In our MADE CLEAR (Maryland Delaware Climate Change Education Assessment and Research) partnership, we started by studying teachers' challenges in teaching climate change in Maryland and Delaware. In the meantime, we created a collaboration between scientists, teacher educators and teachers to 1) make sense of climate scientists' work informed by different scientific disciplines; 2) make complex ideas behind climate change accessible to classroom environments; and 3) support teachers' implementation of scientific practices as they are teaching climate change. 

Teachers have been a crucial component of our collaboration as they have been the critical consumers of the activities developed by the MADE CLEAR team. We went through multiple revisions of our activities after teachers' feedback based on implementation in their classrooms. The facilitation guide included background for teachers, student handouts, formative assessment probes, teacher and peer feedback tools. We looked specifically at local issues to create a culturally responsive classroom environment while extending students' sense making to global aspects of the problem. 

During the last five years, the MADE CLEAR team produced numerous publications about teachers' and students' learning of climate change and there are still manuscripts in progress. If you want to learn more about the research resulting from this partnership, you can contact the team members at https://madeclear.org/about/staff/. 

This video was truly enlightening for me!  Congratulations and Thank you..  Asli,Jane,Mary and Joel

What a wonderful educational video. Having just hosted a STEM Day on campus I was excited to see some of the same activities that we did with middle school students in this video.  BRAVO!

This video illustrates some of the challenges of bringing the broad and complex topic of climate change into the classroom, and it models some creative approaches that provide teachers with the tools to teach about climate change.

One aspect that is especially interesting to me is that the climate change professional development was offered by a trusted source, and participating teachers know they can turn to their instructors with questions as they try out new lessons. Ongoing support is an important part of implementing new material in the classroom.

Nice job!

Thanks for sharing your work. In looking at some of these issues of climate change, I was curious to know if you all had found ways to incorporate computer modeling or simulations as part of the learning experience. If not, it might be a useful addition

Wow, looks great. I'm curious how the activities you've created get used in schools--integrated into bio courses, or environmental science courses, or somewhere else? What happens to the rest of the curriculum that surrounds these activities? What sorts of tools have you used to "align" these to new science standards? (I think MD is using NGSS.)

As a Washingtonian, politics is always on my mind! Does your project help develop the capacity of teachers to help students consider the connections between environmental science principles, public perceptions about climate change, and environmental policy?

You have raised a nagging problem for science educators--how to talk about and address topics that some people see as controversial.  Climate change is certainly not the only challenging science topic that teachers need to approach, but it is one of the most dramatic and visible.  By bringing the controversies to the surface, and helping teachers work through ways to address skeptics, be they students, parents, or school administrators, you are modeling important professional development.  In ethics discussions, these are sometimes called "courageous conversations"  (kind of scary that climate change may be one of those topics, but it is what it is).  Thank you for addressing the issue head on.

This is such a spectacular video. Climate change can be such a touchy topic for some people, and the efforts that you are making to make education on the topic easier seem incredible. Thank you so much for sharing.