playing god? In the Classroom User Guide

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About the Lesson Plans

playing god? In the classroom provides teachers with a series of free lesson plans to support bioethics education at the high school level and above. Each stand-alone module uses an episode of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics award-winning podcast, playing god?, as a foundation for student exploration of complex ethics questions generated by the scientific and medical advances. Lesson plans were developed at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics in consultation with an expert advisory board of experienced educators.  

Each lesson plan incorporates the stories told in the Podcast to prompt students to recognize the societal impacts of science and technology, and to deliberate and form solutions to tough ethical challenges. The stories serve as unique case studies, covering themes ranging from patient autonomy to drug pricing, and aims to foster empathy, critical thinking, effective communication, and other crucial skills.  

Each lesson plan is independent of the others. Teachers can choose to use any or all of them. They are each structured as follows: 

• Sample Activities: Suggests simulations, debates, and research and writing activities for student groups of various sizes designed to provide them with practice developing and articulating informed viewpoints, and working together toward ethically acceptable solutions to identified challenges.
• Careers Mentioned: Provides a list of the careers of the professionals featured in the episode to prompt student exploration of relevant career pathways.
• Additional Resources: Provides links and references to additional readings about lesson-related topics, which are freely accessible for use, except as noted. 

What is Bioethics?

Bioethics is a field of scholarship that identifies, studies, and responds to ethical questions in medicine, public health, biomedical research, scientific advancements and the development and use of new technologies. Bioethics questions often involve overlapping concerns from diverse fields of study including life sciences, biotechnology, public health, medicine, public policy, law, philosophy and theology.

Season One of playing god? addresses bioethics issues related to advances in medical technologies in the past half-century, including ventilators, organ transplants, stem cell science, and more. Those developments have undoubtedly saved and improved many lives. However, while they may solve scientific and medical problems, they introduce ethical challenges: just because we can do something – does it mean we should? And who gets to make those kinds of decisions?  

Using the Lesson Plans

Permission is hereby granted to reproduce, distribute, and display copies of content material for nonprofit educational and nonprofit library purposes, provided that: (i) copies are distributed at or below costs; (ii) author and source are acknowledged; and (iii) a copyright notice is attached to the copies, such notice being in the form “Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics 2024” (or as otherwise indicated on the materials as posted here). No commercial uses are allowed without the prior express permission of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. Please contact [email protected] for permissions and more information.