Tips for Teachers

Many environmental education programs of the past 30 years have overburdened teachers with requirements that are not linked to the core curriculum they are required to teach. In the past, Environmental Education (EE) experts would visit a campus once or twice to conduct staff development training and distribute thick binders to the teachers, expecting teachers, whose schedules were already heavily impacted with required subjects, to figure out how to infuse superfluous EE curriculum. Though most teachers care deeply about teaching children to be responsible stewards of the environment, this antiquated method of approaching EE just hasn't been universally effective.

The Go Green Initiative recognizes that teachers and parents need to work together in order to make EE work. With the Go Green Initiative, parents do the behind-the-scenes work, like: scheduling and fundraising for educational assemblies; planning Earth Day celebrations; setting up facilities for Family Ecology nights or after-school ecology classes; and serving as aids in the classroom when hands-on EE lessons are going on. This team approach allows teachers more time to creatively link EE to the existing science, math and social studies curriculum, thereby ensuring that EE is not an "add-on" lesson, but rather an integrated part of what the teachers would be teaching in the first place.

One of the most successful models of parent/teacher cooperation occurred at Walnut Grove Elementary. The parents wrote a successful grant application, which allowed every teacher on campus to receive a $100 mini-grant to use for anything they wanted, as long as it advanced environmental education in the classroom. The teachers were very creative, and ended up purchasing items that made them enthusiastic environmental educators all year long!