Feb. 16 CC Institute Niagara - 1 day

Today we really tried to be responsive to the teacher experience and I think the majority of the group left feeling that they had both a better understanding of how to integrate cc into their teaching practices and the hope to move their teaching towards transformative practices.

There were about 5 - 8 participants who turned-off immediately or treated the day as an opportunity to do some online shopping.

From the info in the pre-institute survey, we knew they were all grade 7 & 8 teachers and from their comments they really wanted relevant student-friendly sources for local data, and RESOURCES! I would say 75% of these teachers were addressing climate change at the conventional level - if they were EVEN including climate change at all.

We framed the overall day with an inquiry approach and walked the talk of inquiry but we also moved away from trying to make the one day a thorough dive into professional inquiry as I think we can easily lose those that are not familiar with inquiry or climate change education practices when we move to quickly into metacognitive discussions.

Additions /Experiments:
The morning followed the standard inquiry session; however, in the afternoon we tried a couple of different things:

With groups doing chapter buzz summaries of dots, we had them then also consider how dots addresses some of the challenges of climate change learning. Stan this sheet and process really works well. Instead of them sort of half-energetically reporting back to the groups, we had them put their strategy on chart paper and we put them all up on the gym wall and had each group present to the whole group. Standing and presenting to the rest of the group added accountability and i noticed that each group seemed to speak a little more in depth than I have seen and the rest of the group seemed to listen more intently.

We decided to be responsive to their request for resources and planning time and created two break-out sessions. Groups then swapped.

1) Judy facilitated question-formation technique so all teachers left the institute with at least one inquiry question on climate change and had the experience of the process so they can also replicate in their classrooms.

2) I facilitated lesson-plan remodelling with two options: a) take a lesson that they currently use for climate change related expectations for grade 7 & 8 and apply one or a few of Connecting Dots to move it along the transformative practices continuum
b) their second option was to take a resource from R4R that is relevant for an upcoming lesson/unit and that ties to climate change - then once they get a handle on the R4R resource then apply the strategies within Dots to consider whether they can move the lesson along the transformative practices continuum. From conversations, I had with a few teachers this second option was helpful to give them some time to get more familiar with R4R. With two educators I spoke with they were beginning to apply a critical lens informed by Dots to the resources - which is AWESOME! This time working with R4R was quite helpful to also show teachers how to look up the pedagogical approaches and the assessment sections as in the demo I think a lot of them missed it.

In the morning and following a thread about getting students engaged from the KBC, we discussed the importance of emotions, well being, and learning about climate change. The conversation explored ways to have students experience climate change first-hand to try and invoke responses from disengaged students. After the KBC I did show the whole group some research on the impact of climate change images - that many of the images that have the highest impact (starving children in Africa) also are the images that do not foster individuals to feel able to take action.  I think as the institutes continue and teachers especially in the middle years are trying to find ways to engage their students, we should have some awareness around the dangers of fear-tactics.

I have also tried collating the learning documents into one google doc called "Documenting our Learning" and have identified the various tools and ouptuts with titles. I think then if they are interested in going back to the inquiry tools/process that were used during the day, they can find the outputs all in one doc. Then they can scan and have the visual aid to help them remember. Especially for this particular group but I think for the one days overall. This may be a more manageable documentation process for the teachers.

Misses:

The times for the institute were different than our understanding. We thought 9 - 3:30 and it was 8:30 - 3. So it was really good we were there an hour ahead of what we thought was our start time.

Not all teachers had filled out LSF's registration surveys so at the end of the day we had a lot of teachers (maybe 15) that did not have access. This created an awkward situation where we couldn't really request that only those who had received the email to stay. Krista, the curriculum consultant requested that we resend the survey to her and that she would follow-up with teachers. So hopefully we get a good response rate....it is always such a challenge if you don't have them there in the room.

Nametags - we didn't have nametags. Is it possible to include nametags in materials that LSF sends? I am sure it is and is probably my miss.

Anecdotal Evaluation on the day:
There were lots of "thank yous" and smiling faces leaving....I think they left feeling empowered but maybe that was just the relief that comes with a long weekend!