The teacher companion to Earth Science B — Water, Climate, Resources and Hazards (California), the second semester of a full-year laboratory Earth science course for grade 9, built on the CA NGSS performance expectations HS-ESS2-2, HS-ESS2-4, HS-ESS2-5, HS-ESS2-6, HS-ESS3-1 to HS-ESS3-6 and HS-ETS1-1 to HS-ETS1-4, with the RST.9-10 literacy standards throughout.
Module 1 covers the semester as a whole: the UC A-G area D case and phenomenon-driven teaching; lab safety and management for lamps, water near electrics, sand, seltzer and shake tables; teaching hazards and climate change with care, as settled science without doom and with solutions framed around what people can do; and real-time data, pacing, tools and access. Modules 2-5 take one student unit each: a briefing on what students produce and the misconceptions that arrive every year, a facilitation lesson for the investigation lab, the argumentation lab and the modeling workshop, and a scoring lesson with synthetic student work at three bands, the realistic errors it contains and the one piece of feedback that moves each.
Every number in the exemplars was recomputed from the same data the student lessons use: DWR reservoir observations, NOAA 1991-2020 climate normals, the Mauna Loa carbon dioxide record, NASA GISTEMP and the San Francisco tide gauge.
Curriculum
- 5 Sections
- 16 Lessons
- Lifetime
- Module 1: Teaching Earth Science B4
- Module 2: Unit 1 — Earth’s Systems and California’s Water3
- Module 3: Unit 2 — Weather, Climate and the Energy Balance3
- Module 4: Unit 3 — Climate Change: Evidence and Models3
- Module 5: Unit 4 — Resources, Hazards and Human Impacts3
Instructor
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