may be based on outdated traditions that may need to be abandoned because they are a mismatch for young generations. Therefore, the priority goal for this unit is to fuel the next generation to maintain and establish expectations that best suit them. Instead of losing their sense of self, in an effort to satisfy and please their family, students will learn self-advocacy.

At the core of the curriculum and educational mission of King Robinson Interdistrict Magnet: An International Baccalaureate STEM School are certain ubiquitous goals which drive all aspects of this unit. Among these goals is to integrate units and individual lessons with the two magnet themes. When done successfully, students become empowered to be responsible, productive and engaged 21st-century global citizens, who are respectful, open-minded, and reflective students with positive attitudes. Through inquiry-based learning, students will use their skills to take actions that lead to positive contributions to the world.

Unit and Task Pacing Guide: This unit is designed for six to eight weeks of instruction. The outline follows forty-five minutes of instruction that is systematic, explicit, and structured for five consecutive days each week.

When an athlete performs a task, some of the energy being used turns into heat. That is why they feel hot afterward. This unit focuses on thermodynamics, a study of the relationship between energy, work and heat. Students will explore and study the laws of ideal gases, as well as the concepts of temperature, temperature scales and kinetic molecular theory. To enhance understanding, students will be introduced to the workings of a Stirling engine.

Each lesson will be accompanied by a lesson plan. Depending on the lesson, also included will be examples and applications (problems to be solved by students using the equations and concepts presented in the lesson).

The unit is intended to be taught in 10 th or 11 th grade Chemistry classes, but it can be used also by middle school 7 th and 8 th grade teachers to expose students to concepts like temperature, pressure, volume and ideal gas laws. Although the primary focus of this unit is Chemistry, the lessons and concepts of this unit can be used in Physics, Physical Science and Math classes to introduce and familiarize students with these concepts. Student understanding will improve in relation to vocabulary, computation skills, problem solving skills and comprehension levels. Many strategies, examples and applications will be brought out and explained in the unit. The unit will last approximately three weeks.

This curriculum serves to assist middle schoolers develop and explore “femaleness” as a fluid construct of identity. Using literature and nonfiction text, students will be asked to critically analyze female characters, their roles and choices as presented. In New Haven, the current core text being used is The House on Mango Street (THOMS) by Sandra Cisneros, and while this curriculum uses THOMS as a “foundational” text, other texts could serve as viable options. The text serves as a launchpad for whole class and small group discussions. Having a common or a foundational text not only provides students with a shared literary experience from which they can develop a common language, but it also allows students to create a barrier of safety--a level of personal distancing. This personal distancing shifts classroom discussions away from individual experiences that may subject students to judgments that sometimes accompany discussions related to topics of gender and sexuality. Negative judgments would have a deleterious and stifling effect on not only classroom discussions but run contrary to what the curriculum hopes to achieve--a nonjudgmental exploration of women and their roles in the world.

Students will gain voice and language through exploration of the fluidity of the construct of femaleness. The curriculum attempts to expand initial literature inquiries into the female construct by providing students further opportunities to explore, discuss, synthesize and refine ideas using nonfiction texts concerning women, their roles and world placement using various sociological, economic and political lenses. Exposing students to a diversity of voices of and about women through both the dramatic narrative, essays and other multimedia concerning the economics, sociological and political aspects of womanhood should serve as a contextual backdrop which for some students may be a first inquiry into unquestioned acceptance of what it means to be female. The curriculum seeks to compel students to think critically about what it means to be female, look beyond traditional binary frameworks of male versus female, single versus married ideologies and seeks to have them reevaluate what may be familiar female images. It asks students to examine and question the possibility of limitations of their constructs of “femaleness.”

Using reflective writing, small and large group discussions, students will develop voice, and identity, appreciate the multi-dimensions and perspectives contained within the construct of the female and its intersections of sex, class and race. The curriculum forces students not only to gather information about women from fictional narratives and historical sociological, economic and psychological essays but it asks them expend synergistic energy to evaluate various expressions to develop agency, to not be victims and determine their role in the depicting what it means to be “female.”

This unit will help 4th or 5th grade teachers prepare students to explore two big questions related to the Earth’s changing climate. The primary goal is to nurture an understanding of the element carbon, Earth’s carbon cycle, and how carbon dioxide and other gases contribute to the planet warming greenhouse effect of Earth’s atmosphere. The questions are:

1) What is carbon and why are all living things on Earth considered to be carbon-based lifeforms?

2) What is the greenhouse effect and why should we care about how much carbon is in our atmosphere?

These questions align with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) for 4th grade that many states have adopted or adapted.1 An annotated list of the applicable NGSS and state science standards can be found in the appendix of this curriculum unit.

Under the NGSS, 4th grade students study concepts related to energy and learn that all fuels used to meet our continuously growing energy demand are derived from natural resources. Consequently, the production and usage of some energy resources adds more carbon dioxide to Earth’s atmosphere. Students are just beginning to develop an understanding of how human activities can impact the Earth and result in either positive or negative consequences.

This unit seeks to develop an awareness of and the application of a Critical Race Theory lens to the reading and analysis of literature and films. Using an Inquiry based learning approach, it asks students to notice and wonder about the visual images that barrage their daily lives and the coded language they are complicit in use or acquiescence. The unit requires that students guide the inquiry by generating questions about the world as depicted in literature, seek voices not heard or ways that interests may converge. It asks students to try to make sense of their discoveries by explaining and debating positions on issues or concepts based on reflection, research and analysis. This unit seeks to empower middle and high school students to not only question the status quo but challenges them to create/recreate counternarratives reflective of utopians for the world they failed to discover in literature.

This unit will examine the genre of science fiction—specifically Afrofuturism. The genre of Afrofuturism will allow students freedom to creatively write about worlds of utopia not limited by one’s current reality and seek to modify the future by going back to alter one’s future using tools of science, mysticism, and social justice.

Within the last few years, the demographics of Barnard Environmental Science and Technology School has changed significantly. When I began teaching there four years ago, there was a large Multilingual (ML) population, but not enough to have a full-time ML teacher. The majority of the students who qualified for ML services spoke Spanish. In my first year of teaching at Barnard in 2017, the school began enrolling refugee families from Western Asia, primarily Afghanistan. Between 2017 and 2020 the number of students from Afghanistan rose exponentially, to the point where not only did the school administration make the original ML teacher full-time, but also decided to hire another full-time teacher, which is how I came to have my current job. As of 2021, very close to 50% of the ML students at Barnard speak Pashto, one of the languages of Afghanistan. Spanish is the second most spoken language, followed by Arabic.

I have been looking at the materials that the district has provided as well as what the school might be able to purchase in the future. Most of what I see for Newcomer and refugee students are textbooks explaining how to survive in a traditional American school. There are common phrases, basic English and many smiling faces. These textbooks can be useful, but they oversimplify or do not address the complexities of what it means to be an American, an immigrant or a refugee. They do not address how and why English came to be the language of this country or the racialized structure of U.S. society. They certainly do not touch on the role race (and racism) have in “English as a Second Language” education. By curating resources at various English language levels that positively affirm the identity of multilingual, immigrant, and refugee students, the connection to the content will become more meaningful. Allowing students to have an active role in curating the content and being able to tell their own stories will ensure that the narratives showcase their personal identity and present the message that they would like others to see.

Rationale: Oftentimes, ML students, especially Newcomers, are seen as being in a deficit because they do not know English or are still learning English. They are excluded from many in-class activities and assignments. I want to disrupt this assumption about ML students as not being able to understand concepts that may be more complicated or require analysis and higher order thinking skills, like racism and its effects on education. Instead, I want ML students to feel as though they can not only grasp the content, but contribute to a better understanding for everyone through authentic representation and sharing of their experiences, languages, and cultures.

CRISPR-Cas9 is a gene-editing technology with potential to expand the agricultural industry and improve human health. However, this technology may have unforeseeable consequences and adverse effects for society. Statistical procedures are often used to study public perceptions of controversial technologies. In this unit plan, students will design and administer surveys to investigate how their peers feel about various applications of gene-editing technology. In the process, students will apply random sampling methods and learn how to minimize response bias. Once their surveys are completed, students will analyze the results using contingency tables, confidence intervals, and hypothesis tests. The ultimate goal of this unit will be to help students to create clear policies for regulating the use of CRISPR-Cas9 and defend these policies with their statistical findings.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), immunizations are one of the public health’s most cost-effective inventions. The United Nations (UN) created several sustainable development goals to ensure a sustainable future for all. One of these goals focuses on good health and well-being at all ages. Vaccinations play a vital role in achieving this goal. In 1803, Edward Jenner coined the term vaccination, from the Latin word “Vacca” which means cow. Vaccines are substances that consist of weakened, dead, or incomplete portions of pathogens or antigens. Vaccines help prevent diseases and are one of the most important achievements of mankind. Research shows that vaccines help prevent a million deaths per year worldwide, increase average life span, and help eradicate infectious diseases such as smallpox. The current unit, targeted to high school students, dives into the history of infectious diseases and vaccinations, different types of immunity and how they are acquired, a brief overview of how vaccinations help produce antibodies that combat disease-causing agents and briefly discuss the vaccination delivery systems that are currently used worldwide. This unit could be taught over a period of 3-4 weeks, the unit introduces the Design Thinking Process where students embrace empathy, work collaboratively, create “human-centric” solutions to problems.

This unit focuses on the blending of vaccine focused content with basic biology content. The blending of content primarily concerns the human immune system. Allowing high school biology students to explore human vaccine technology through fundamental immune system knowledge and providing a tangible and relatable way to engage with these two complex topics to aid student understanding of how a vaccine works on the individual level. Prior to addressing the science behind how a vaccine leverages the immune system some vaccine focused content will provide a brief history of vaccines and explanation of vaccine types. Herd immunity will also be discussed within the unit. Herd immunity refers to the percentage of immune population threshold that is necessary to avoid an epidemic. Herd immunity is about understanding how vaccines work on a population level. It is relevant that students understand that vaccines are not just an individual health issue and are perhaps more importantly a community health issue. These topic areas will also allow the unit to explore the pressing and relevant vaccine related issue of barriers to vaccine adoption and public adoption of vaccine protocols. Finally, the likely future of vaccine technology, DNA vaccines, will be discussed. DNA vaccines offer much promise in eliminating some inherent vaccination issues such as transport, storage, ease of production, and safety.

As a primary-level teacher, I am responsible for creating a classroom that operates as a community, with everyone’s voice included in the day-to-day environment and provides opportunities for students to learn through literature, science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics. Key components of our school theme include equity and inclusion making social-emotional learning integral to any academic learning that takes place throughout the day. This unit will provide my students the opportunity to build an understanding of how we are all important to help make positive changes the world in the ways that we can.

This unit centers around two pedagogical ideas within the context of the secondary English classroom. The first is that by sharpening skills of critical analysis, students can use those skills across multiple disciplines and in their lives outside of school. The second is that students need more opportunities to respond to texts through the creation of their own texts. Drawing from work that I do in my own classroom, the structure of this YNHTI Seminar led by Dr. Ferguson, and changes happening in college-level composition courses like the First Year Writing course at UCONN, this unit asks students to apply skills of critical analysis to three visual texts by Clotilde Jimenez and then respond to those texts by composing a creative text of their own. Intended to be a unit done with students in the beginning stages of the school year, this unit will provide a foundation for visual literacy skills that can be put to use in other arenas of study both in the English classroom and in other classes throughout the rest of the academic year. For this unit, the three visual texts are all by the artist Clotilde Jimenez, an artist who works primarily in mixed media collage.

During this course of study, students will read the short fiction of writers with a broader perspective. It is my hope that through experience of the work of a group of diverse female writers that students will be able to examine an author’s text and life experience in order to determine their point of view. They will be asked to learn about different writers, analyze what aspects of their life are important, determine why it is that they chose this topic to write about, and cultivate their own views about what the writers view as important. Also, during this process, they will have the opportunity to write about what they determine is important.

Roxane Gay states that writing itself is a political act.2 I would agree. I think writing is a way for the writer to exert their power. My students often feel they have no voice, but there are a multitude of ways for underrepresented voices to be heard including, but not limited to, expressing political power. As young people, it is important for my students now to start thinking about what is important to them. In their research, Xu, Mar and Peterson found experience has an important impact on political views. It is important for my students to have experiences.3 While my students don’t have the right to vote, they have the ability to cultivate their voice to determine what issues are important to them and what their stance is on those issues. In the long term, this will be very important when they do reach the age to become voters.

It is my hope that through the study of writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Sandra Cisneros, Toni Morrison, and Nadine Gordimer, among others, that my students will start to see how women have regained their power through writing. I want my students to find their voice like Roxane Gay, who overcame adversity and found her inner strength, her inner voice, through the written word .4 This is what I want for my students. I want them to be able to cultivate their own voice to share with the world so they can be heard. One of the ways we will do this, just as Gay talks about in finding her own voice, is through reading the writing of powerful women and my students’ own writing.

Whatever method we use to get a drink, we don't have to consider the environmental and water quality engineering underlying clean water. Living in the industrialized world, like the United States, we are fortunate - we don't have to worry about the quality of our drinking water. But in many parts of the world, people don't have this luxury. The focus in this six-week curriculum unit is for primary-grade scientists to build an appreciation for the outdoors, impart an understanding of how many people in the world struggle to find clean water, and empower them to solve a problem. Students will spend time learning new concepts and experiencing laboratory and field demonstrations as they move through this curriculum unit on environmental engineering and specifically, water filtration.

The curriculum unit begins with the primary mentor texts, The River Ran Wild: An Environmental History by Lynne Cherry and The Water Princess by Susan Verde. Classroom activities include learning about water treatment and access, experience carrying water, engineer a working water filter, field trips to the pond, and connecting with an area in need of easier access to clean water.

“Water and Life & Phase Changes of Water” is a unit that can be used to cover the Connecticut high school science content requirements concerning: phase changes of matter. The concept of phase change must be approached just as that, a concept. Encouraging students to develop a conceptual understanding of phase change is a focus of this unit. If the teaching of phase change is approached as such with the end goal of students connecting phase change with energy, molecular movement, and intermolecular bonds students can develop a deep understanding of the concept and be better prepared to apply this understanding to multiple situations.

This unit also addresses the need for strong content to be partnered with the very conceptual phase changes of water. A section on the emergent properties of water is included. These properties are fundamental to life on this planet, an inherently interesting topic for students. The emergent properties, all due to the polarity of the water molecule, are: expansion upon freezing; usefulness as a solvent; high specific heat; and cohesive behavior. Examples to use in the classroom are provided to the reader as well. The backdrop of life sciences can help a high school teacher make more connections between physical sciences and students’ lives.

Watersheds are areas of land that drain rain, water, or snow into one location such as a stream, lake or wetland. It is a subject that has a number of interconnected parts that rely and function together to maintain the health of the watershed. In order to understand how watersheds behave and the impact they can have on the environment and how our actions affect them, one needs to understand the budgets of water, carbon, phosphorous, and nitrogen within watersheds. We will first breakdown the idea of the watershed into the cycles that make it up. From there, we will look at the environmental impact that each cycle has and how human involvement can affect the life forms that live within the cycles. Watersheds have the important roles of supplying water and food to the surrounding population. Learning more about how they function and becoming knowledgeable about the ways we can preserve and protect watersheds is a good way the preserve and keep up a high quality of life.

The main content covered in this unit includes the Structure and Function of the biological molecules, the energy flow and the nutrients, Nutritional Facts Labels, and the My Plate concept. Proteins, nucleic acids, polysaccharides in carbohydrates are considered macromolecules, and the lipid molecules are considered as biomolecules. For clarity purposes, proteins, nucleic acids, carbohydrates, and fats will be referred to as “biological molecules” throughout the unit. The history of studying these biological molecules dates back to the early 19th century. British physician-chemist, William Prout (1785-1850) was the first to classify “foodstuffs or ingredients of life into saccharinous (carbohydrates), oleaginous (fats), and albuminous (proteins)” and urged that “a satisfactory diet should include carbohydrates, fats, protein, and water”3. Carl Schmidt coined the term “carbohydrates” in 1844.