Climate Change & Environmental Justice Program

Writing teams met at the County Office of Education for three days in August 2023 to move their work forward together. See the article below by Milton Reynolds that highlights that experience. A team of experts will review the curriculum through the end of October. The teams will then make revisions during the months of November and December. Starting in January, preparations for field tests will commence. The curricular units will be field tested and evaluated beginning in March 2024. 

Embracing the Power of the Collective, Milton Reynolds (October 5, 2023)

The community writing teams are diligently writing lesson plans that follow the detailed CCEJP storylines they have created. A storyline is a coherent sequence of lessons driven by questions students ask in response to observing phenomena associated with climate change or environmental justice. The community writing teams solicited questions from students during the Pilot Phase of their work earlier this spring.

The storylines created by writing teams tap into learners’ natural curiosity and wondering. Within each lesson, students will figure out or solve a key problem and add to their explanatory models associated with the observed phenomena. Writing teams are working with coaches, pedagogy specialists, and subject matter experts to ensure lessons coherent to the storyline, rigorous multidisciplinary content, and effective student-centered activities.

This fall, each writing team will also be recruiting eight educators at each grade level to field test the entire unit. The field test will be scheduled in the spring of 2024 and participating educators will provide feedback to the writing teams about the impact and effectiveness of the curriculum. Data collected during the field test will inform the final improvements of the units before publication in March 2025.

The writing teams have developed an initial draft of the first phase of the unit storyline called the anchor experience. The anchor experience launches the unit and engages students in activities to share their own questions about an observable phenomenon and to develop a model that reveals their initial understanding of that phenomenon. The student questions, observations, and models gathered during the anchor experience pilot will drive the further development of the curriculum units.

Each draft anchor experience prototype has been reviewed by a panel of diverse experts. These experts include members of the CCEJP Steering Committee, science educators, storyline specialists, and content experts. The reviewers used established anchor experience criteria to provide written feedback to the writing teams in advance of the pilot phase.

Each writing team has recruited between 3-5 educators across California to pilot and gather feedback about the draft anchor experience in classrooms. The pilot phase is taking place between April 1-June 30, 2023. The CCEJP evaluation firm, RTI International, has developed common evaluation tools such as an educators' survey, observation protocol, and interview protocol. The data collected during the pilot will be shared with writing teams to support the improvement and refinement of the draft anchor experience and development of the rest of the unit storyline.