Climate change education needs New Jersey’s Department of Education (NJDOE)


began a thorough and rigorous process of devel- oping and reviewing the standards themselves, in consultation with committees, including teachers, higher education professionals, and content-area experts. At the same time, a committee of thought leaders convened. Led by Sustainable Jersey and the New Jersey School Boards Association, this thought leader committee was composed of experts from across sectors ranging from nonprofits to K–12 education, who worked together to answer the following question: What are the biggest needs with regard to climate change education in New Jersey? The thought leader committee brought in Dr.


Lauren Madden, who helped guide the iterative process of surveying thought leaders and others within their networks, identifying needs, and syn- thesizing findings. The needs fell into four big cat- egories: professional learning, curricular resources, community-based climate change education, and support of boards of education. A formal report was written and released in February 2022.5


Gathering resources for teachers Of the four major categories outlined in the report,


curricular resources are perhaps most essential, as they must be in place and readily available to teachers well in advance of September 2022. With the release of the standards themselves, the NJDOE shared some sample instructional resources for teachers to get started, available on their website. However, more tools are needed to support the larger implementation of these new standards. In response to this need, a subgroup of the thought leader committee convened as the New Jersey Climate Change Education Initiative (NJCCEI) to further support teachers, schools, and school systems in adopting climate change education. The NJCCEI’s first task was a big one: create an easily searchable database of resources for teaching about climate change. In an effort to ensure progress was swift, the NJCCEI


group forged a partnership with SubjectToClimate (StC), a nonprofit organization connecting K–12 educators of all subjects to credible, unbiased, and engaging materials on climate change at no cost. The materials include resources from other organizations that StC curates and to which they add synopses, teaching tips, and scientist notes as well as inquiry-based lesson plans that are developed by a taskforce of teachers. SubjectToClimate’s co-founders Ms. Margaret Wang and Mr. David Jaffe worked in close collaboration with the NJCCEI group to create a plan to develop a New Jersey-specific version of the site, ensure that resources available align well with New Jersey’s new standards, and allow for teachers to find New-Jersey-specific context and examples throughout the sample lessons. SubjectToClimate has already recruited a cadre of expert teachers from across New Jersey to contribute and provide feedback on resources in this portal.


Making sure our i’s are dotted and t’s are


crossed While the NJCCEI group was thrilled to have a system in place, they wanted to make sure that the resources shared were screened effectively and met the needs of New Jer- sey teachers explicitly. SubjectToClimate uses a thorough screening process for all resources available on its site. A scientist review team, consisting of credentialed scientists in climate-related fields and led by an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Climate Expert Reviewer, first conducts a credibility review for organizations that provide resources for their webpage. This team randomly selects approximately 10% of the resources and does a credibility check based on relevance, quality, conflict of interest, key- words and phrases, and a quantitative confidence scale. If the organization passes the credibility review, the scientist review team will proceed to conduct credibility checks for each resource that is shortlisted by the teacher review team. Next, a team of practicing and former teachers — who have at least two years of formal or informal teaching experience, passed an application process, and took a fundamental cli- mate change course — uses a rubric to review prospective resources and evaluate the relevance to learning standards, pedagogic effectiveness, and ease of use. Once these reviews are complete, the whole database is consistently reviewed for additional criteria such as variety in perspectives, acces- sibility, and representation of marginalized communities. The resources used in the lesson plans created by the teacher taskforce are also evaluated using the same screening pro- cess described above. Moreover, the lesson plans available on StC are screened through a multitude of processes.


Green Teacher 131 Page 25


Photo by Anthony Quintano


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