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Considering the Merit

This support material is incorporated into critical challenges at grade 9, however, it can be adapted for use at all grade levels.

The following document can be adapted and re-saved for your needs.

Opportunities, Challenges and Interesting Implications Chart 
This chart helps students to consider the opportunities, challenges and implications of an idea or a proposal. Often, we encounter ideas or proposals that seem to have merit but also raise some concerns. In order to make a reasoned assessment, we need to consider the opportunities, challenges and interesting implications.

To use this chart:

• ask students to brainstorm and record the potential benefits that may be realized in the opportunities column
• ask students to brainstorm and record the potential negative implications, including hurdles, to be overcome in order to realize the opportunities in the challenges column
• ask students to brainstorm and record possible related effects or unintended impacts that may result in the interesting implications column
• after completing the three columns in the chart, ask students to decide whether the idea/proposal has enough merit to warrant moving forward and to provide reasons to support the decision.

Credits

Adapted from Critical Challenges Across the Curriculum series.  Permission granted by The Critical Thinking Consortium for use by Alberta teachers.