Lesson Planning for Transformative Education

This section aims to help translate transformative education content, attitudes, and skills into approaches for developing integrated lesson plans that address curriculum standard-aligned learning outcomes. This section is for curriculum developers at national, sub-national, and regional levels, as well as classroom and community educators. Examples of how standards have been aligned to transformative education lessons in different parts of the world, as well as our curated collection of lesson plans and resources, are shared below.

Aligning lessons to curriculum standards and existing learning materials

Our Policymakers section discusses how systems of education and education leaders can approach revising or adapting curriculum  to integrate transformative education content into learning standards, or to identify existing opportunities in current curriculum to integrate SDG 4.7-aligned content. These approaches have the most potential for impact at scale for entire school districts and education systems. However, for educators and leaders who do not teach in areas where such approaches are being considered or taken, teachers can also do their own research to develop curriculum-aligned lessons that create action-oriented learning opportunities to address the SDGs. The below example shows how a seemingly unrelated standard can be used to teach about SDG-aligned content. Often it just takes a little creativity to make the connections!

New Jersey Kindergarten Math Standards on Sorting Skills

Waste Sorting & Counting Activity

The video resources and drop-down sections below offer resources to help you brainstorm ways to make these transformative education connections to existing standards in your curriculum.

Designing lessons to promote inquiry and learner agency

Integrating SDG 4.7 content offers teachers opportunities to develop exciting learning opportunities for learners that connect to their daily lives and empower them to become change agents in their communities. The Understanding by Design framework (Wiggins & MicTighe, 2005) advises educators to facilitate such inquiry-based, action-oriented learning by starting with the big ideas and essential questions of a topic that can compel learner interest, then backward design lessons that build on those ideas and questions to guide learning of curricular content. Backward design calls upon educators to first think of the learning goals, then to consider what are acceptable evidence of student learning, then to develop the lesson content and activities around these learning goals and evidence of learning. 

When integrating SDG 4.7 concepts that may not be explicitly addressed in existing curriculum, big ideas and essential questions can help lesson designers identify areas in the curriculum that can be applied to help explore the topic using core curriculum skills and knowledge. This section offers tools and guidance for how to use big ideas to guide alignment of SDG 4.7 content to core curriculum.

A wealth of lesson plans and resources already exist that map to subjects, grade levels, and SDG focus areas. You can explore existing resources and collections below:

Connecting content to communities

Connecting learning content and experiences to the wider school community can be transformative for learners, and help build their sense of agency. As discussed further in Part 5, place-based learning is a pedagogical approach that takes advantage of learners’ environment and geography to orient learning. Place-based learning can be facilitated by building partnerships between schools and community organizations, colleges and universities, museums, or government agencies, which can offer additional opportunities for applying learning to real-world problem-solving. These partnerships can also help facilitate integration of SDG 4.7 content by bringing the expertise and existing educational materials from community partners to formal education, and collaborating with teachers and curriculum designers to adapt existing materials to curriculum standards. The resource linked below offers tips about connecting content to communities.

The workbook and faciltiators' guide linked below helps students learn about climate change, and how they can create action plans for addressing local climate change issues in their communities.

The video panel linked below, organized by New Jersey Audubon, offers an example of how New Jersey civil society organizations and state agencies helped prepare the state for adopting its first in US K-12 climate change education standards across subjects by tailoring their existing content through partnerships with schools and districts.

To facilitate place-based learning in learners' communities, the SciStarter helps connect citizen scientists on an array of local and global projects. 

Lesson Plans and Resources

Explore our collection of of lesson plans and other learning resources, including resources developed by members of the Mission 4.7 Secretariat, as well as other curated resources developed by experts and educators . 

If you have a resource you would like to share with us, we'd love to hear from you! Please complete the brief resource submission form here.

The collection below is organized by grade band and by subject. Click on your subject to explore our collection. These resources are also organized according to our Learning Expectations here.