Cause analysis • Years 7–8 • Unit 10 Week 4

Cause & Consequence Chart

A blight killed a crop. A system turned that into a famine. This sheet asks you to hold those two things apart — the event that started the crisis, and the conditions already in place that decided how bad it became.

Ingoa / Name

Akomanga / Class

Best for

The 20-minute cause analysis in Lesson 4, straight after the TED-Ed video.

Kaiako use

Do not pre-sort the causes. The sorting argument is where the learning happens — especially the disagreements about which column a cause belongs in.

Ākonga use

Sort all six causes, then explain in writing how one structural cause made the immediate cause deadlier than it had to be.

Linked next step

Lesson 5 uses this reasoning again in the Trade-off Scenarios, where the question becomes who gets a real choice and who does not.

Te Ao Māori lens

Raupatu — the confiscation of land — created a comparable structural vulnerability in Aotearoa. When a people are separated from the land that feeds them, a bad season stops being a hardship and becomes a crisis. Students who know that history often reach the structural column faster than the immediate one.

Free to teach tomorrow, adaptable to your rohe

The chart is ready to print. Te Wānanga is useful when you want the same two-column analysis applied to a New Zealand example your class already knows.

Rebuild the cause list around a local or iwi history your class is studying.
Add a scaffolded version with two causes pre-placed for students who need a model.
Save an adapted Unit 10 cause-analysis set in My Kete.

Adapt this in Te Wānanga Open Creation Studio Open My Kete

Kaiako planning snapshot

Use length: 20 minutes as the Lesson 4 analysis activity.
Grouping: Pairs. The disagreement between partners is the point.
Prep: One copy per pair, plus one per student if you want the writing task collected.
Teaching move: When a pair asks which column a cause belongs in, ask “would this cause have killed anyone on its own?” rather than answering.

🧺 Kai systems ⚖️ Trade-offs

What this sheet already gives you

All six causes written out, ready to sort
A two-column immediate/structural frame
A worked comparison to model the distinction
Consequence rows with the figures from the lesson
A written explanation task and a challenge question

Students who put every cause in the structural column usually have the idea. Students who put everything in the immediate column are still treating the famine as weather.

Ngā Whāinga Ako / Learning Intentions

We are learning to tell an immediate cause apart from a structural cause.
We are learning to explain how those two kinds of cause interact to produce a catastrophe.
We are learning that a food shortage becomes a famine because of power, not only nature.

Ngā Paearu Angitū / Success Criteria

I can name the immediate cause of the famine and at least two structural causes.
I can explain how one structural cause made the blight more deadly than it had to be.
I can use the words immediate, structural and consequence accurately in a sentence.

First, the difference

An immediate cause is the event that triggered the crisis. A structural cause is a condition already in place that decided how bad the crisis became.

A power cut is an immediate cause. Having no backup power and no food in the house is a structural cause. The power cut is the same for everyone; the consequences are not.

Sort the six causes

Write each cause into the column where you think it belongs. If your pair disagrees, write it in both and say why underneath.

Immediate cause — what triggered the crisis	Structural causes — what made it fatal

The causes to sort

Phytophthora infestans blight destroyed the potato crop (1845–46)
Irish tenant farmers were required to pay rent in cash, not food, so they sold their other crops
Irish land was held by a small landlord class, around a third of them absentees who never lived on their estates and left agents to collect the rent
Potatoes were the only crop cheap and calorie-dense enough for impoverished tenants to survive on
The British government adhered to laissez-faire economic policy, refusing to intervene in the food market
Food exports from Ireland to Britain continued throughout the famine years

Now the consequences

These are the figures your lesson used. Fill in what each one tells you about who carried the cost.

Consequence	What it tells us about who bore the cost
Around 700,000 to a million people died between 1845 and 1852. Death figures for this period are estimates, not counts.
At least 2.1 million people emigrated between 1845 and 1855, out of a population of about 8.4 million in 1844.
Ireland kept exporting beef, butter and grain to Britain throughout the famine years.

Sources: Donnelly, J. (2001), The Great Irish Potato Famine; Ó Gráda, C. (1999), Black '47 and Beyond. The uncertainty in the death toll is worth naming with your class — it is itself a historical finding.

Write it up

Choose one structural cause. In three or four sentences, explain how it made the blight deadlier than it had to be. Use the word structural at least once.

Challenge question

If even one of the structural causes had been different, would a crop failure still have caused a million deaths? Which structural cause do you think mattered most, and why?