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.

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.