I.

General Information
Teacher: Pete Kohnen
Date of Submission: December 1, 2016
Grade Level: 11 and 12
Number of Students: 25
Unit: Ethics and Environmental Impact of Humans
Lesson 2: Tragedy of the Commons Day 2
Approximate Length: 60 min

Targeted Benchmarks:
Students will:
Develop an understanding of what the Tragedy of the Commons is
Understand how TOC affects the environment
Begin to understand the difficulty between balancing human demand with
sustainability

NGSS Addressed:

HS-ESS3-2: Evaluate competing design solutions for developing, managing, and

utilizing energy and mineral resources based on cost-benefit ratios

HS-ESS3-3: Create a computational simulation to illustrate the relationships among

management of natural resources, the sustainability of human populations, and
biodiversity.

II. Summary of Lesson

Students will begin by discussing their journal entry from the previous lesson. After the
discussion, they will be provided with reading material regarding what exactly the
Tragedy of the Commons is and another article about the men involved in the standoff in
Oregon who have been fighting for grazing rights on public land.

We will have a discussion based on the reading for whatever time allows and then class
will be closed with a reflective journal entry about what their thoughts are regarding the
tragedy of the commons (how they relate to it, what it even is, an example they can think
of, how their ideas about it have changed, etc..)

III. Sequence of Activities

1 Bellwork Brief discussion of journal entry responses from previous lesson (6 min)

2 Reading Explanation of Tragedy of the Commons and Oregon standoff article. (25
min)

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3 Class Discussion What are the implications of opening up public land to
unregulated grazing. What are other cases where TOC can be exemplified? (20 min)

4 Closing question/ Journal work What are your thoughts on TOC? How have your
thoughts changed? Should TOC help guide environmental policy creation? (remainder
of class time)

IV. Instructional Standards Comments

High Order Thinking: With a contentious issue like the Oregon Stand Off, it places
students in a position to defend a position whether its agreeing or not with the writer of
the article or the characters in the article. Through the journal entry at the beginning of
the day, they are connecting the activity, the informational reading and the current event
to other concepts as well.

Deep Knowledge: The current event combined with the previous days activity allow
students to remained interested and invested in what the implications for TOC are.
Additionally, pooling ideas and discussing thoughts allows students to find value in their
thoughts and evaluate the ideas of other people who may have different perspectives than
theirs.

Substantive Conversation: The informative reading and current event reading will
provide students with many talking points for the class discussion. Reading individually
and then discussing as a group will allow students to form their own independent
thoughts and then pool them together in order to develop a broader and more complete
idea of what the implications of TOC are.

Connections to the World Beyond the Classroom: Through the current event article,
the students will see that TOC is still relevant information despite having the wealth
of knowledge we possess. This would be a good time for students to execute one of
their social media tasks that they will have assigned throughout the class. They
could make a post about their feelings on a TOC issue or make a bold statement
about something guided by TOC.

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