Education and the Environment: The same, but different

We've talked a little about students and teachers and environmental science. As the vet on the net, I feel compelled to share my thoughts on being the guide on the side, so to speak, with respect to curriculum before we dive into content-specific labs. And be it known that I think our students desperately need to hear a sage on the stage from time to time. It’s just that what we more experienced folk ought to tell/show is different in this post-information revolution age. We are living in 'interesting times' indeed…

Anyone reading this blog is likely familiar with OERs (Open Educational Resources); HippoCampus is a great example of a rich environment that is keeping up with both new technologies and new directions for education. Being in higher education (and highly skeptical of this sort of significant change), I felt it was my duty to see how/if these new OERs might be useful. Having been an online learner as well, I am especially sensitive to maintaining a reasonable balance between my expectations for students and what all I could deliver via distance and face-to-face courses. I was happy to find that the licensed resources in the NROC Environmental Science course enabled the efficient development of and supported the effective delivery of an online Integrated Earth Science for Teachers course that I designed and taught. Visualize your own favorite teaching activities and supplements as you review the Balancing Acts activity.


Balancing Acts is a formative activity that helps students operationally define the center of mass. That’s how you might integrate it into a constructivist Physics classroom. In an Environmental Science class, imagine how the bigger picture of an intricately related system, like a local habitat, an ecosystem, our planet, and perhaps even this universe ultimately, is easily transferred to the model. Think about the implications for your teaching practice! That’s the power of experiential learning as we all know. Click here to explore various representations of this activity as it was presented in a professional development program.

Focusing its resources on several key issues where it believes it can have significant impact (Community Juggling), the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has been a strong proponent of OER development. Its focus on education and environment programs provides another powerful application of Balancing Acts. Pay particular attention to the many aspects of the CLES scales introduced earlier with the Rope Trick activity and reinforced in this brief clip.

Today's educators are challenged to provide hands-on experiences, inquiry-based activities, and problem-based labs with direct application to real world situations. Combining that with mobile learning technologies and social networking capabilities, the trendy pedagogical approach has been tagged as 'connectivist'. Like the many standards revisions underway, this re-focusing of educational priorities makes the role of the teacher even more critical. Innovative models for education are being designed with the intention of, as explained by James Zull (2002) in The Art of Changing the Brain, "creating conditions that lead to change in a learner's brain. We can't get inside and rewire a brain, but we can arrange things so that it gets rewired. If we are skilled, we can set up conditions that favor this rewiring, and we can create an environment that nurtures it" (p. 5).

The great news is that the reasons great teachers teach will not likely change in spite of the fact that the tools and techniques of the profession will transition continually. The exciting business of these 'interesting times' is that we can realize the goal of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) by "re-defining the very idea of a course, creating an open network of learners with emergent and shared content and interactions" right now. The field of Environmental Science not only offers a personally relevant context for education, but also a practical preparation for 21st century leaders when one considers the opportunities for differentiating instruction based on the MOOC principles of content aggregation, remixing, re-purposing, and feeding forward. What is it that drives your practice? How are you managing such rapid change to maintain balance in your classroom? What advice would you give to new teachers?

Real solutions for real problems

Paraphrasing a classic line, ‘Humanity, we have some problems’. In terms of the environment, like any other system, one ‘solution’ impacts another and so on… so we must unravel things together with lots of communication, collaboration, and creativity to flourish. At least that’s what some who know how to ‘fix’ the educational system are saying right? I’m pretty sure that’s what most environmental scientists and exemplary environmental science teachers have been doing for decades!

Remember how the Community Juggling activity looked and sounded? That experience is one way we can identify stuck patterns of thinking and doing. If we give students a chance to exercise their own visualization skills along with the freedom to imagine possibilities, they’ll likely devise ingenious solutions that fit the complex situations faced today. Rope Trick is a diagnostic activity targeted at fostering that critical ability for any field; check it out!


Could you get loose? Click here to see how other teachers fared at a professional development workshop! Do your students build mental images of the concepts you cover? An oft-overlooked part of our job is to give students a frame of reference and conceptual understanding that naturally transfers to other contexts. Click here for an in-depth explanation of why Rope Trick really works.

That’s how collaborative problem solving happens in real-world success stories. And that’s how it’s happening in real student projects right now! For example, I was re-charged by the phenomenal work displayed at Catamount Institute’s Student Symposium this spring. Community leaders, parents, teachers, administrators, and students teamed on their own time to figure out what they would/can do to make unique contributions to solving global environmental issues. And they’re making it happen!

We tend to forget that it’s just as important to learn what doesn’t work as what does work. That’s called research. The inherent power of problem-based learning can be exponentially increased by building on personal relevance, attending to uncertainty, and developing student negotiation, critical voice, and shared control. These are the 5 scales of the Constructivist Learning Environment Survey on which I base my research. From another perspective, Shelly Blake-Plock shares her Thinking about Collaboration on the TeachPaperless blog. The only trick is in adapting (or replacing) current practice with practical accountability.

With unprecedented amounts of information at the fingertips of most of our students, our role as educators (no longer teachers) is made even more exciting with the power of digital media and electronic tools. The HippoCampus site empowers even greater advances! How are you keeping pace with new technologies? More importantly, how do YOU set a proper pace for YOUR students?

Breaking the ice – and maintaining focus...

Environmental Science: what a timely, important, and interesting interdisciplinary topic; we can blog about anything and everything! As John Muir put it: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” That good news is also the 'bad' news if you have a targeted objective to achieve in this multimodal, multimedia society. Productive conversations build on common experience. Regardless of the group, I always introduce myself by way of a fun team-building activity. Quickly scan the Community Juggling activity detail.


In this case we have the topic. As facilitator I'll direct the focus to lifelong learners, our curious students of all ages and backgrounds.

You can see how this icebreaker is easy to focus on systems, a key concept in environmental science. I've used it as a diagnostic assessment to gauge student knowledge of system components and awareness of issues that bombard the system flow. Attempting to find patterns and causal relationships is evidence of reflection – and a skill that can be developed from an early age; students often need to practice transferring that skill to other areas as they grow. They too can become overwhelmed with too much information and too many options.

As an educator, you know what's going to get your students from point A to point B. My goal is to point out some useful tools and to inspire innovation for creating new and different applications of them in your particular context. Via this blog, I'll link simple, targeted (and teacher-tested) activities to vetted, professional (and freely-available) NROC resources that you can weave into your lessons appropriately. Future posts will be organized by the topics detailed on the EPA website so you can incorporate breaking news.

No matter how many links I string together, I bring just one perspective to this on-going work. It’s going to take more than that to make a difference in our classrooms, communities, and countries. So, fellow jugglers, how could/do you leverage the Environmental Science course content to support your practice?