UNESCO World Heritage Sites Task

I just designed a task for my Year 7s around the UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The focus here is on developing and utilising higher-order critical thinking skills, such as evaluating and creating. As this is quite a lot of work for KS3/Lower Secondary students, mine will be presenting it in groups (encourage the use of technology in presenting - PowerPoint, Prezi, Animoto, Google Presentations, etc). 

The Lowdown:

Students must answer the following key questions:

• Why should we care about protecting cultural and natural sites?
• What do you think should be the key criteria for protecting a place? (Students will design their own key criteria re: what makes a place worth saving)
• Can UNESCO's criteria be made any better? (Students will evaluate UNESCO's criteria, providing an overall opinion, reasons, and potential improvements)

They will also need to research a current UNESCO World Heritage site (or a location of their own choosing that they feel needs protection), provide background information on their site, and evaluate it using their own list of criteria to decide whether it is worth protecting/preserving. 

Other things:

I would also recommend printing out images of World Heritage sites to provide inspiration. 

You will need to scaffold and model thinking - I talk it through with my students and use Project Zero thinking techniques e.g. Think, Pair, Share, plus graphic organisers and coloured pens to get students generating, sharing, and writing down their ideas. You will probably also need to discuss the UNESCO criteria with students - I've greatly simplified them, but the language is still quite formal - if anyone can simplify them further, I'd love to get in touch with you. 

We've just started, so I will let people know how it goes and share insights re: the final product. You could probably get 8s and 9s to do this as well. 

The assignment handouts are available below - feel free to modify them for use in your classrooms. 

Resource 1: Should We...? Task

Resource 2: Group/Record Sheet

Resource 3: UNESCO Criteria Sheet (Simplified)

UPDATE:

Resource 4: 'NIP' Graphic Organiser (use this for evaluating UNESCO's criteria)
Resource 5: Should We...? Criteria Sheet (Mark sheet)

Depending on which sites you're looking at, this website on World Wonders + Google Earth/Maps could be very useful. It doesn't have any African sites, and very few Asian ones, but there are plenty from N. America and Europe on there. It provides students with a VFT (Virtual Field Trip) experience.