Students will launch the survival inquiry by taking positions on danger-response scenarios, listening to a community expert connect literature to real human-wildlife encounters, and beginning an evidence-based comparison of how intellect, instinct, or both shape survival and reveal limits to human control over nature.

Students will take a defensible position on whether intellect, instinct, or both best support survival by weighing evidence from both texts, testing their reasoning against peer questions, revising a compare-and-contrast draft, and recording a concise CER response.

Students will present and defend their two-story survival analysis to classmates and a community expert, use critique to strengthen reasoning, and complete a final CER video that shows how evidence from both texts and the expert talk supports a claim about survival through intellect, instinct, or both.