Using Storylines to Resolve Misconceptions about Climate Change

Thursday, Friday 8:30am-11:30am SERC Building - 234
Workshop

Conveners

David Amidon, National Center for Science Education
Blake Touchet, National Center for Science Education

This workshop will offer teachers an opportunity to engage in selected activities from two storylines developed by the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) aimed at resolving common misconceptions about Climate Change. Teachers will be introduced to NCSE's misconception-based approach to teaching climate change, learn about and engage with tools and strategies used in these lessons for spotting misinformation, and gain strategies for resolving misconceptions in a no-conflict manner. Teachers will work through two of the lessons from the NGSS-integrated storylines - "Understanding Climate Modeling" and "Climate Change in Your Backyard." Both lessons feature a suite of activities and have been identified as high-quality educational materials by CLEAN, the Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network. After working through the lessons as students and debriefing from the teacher perspective, we will discuss the principles of place-based learning and work in groups to brainstorm local phenomena and outline lesson storylines that could be used to create or adapt lessons for their local communities.

Overview

The National Center for Science Education has been working for the last forty years to prevent efforts to interfere with the accurate teaching of evolution and climate change across the United States. But the threat of attacks is just one barrier to effective climate change education. Another is that students and even some teachers do not enter the classroom as blank slates due to the extent of societal controversy around these topics. Instead, they are likely to have already formed various misconceptions about the science of evolution and climate change through multiple sources. To address this challenge, NCSE has developed NGSS-aligned storylining lesson sets that allow students to engage with evidence to recognize and resolve the most common misconceptions. These storylines are freely available through NCSE's Teacher Support page.

In this workshop, teachers will get a chance to work through two separate lessons in the Climate Change storyline -"Understanding Climate Modeling" and "Climate Change in Your Own Backyard." Both lessons feature a suite of activities and have been identified as high-quality educational materials by CLEAN, the Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network. Not only will teachers get a chance to work through activities from the student perspective, but they will also debrief as a group before exploring how to integrate the lessons into their own classrooms. Emphasis will be placed on incorporating local phenomena into each teacher's implementation to help create authentic learning experiences.

Workshop Program »

Target Audience

This workshop is designed for science teachers in grades 6-12 that are currently teaching Climate Change in their courses, or who are looking for ways to integrate Climate Change into their existing curricula. We also encourage pre-service teachers and leaders of pre-service programs to attend.

Goals

As a result of participation in the workshop, participants will be able to:

  • Access the Climate Change Storylines through the National Center for Science Education website.
  • Use NCSE lessons in their classrooms, or adapt lessons to suit their situation.
  • Address misinformation and misconceptions following NCSE's no-conflict approach.
  • Identify local phenomena that will help integrate NCSE lessons into place-based learning experiences.

 

Format

Each day will offer participants a chance to work through lessons as students, followed by a group debrief session.

On Day 1- we will begin by introducing the NCSE Storylines and the no-conflict approach to addressing misinformation and misconceptions. We will follow this with a deep dive into the "Understanding Climate Modeling" lesson with activities and discussion, with collaborative work time to incorporate these ideas and activities into the classroom.

Day 2 will follow by working through "Climate Change in Your Backyard." This will include actively participating in lessons, followed by more discussion and time to build place-based activities for the participants' localities modeled on the lesson.


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