Here are some ideas which you might consider. Some may not be possible or relevant, and if you have other ideas we’d love to hear from you!
As teachers we may not think of our classrooms as places where our individual and collective carbon footprint goes up, but this is exactly what happens. Schools in general can be energy-wasteful, which is not practical for our environment or our finances. As teachers we tend to feel as part of a whole which is not necessarily controlled by us. We need to follow the policies our schools have decided on, so we feel that environmental sustainability does not depend on us, but it does. This is the first step for us - we need to change. Our students also feel they cannot make any major changes regarding the environment. Much like our students we can do a number of things to help the environment.
Depending on the context in which we are teaching, it is likely we may face some resistance. A major support needs to come from management and colleagues. Applying this toolkit should not be the task of one teacher but the joint decision of the teaching staff led by the school management. It is crucial to bear in mind that management and the teaching staff of each school may need to modify the ideas included in this toolkit to ensure that the points cater for the needs of their own teaching context.
Parents may also be resistant to certain changes. It is important to follow careful steps and discuss the rationale behind the changes made, before the changes are made. Getting parents to agree with the changes and assuring them that the changes made to help the environment still mean their children get their education without any compromise in terms of quality.
Teachers can do little unless Academic Managers and schools adopt the agenda on Environmental Sustainability. Therefore, this Toolkit complements and should be studied along with the Toolkit for ELT Managers, which can be found on the Green IATEFL website.
At the beginning of the school year, get the students to discuss the environment. You can get ideas on the British Council teaching English website where there are several lesson ideas and materials to use. Another useful resource is the United Nations Sustainability Goals which can form an excellent introduction to the issue of sustainability.
A project idea is to ask learners to work together and think how:
they can lower their own carbon footprint
they can make their classroom life greener. This project is particularly useful at the end of the school year, when students tend to throw away half-used notebooks.
Take a good look at your classroom and explore ways in which you can make it more sustainable.
Ensure that heating is switched off when you open the windows.
On hot days, check if you can open windows, instead of switching on the air conditioning.
Pulling the curtains over the open windows may limit exposure to direct sunlight. Therefore, the classroom will not be so hot.
Placing windows in an angled position filters the air without causing the classroom to be too cold for the next class. This also helps with the oxygen recycling of the classroom, which means that learners do not feel too drowsy or hot.
Switch off the lights when you leave the classroom or during breaks. Especially in schools which are open all day, there are times during certain days when artificial light is not needed.
Switch off the digital whiteboard when it is not needed. IWBs should not be left on when we are not actively using them.
Ensure that there are two bins in your classroom: one for waste the other for recycling.
Avoid photocopying. No matter how well-organised our students are, photocopies are usually torn or lost by the following lesson. It may seem difficult at first, a careful yearly plan of all activities and careful lesson planning can help teachers know how their material can be used better and in a more in-depth way. Our main aid to this venture it to use Google classroom or any other Learning Management System. LMS can organise the material of the class, therefore students can access long worksheets or articles on their digital devices. It would be great to have a noticeboard or whiteboard in the school photocopying area in which each teacher can note how many photocopies have not been printed. At the end of the school year, we can estimate how much money we have saved.
Every year a number of quizzes and tests are printed. This falls under ‘’avoid photocopying’’ but we need to be realistic about it. Putting the test on the whiteboard and asking the students to solve the test off the screen, implies that all students can work at the same pace, which is unrealistic. What we can do is ensure that tests are perfect (no types, no changes, no issues with the amount of material) so that this year’s copies can be kept for next year (and for a number of years). What is actually photocopied in this case will be only the answer sheet.
Screens might not be the best solution for long tests but short grammar and vocabulary quizzes can be shown on the screen. Students may have either a ring-bound folder with simple sheets of paper on which they write their quizzes or they have a specially devoted notebook for this purpose.
It is important to remember that testing does not necessarily need to be paper-based. Projects, crafts and even essays can work as ways of testing.
In the testing section, the idea of keeping files on everything we create was first presented. Regarding our teaching materials, this is of central importance.
As teachers we prepare flashcards, matching cards and card games. It makes financial sense to have a filing system in which all of these can be kept and re-used.
Laminating machines are costly and they also consume electricity and plastic. Therefore, they are not the best option for sustainable classrooms. Reinforcing the edges of flashcards/card games with sticky tape can help prolong their life.
Organising events for parents is an important element of the school’s function. In these events, we need to consume energy in the form of heating and electricity. If we add the energy parents will need to consume in order to get to school, the carbon footprint of this venture goes up. The school does need face-to-face events for parents, but parent-teacher meetings to discuss individual students’ performance need not take place face-to-face. The first option that comes to mind is online, using Zoom or a similar platform but if you watch again the recording from the IATEFL Conference in Brighton 2024 by Vicky Saumell you will see how these platforms do have a climate impact. Therefore, what we can do is use the good, old-fashioned phone meeting along with regular emails.
Provided that school rules and regulations allow it, each teacher can set up a WhatsApp group to communicate directly with the parents of each class. These messages can be short, sweet and easy to manage.