Target Audience
Junior high school students are grades 6, 7, and 8. The age range is 11-14. In public schools, students often come from a diverse background in socio-economic status, family history and cultural identity. It is important to have a lesson plan that fits the age group but does not discriminate or show bias towards a type of status or identifier. Junior high school is marked by a transition from elementary school, which often has one single teacher, to courses taught by different teachers and different times during the day. The student moves from one group of class members in elementary school to a wide number of classmates in a variety of class settings. This time is marked also by age transition as the student moves from child to teenager. There are more decisions that have to be made that include academic, personal and social choices. At this changing point in the student’s life, it is important that they learn how to use decision-making skills to face situations. The ability to think critically and to find understand conflict resolution can assist the student throughout their social, personal and educational interactions.

Subject
Nancy Carlsson-Paige and Linda Lantieri (2005) explain that students are maturing in an age of conflict and face many problems that can significantly impact the student’s ability to achieve, to have self respect and to learn. They suggest that the role of education must give students the knowledge and opportunity to engage in decision-making action; utilize critical thinking and problem solving; develop conflict resolution techniques (Carlsson-Paige and Lantieri 2005). These skills can be used to foster a pro-social environment and develop a citizenship society. Decision making skills can empower the student and offer self-confidence, motivation and enhance independent learning (Hughes 1998). The contention being that empowerment and student autonomy correlate strongly with self-confidence and that this needs to be enhanced through the acquisition of enabling skills (Hughes 1998).

Lesson Plans
Lesson Plan 1: Decision-Making

Adapted from the Society for Judgement and Decision Making (2006)
Decision-making is examining the question or decision. The decision-maker focuses on the consequences and outcomes of a decision and chooses an alternative that has the best outcome and lowest risk. This means that each choice leads to a consequence and reaction. In decision-making, each alternative has one to many possible consequences. Sometimes the consequences are easy to find out, and other times they may be hard or unknown. The choices (alternatives) are scored by how strong and possible the consequences are. The decision-maker looks at the consequences and finds the alternative with the best possible outcome.

Co-operative Learning
Cooperative (or group) teaching strategy allows students to share goals. Students are divided into small groups of 3 or 4. Johnson and Johnson (2006) identify five important components of cooperative learning: positive interdependence, face-to-face promotive interaction, individual and group accountability, interpersonal and small group skills, and group processing. Positive interdependence is structuring the activity so that the groups are linked with each other and one can not succeed unless the group goals and tasks are met (Johnson and Johnson 2006). Face to face promotive interaction is letting the students “do real work together in which they promote each other's success by sharing resources and helping, supporting, encouraging, and applauding each other's efforts to achieve” (Johnson and Johnson 2006). Individual and group accountability helps the team achieve its goals by having each member have a task that supports the overall goal. Interpersonal and small group skills where “students have to engage simultaneously in taskwork (learning academic subject matter) and teamwork (functioning effectively as a group)” (Johnson and Johnson 2006). Group processing lets the members talk out the problem, steps and goals to establish a working relationship and develop success (Johnson and Johnson 2006).

Activities Conducted

1. Divide class into teams of 3-4.
2. Handout the Scenario worksheet to each student.


• The scenario worksheet has three situations that the junior high student may face.
  
  • Responsibility (Friends want you too skip a class with them)
  • Alcohol (A friend took a beer from his dad and asks you to drink it with him)
  • Stealing (A friend wants you to steal from the computer lab during lunch hour)
    
• Each group chooses the scenario they would like to work on.
• This is the first ‘group’ decision.
3. Handout the Decision Worksheet and Instructions.
   
• An example of this is the decision tree at Enchanted Learning (2006), a teacher resource.
4. The group objectives are too:
   
• State the decision that needs to be made.
• List three alternative choices for each scenario
• List the consequences associated with each of the alternatives.
• Compare the consequences each of the alternatives in order to make the decision
• Decide on the alternative as a group
5. Homework Assignment should focus on what they learned by working as a group.

Lesson Plan 2: Critical Thinking Skills
Critical thinking is the “ability to analyze facts, generate and organize ideas, defend opinions, make comparisons, draw inferences, evaluate arguments and solve problems” (Chance,1986, p. 6 in Huitt, W 1998). Really, critical thinking explores the occurrence or statement and decides if it is valid. The foundation of critical thinking is to behave ethically, socially, and remove biases or prejudice. Critical thinking is asking questions about the world around us and finding a reliable, valid answer with the goal to develop more knowledge. This is using reasoning, reflection and acting responsibly. The critical thinker has learned how to ask the right questions, find information that is relevant and valid. The critical thinking skill is then sorting through the information and finding an answer or coming to a conclusion about the situation or world.

Discovery-Based Learning
The discovery-based teaching strategy is based on the student’s ability to think about a problem by developing the questions that need to be answered. The student acts as the detective to the problem, asking ‘why’ and solving the problem by organizing information and developing his or her own ideas about the question. The student experiments with different possibilities and answers them by using ‘gathering information’ and validating it with the question. The student then answers the ‘why’ or ‘how’ questions. This uses complex thinking skills where the student must develop the question, make a prediction, and decide on the outcome using information. More…