Global education presents an opportunity for all classroom teachers, regardless of subject or grade level, to engage students in understanding globally relevant issues that extend from content taught in class and providing opportunities for students to develop solutions and enact strategies in addressing these issues. These issues are embodied within the Sustainable Development Goals – a series of 17 goals established by the United Nations that collectively work toward providing an opportunity for all global citizens to survive and prosper today and for generations to follow. This paper describes strategies for STEM teachers to integrate global education within their classroom and empower their students to solve real-world problems experienced in the global community.

Crosscutting concepts (CCCs) are designed to help students make sense of phenomena across multiple scientific disciplines (National Research Council 2012). Since they are applicable to explaining so many different phenomena, they have the potential to be accessible, extensible, and generative for sensemaking. We suggest that explicitly using CCCs during the can serve as a resource for students to help them begin to make sense of phenomena without in-depth content knowledge (Krajcik & Reiser 2021). But how could we get students to use CCCs productively, when they have not yet begun to dig into the phenomena enough to develop the deep disciplinary knowledge necessary to explain it? We explore an instructional approach that scaffolds students' use of CCCs and helps students use them to make sense of and ask productive questions about an anchoring phenomenon. We describe how CCCs play a role in working with anchoring phenomena to guide sensemaking in a unit, and present evidence from 32 classrooms that illustrates how students use CCCs as part of their sensemaking to develop productive investigative questions. These data were used to revise lessons through incorporation of scaffolds to support students' use of CCCs as part of their sensemaking around the anchoring phenomena.