Lessons for Understanding Our Water Footprint

Notes from our reviewers

The CLEAN collection is hand-picked and rigorously reviewed for scientific accuracy and classroom effectiveness. Read what our review team had to say about this resource below or learn more about how CLEAN reviews teaching materials.

• Teaching Tips
  Teaching tips are embedded throughout the lesson plan. There are many extensional activities in the lesson plans, including ways for students to think about potential career paths, links to interdisciplinary studies, and more. Educators may wish to emphasize the relationship between virtual water and indirect water use (they are the same thing). A definition is provided [link https://watercalculator.org/footprint/what-is-virtual-water/ 'here.'] Educators will need to be sensitive on how diet and economic based solutions are discussed. This is mentioned in the lesson plan, however it is important that educators think through their students specifically and how they might respond to the discussions around the economic/diet lesson plan.
• About the Science
  This resource includes both a middle school and high school curricula on topics related to global freshwater distribution and availability. Students evaluate how they use water in their daily lives using the Water Calculator. In the second lesson, students explore how and why "virtual water" (indirect water use), or the water that goes into growing crops and feeding livestock, is both a concern for our planet and an avenue for water conservation practices. In the third lesson, students create a poster to demonstrate how to save water at home. They then audit the water use at school and strategize to create solutions that are presented as a poster. The lesson plans do not focus on climate change as the core concept, but rather climate change enters through reflections, discussion questions, and a possible focus for project-based learning. The references are useful and credible. There is an extensive list of references provided at the bottom of the teaching notes PDF and the lesson plan. Some of these are peer-reviewed journal articles that detail the calculations used to determine the quantity of water use for specific things (e.g., a chocolate bar). Passed initial science review - expert science review pending.
• About the Pedagogy
  This resource includes a complete guide for students and educators, including a slide deck with notes, a rubric where appropriate, and embedded teaching tips and supplementary resources. This resource supports learning through discussions, simulations/interactive websites, group activities, community interviews, and presentations. This resource is modular and educators can use it in part or in its entirety without sacrificing content or learning objectives. The water footprint calculator is also available in Spanish and many parts of the lesson plans have links to Spanish language resources.
• Technical Details/Ease of Use
  This resource includes a complete set of lesson materials that are common to the classroom. Links in Lesson 1 are inactive for both the middle school and high school lesson plans. The links in lessons 2 and 3 were active at the time of review. Educators may be able to search for the links for Lesson 1 and still use the lesson plan.