Over the past two weeks a team of five students, or Learners as they are called at the international online School of Humanity, participated in a mini-internship where ARES served as the client organization. The learners were tasked with solving a real-world problem for the client... in particular, we challenged them to create five new lesson plans for student activities aligned to the Space Prize Curriculum, with the goal of integrating the resulting activities into our professional development for teachers, including the online Space Education Course so that the lessons might be used by real teachers and students around the world. We requested activities that they as learners would find engaging, while also expecting formal lesson plans complete with scoring rubrics as a final deliverable. This morning the team of learners presented an overview of their solution and shared the final lesson plans, now available here as an open education resource (OER):
The learners chose to focus on five specific chapters in the curriculum; introduction to space science, the history of space exploration, skill sets and mindsets, space and sustainability, and space governance and ethics. The activities they chose allow for a high degree of student agency. For instance, the space science lesson plan includes an open ended activity where students create a model of the solar system, allowing them to decide what is most important to model and how it will be accomplished... and the sustainability lesson allows students to choose to focus on a Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) they are most passionate about.
We are grateful for the learners' work on this project and hope that their lesson plans will see use in the coming academic year. In the meantime, we'd love to hear feedback from other educators. How do these lessons look to you, and how might you use them with your own students?
Learn more about the ARES Learning approach in the book Space Education: Preparing Students for Humanity's Multi-Planet Future by our co-founder Dr. Mark Wagner, and explore a complete Space Education Curriculum developed for high schools - it's a free and open education resource available to students, teachers, and enthusiasts everywhere.
Educators, sign up for online professional development based on the book and curriculum. Space is limited and registration ends soon!
Join the free online Space Educator Network for ongoing resources and discussion.