Local landscapes examined via Google Earth provide a natural arena on which students can analyze how humans modify and interact with their environment. These lessons guide students through an exploration of the natural and built environments both near and far so students begin to understand how each of these environments compare and the role they play in our everyday lives. With this knowledge, students progress from natural and built environments to the concept of land cover classification, a system of dividing out land cover into categories that describe its use and impact. The students then move toward examining the natural and built environment and each land cover classification in terms of environmental justice themes with the specific example of soil pollution. In each of these lessons, students are encouraged to examine a variety of categories and scales that their surrounding environment can be divided into to determine how we interact with the world and the results of those interactions.

In this unit, students explore the phylogeography of three-toed sloths (Bradypus pygmaeus and Bradypus variegatus) endemic to the Bocas del Toro islands off the Caribbean coast of Panama. After learning about the geologic history of this region, students measure model sloth skulls from each of the islands and compile that data into scatterplots. Students then analyze the scatterplots to make conclusions about which geographic factors best account for the variance in sloth body size in the region. The sequence of activities was designed for high school life science classrooms using the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) framework and teaches the disciplinary core idea LS3.B Variation of Traits. This lesson was taught in an integrated co-teaching classroom, a special education classroom, and a ninth-grade general biology classroom. Students were able to successfully answer the overarching research question and gained a deeper knowledge about natural selection and evolution in the process.

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.