TG Introduction

The Global System Science Series 

Global Systems Science (GSS) is an interdisciplinary course for high school students that emphasizes how scientists from a wide variety of fields work together to understand  problems of global impact. There are many ways to incorporate GSS books with its investigations in your curriculum. In its original design, using all the books, it would be a two-year curriculum starting with A New World View which introduces four key ideas that permeate the series:  

• The Earth has tremendously diverse environments, yet it is a single planet that we all call “home.”
• We can better understand the Earth if we think of it in terms of systems.  
• Everything is connected to everything else. 
• Through global studies we can find out what we can do to sustain life on Planet Earth—now and in the generations to come.

A New World View can be followed by any other units in the series, 
depending on the purpose and context of the course you design. 
Individual modules can also be used as supplementary material for traditional discipline-based courses.

This Global Systems Science Teacher’s Guide has additional investigations that are not included in the Student Books. Everything is online now but feel free to print any of the pages of the Teacher Guide or the Student Books if you need to provide hard copy pages to your students.

The first part of this guide is intended to answer the most commonly asked questions that you can find on the contents page.

The second part of this guide is divided into eleven parts, keyed to each of the eleven Student Guides pictured on the the GSS Map. Each part has: 

• A brief overview of the Student Guide and a list of its educational goals and objectives.
• Assessment tasks
• Chapter-by-chapter suggestions for 
  • demonstrations, “openers,” small and large group work,  and questions to stimulate your students’ thinking.  
  • additional activities for various groups of students, including those who may have difficulty grasping some of the concepts, and those who are capable of meeting additional challenges.
• A list of additional resources for enriching classroom instruction.

Last but not least, the GSS series is kept up-to-date week by week with curated collected newspaper and magazine articles pertinent to specific chapters of each book. These are found on the table of contents page of each book, but you may receive the weekly updates via email by request to gssmail@berkeley.edu.