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Best Practices in Environmental Education

by
Bill Whorton

To ensure the health of the Chesapeake Bay in the future, NOAA and other agencies are working today to advance high quality K-12 environmental education for today’s students, who are the next generation of Bay stewards.

But what constitutes high-quality environmental education? To examine this, the Chesapeake Bay Program’s Education Workgroup, chaired by the NOAA Chesapeake Bay Office, convened a workshop to examine research-based best practices for environmental education. The workshop focused on student learning, but also practices in teacher professional development and “green school” certification programs—two topics recognized as essential to high-quality environmental education. A report highlighting the findings and summarizing the discussions has been published by the Chesapeake Bay Program’s Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee, which sponsored the workshop.

During the workshop, participants—including top researchers and evaluators in the environmental education field as well as key staff from federal and state agencies and nongovernmental organizations:

  • Examined best practices of education programs that lead to increased environmental literacy in K-12 students.
  • Revisited the definition of the Meaningful Watershed Educational Experience (MWEE) in order to reflect MWEE’s role and importance in broader, more systematic environmental education programs.
  • Discuss indicators and metrics that will assess progress toward increasing student stewardship.

Currently, all watershed states have a goal to provide each student with a MWEE during the course of their K-12 career. But in addition to tracking numbers of students who participate in MWEEs, how can the rigor and quality of those MWEEs be monitored? And while goals have been set for student experiences, no such goals for teacher/educator professional development or school grounds and maintenance have been established.

Working from existing documents and drawing from their experience in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, participants, organized into three groups, dove in to developing a first draft of “best practices” in environmental education for students, teachers, and school facilities. These draft best practices are included in the full report as an appendix, and work on these comprehensive lists remains in progress with the Education Workgroup.

Efforts started at the workshop and described in the report are also still in progress to determine the best metrics for tracking student environmental literacy in the mid-Atlantic.

Sessions that were held at the August 2012 workshop and summarized in the report include:

  • The Framework: North American Association for Environmental Education Guidelines for Excellence in Environmental Education
  • What We Know: Environmental Education and the Meaningful Watershed Education Experience
  • Urban Environmental Education: The North Bay Experience
  • Inquiry-Based Learning: Leveraging Students’ Natural Curiosity to Learn about Their Environment
  • Keeping It Real: Using Schools and Communities as a Context for Environmental Education
  • What Does the National Environmental Literacy Assessment Mean for Metrics Development?
  • Education Priorities and Their Connection to Environmental Education Best Practices
  • Reflections on the Implications for Metrics Development

Report authors presented on workshop findings at the September meeting of the Chesapeake Bay Program’s Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee, which helped support the workshop.In addition, the report was featured in discussions at the 2013 Mid-Atlantic Environmental Literacy Summit, held December 2-3 in Annapolis. The Summit is a biennial Chesapeake Bay Program Education Workgroup conference, organized by the NOAA Chesapeake Bay Office, that brings together educators and decisionmakers to advance environmental literacy work in the region.