Positives

• This text stresses the interconnectedness of the Sustainable Development Goals.
• As each policy/improvement is mentioned, they picture the many goals that are involved.
• It does a great job of explaining how these goals differ from the Millennium Development Goals, so students can avoid confusion and see where the MDGs fell short.

Additional Prerequisites

• Students may need the terms degradation, impoverished, developing country, developed country, municipality, and others defined prior to reading the article.
• The lesson plan and discussion guide are primarily for classrooms using the entire module. However, question 4 in the discussion guide and part three of the guided notes in the lesson plan pertain to this particular section.
• Students should know what the United Nations is and how countries work together to promote the common good.

Differentiation

• Students can discuss the tradeoffs that countries experience as they achieve certain goals, such as the environmental tradeoff as a result of China's poverty-reducing measures.
• Each student can choose one of the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals to further research and produce an informative piece of writing about, including success criteria and current policies contributing to this goal in their own country or country of interest.
• Civics students describe how a country might design improvements through policy to contribute to the SDGs.
• As inequality, poverty, access to education, and gender equality are all pieces of the SDGs, students may want to research the history of inequality in a country of their choice.