Lesson Plan - Complex Urban Ecosystems

Students will focus on the interactions among biophysical and social forces by completing a four corners activity in which they brainstorm different factors (biological, chemical, physical and social) that interact with each other and impact cities. Then students will develop their understanding of good research questions and expand on the idea that scientific inquiry is an iterative and social process. Students will also go out to their field site and use their observational and questioning skills to come up with a variety of research questions by looking at their field site through a variety of lenses. Finally, the class discusses the different questions that the students develop focusing specifically on what type of data would need to be collected and how it could be done. During this lesson, students do not answer the research questions, but over the year the students will be studying their field sites from these different lenses which will allow them to address a number of the questions they generate in this first module