Classroom Earth Success Stories

Forming environmental education partnerships

Steve Hage, a teacher at the School of Environmental Studies in Apple Valley, Minn., uses partnerships to enrich his students’ learning experiences.

His school has an impressive list of partner organizations that encompasses groups far and wide, from the Minnesota Zoo and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, to the ends of the earth, including Inuit communities near the North Pole. These partnerships help Hage's students connect classroom content to real-world issues.

How to integrate environmental education with photography and technology

Scott Olson, a 12-year teacher in the Tonasket School District in Tonasket, Wash., developed a photo point monitoring project for his high school students after being inspired by a wildlife manager from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Photo point monitoring is a tool used to quickly and effectively document changes in vegetation, soil and other landscape features by periodically photographing the landscape. The wildlife manager, who regularly visited Olson’s classroom, came upon historic photographs of local landscapes and suggested Olson use the photographs to conduct photo point monitoring.

Olson ran with it and soon had his students engaged in an exciting learning experience that allowed them to incorporate numerous subject areas and learn in an outdoor setting.

Janet Ort teaches AP/IB Environmental Science, environmental science and environmental research at Hoover High School in Hoover, Ala.

Ort, a 13-year veteran at the school, celebrated National Public Lands Day by working with her students to clean up and monitor the water quality of the Cahaba River, near the school grounds, which are bordered by more than a mile of the river.

By engaging her students in a service project, she not only succeeds at connecting her students to their local environment, but augments her curricular emphasis on watersheds and examining the impact that students have on their environment.

Conrad Benedicto is a social studies teacher and executive director of the Wilderness Arts and Literacy Collaborative (WALC), a small learning community that operates within two high schools in San Francisco: Balboa High School and Downtown High School. For more than 10 years, WALC has worked with diverse, urban students in a junior-senior academic coursework that incorporates outdoor experiences to bolster academic achievement. WALC seeks to nurture within students an awareness of and connection to the different histories and heritage of their communities, as well as the ecological processes that underlie all existence.

Paula Wang of Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C. teaches an AP Environmental Science course. For the past 15 years, Ms. Wang has conducted field trips to nearby Rock Creek National Park where, in partnership with National Audubon Society, students conduct macroinvertebrate samplings throughout the school year. Park staff use these findings for their resource assessment. One of her students wrote, "The ideas I learned were not just ideas that I had to cram into my head before a test and which I would then quickly forget. The material was actually interesting and is useful stuff that I can apply to my everyday life."