COVID-19 & Health Equity Units

What would it be like to teach and learn about COVID-19 while living through it? Educators and students will find out this fall.

OpenSciEd  is now offering free COVID-19 & Health Equity Units for high school science and grades K-5.

These are field test versions that will be revised and officially released in March 2021.

High School Science Unit

The high school unit focuses on the question, “How can we slow the spread of the COVID-19 virus to protect our communities?” It is designed to teach students about the COVID-19 pandemic, transmission of the COVID-19 virus, and the impacts of the pandemic on communities, especially communities of color.

The unit employs an inquiry-based approach, and is designed for 15 class periods of instruction, with optional extensions. There are four broad areas of learning goals targeted in this unit:

• virus transmission between people and communities,
• mitigation strategies and using probabilities to explain how we can lower the chance of transmitting the virus between people and across communities,
• understanding disproportionate impacts on communities and the policies and practices that lead to those impacts, and finally,
• development of two social emotional competencies--self awareness and social awareness.

The high school science unit was developed in a partnership between BSCS Science Learning and current classroom teachers from across the country. Epidemiologists, public health experts, equity and antiracist education experts, community groups, as well as social-emotional learning experts contributed to the material development.

The developers will be conducting a field test and obtaining reviews in the fall of 2020, and revising the materials for official release in March 2021.

Elementary School Units

The K-2 unit, “What can we do to keep our community healthy?”, and the 3-5 unit, “How can we make decisions to care for ourselves, our families, and our communities?”, explore how different communities are impacted by COVID-19 through the lens of historical inequities in society. These multidisciplinary units include integrated social-emotional learning and supports for teachers and families in addressing these emotional topics.

These ready-to-use materials include 12-14 days of instruction with forty minutes of instruction/day. The materials guide students and families through the following questions:

• How have our lives changed because of COVID-19?
• Why have those changes happened? (Should they happen?)
• How can we care for ourselves, our families, and our communities?

The elementary school units were developed in a partnership among NextGen Science Storylines  (at Northwestern University), Learning in Places  (at Northwestern University and University of Washington), and current classroom teachers from across the country.

The developers will be conducting a field test and obtaining reviews in the fall of 2020, and revising the materials for official release in March 2021.

Funding for the COVID-19 & Health Equity Units was provided by a generous donor, who prefers to remain anonymous.