Mitigation or Adaptation?

UCAR Center for Science Education

Explaining mitigation vs adaptation can be tricky but this activity has clearly defined each of the terms for students. Students will gain a better understanding of mitigation and adaptation through real-life examples included in the card sorting activity.

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Notes from our reviewers

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The "notice and wonder" teaching strategy is generally effective for students willing to engage in pair-share and class discussions, but teachers may need to adjust if their students don't engage well with these methods. Having students keep a journal of their thinking in addition to using sticky notes to record thoughts and questions would help, though that may add time to the lesson. The activity is suitable for middle schoolers and can be easily modified to be more complex for high school students.
The concepts of mitigation and adaptation are well-defined and appropriate for this activity. Explaining mitigation vs. adaptation can be tricky but this activity has clearly defined each of the terms for students. Students will gain a better understanding of mitigation and adaptation through the examples in the card sorting activity. This lesson does a good job of comparing impacts from 1.5 vs. 2 degrees C for students to understand how such a seemingly minor difference can have drastically different impacts. The rigor of the activity is just right for middle school. This activity does not include consideration of the data underlying the different projections. Teachers may want to research further into the data if they anticipate getting getting any questions about the reliability of numbers shown in the infographic. Passed initial science review - expert science review pending.
This is a hands-on activity that involves sorting cards into categories based on mitigation, adaptation, or both. This is a group/pair activity that will be good to get students talking to each other about different climate solutions. The goal is to make students think about what they can do to help climate and also how there are different levels of solutions for climate change such as community or nationwide efforts. The instructions are well written and plenty of background materials are provided for the teacher. The teacher's guide is excellent and even provides suggested scripts for teachers. It also gives a lot of resources for the teacher to read up on more information. The pair/share and class/share strategy to discuss observations and questions generated from them is a sound approach for most classrooms, but may not work as well for less engaged classrooms. It may also be challenging for ELL students since so much of it relies on spoken collaboration. Teachers may want to adjust based on their knowledge of their students.
This lesson is scripted well for teachers to use, and the infographic provided is of high quality. The cards are effective for the student activity, though teachers should allow time to print, cut out, and laminate the cards. The teacher guide says 20 minutes of prep time is needed to cut out and laminate the cards but this may take longer depending on how large the class size is. All the links provided work at the time of review. The activity is well organized and designed. There are multiple links to background materials and resources.