Teacher/Instructor

Decide on Goals, Parameters, and the Assessment Plan (if necessary)

Adapted from: LSF – Engaging Students in Sustainable Action Projects

1. Decide on your educational priorities. For example, is it most important that you:

• Address a particular content area of the curriculum;

• Help your students to learn life long skills;

• Help your students to experience success;

• Assist students to take action and build community;

• Effect environmental or socio-cultural change in your community;

• Others?

2. Decide on your own parameters/boundaries. Consider doing the activity “What would you Condone?” You may want to include the following in this activity: administration, other teachers, students, support staff, head caretaker, parents, school council, and community members. Ask this group if there is anyone else who should be specifically invited to participate to improve the efficacy of your action learning projects? (eg. someone with a particular role in your school or community or people from a particular grade.)

ACTIVITY What do you Condone? (30 – 60 mins)

By examining different types of actions students can take, teachers and students can reflect on what they personally consider appropriate and inappropriate. Use chart paper and markers to create a large Venn diagram with two over lapping circles (show diagram). Label one “condone” and the other “not condone”. The over lapping circles is for projects that you would condone, if they were changed “change to condone”. Cut out the strips (descriptions of student actions - see below) from the following chart and arrange them in the Venn diagram showing if you would condone them, change them, or not condone them in your school/program. After you have placed all of the student action ideas in the appropriate places on the diagram, look at the overall pattern on your diagram. Discuss the results (for example: What types of action are supported? Are they effective in making change? What types of action are not supported? Is there a pair of activities in which the action is quite similar but the topic is different, resulting in one action being condoned and the other not?).

Read the article Lousley, C. (1999). (De)politicizing the Environment Club Environmental Education Research, 5(3) 293 - 304 How do the results of this activity fit into her analysis of the implicit lessons we teach students with the choices we make?

Descriptions of Student Actions

1 Students follow a local election in all its stages, interviewing voters in their community and attending local election meetings to raise awareness about the impact low-paying jobs have on working families.

2 Students host a press conference to alert the community about a by-law that is about to be passed that would make it easier to convert farmland to commercial property.

3 After learning that a new, heavily polluting industry is hoping to come to their community, students create a campaign to urge fellow students to write letters to government to prevent the company from setting up shop in their community.

4 Frustrated that the car traffic outside of the school is polluting the air, students create a campaign to educate motorists about the negative effects of idling their cars.

5 Students choose a heavily packaged toy and write to the company to tell the company executives that they will not buy the toy until the packaging is minimized. The students actively encourage other people to boycott the toys through a letter to the editor and posters at school.

6 Students organize a fundraiser to raise money for an organization that promotes fairly traded products.

7 Students engage in a letter-writing campaign to local newspaper and radio stations to ask them not to advertise a new film that the students deem to be too violent.

8 Students create and mount a play that illustrates how the low wages paid to workers in a South American country indirectly accelerate the destruction of the rain forest. A branch of the multinational company in question employs many of the students’ parents.

9 Students host a press conference to raise awareness about the work they are doing to combat racism in their community.

10 Students create a brochure and distribute it in the community to alert local residents about the impact household chemicals can have on the local creek.

11 After learning that a local company sells goods created in sweatshops in poor countries, students mount a sit-down protest at the school gates to stop an exhibitor from the company from participating in the school career fair.

12 Students create a survey to find out what teachers would need to have in an “outdoor classroom” in order to use it well. Students then lobby the school board and the parent council to provide funds to build the outdoor classroom. Students even suggest that money should be taken out of other budgets like the library and the phys.ed budget to ensure that the “outdoor classroom” is built.

13 After learning about the health risks associated with pesticides, students write an open letter to the school board and have it published in a local paper, asking that pesticides no longer be used on their schoolyard.

3. Read Clarke, P. (2005). Teaching Controversial Issues: A four-step classroom strategy for clear thinking on controversial issues. Retrieved on 7th July 2010 from http://bctf.ca/GlobalEd/TeachingResources/ClarkePat/TeachingControversialIssues.html

4. Consider how you want your student action learning groups to work:

• What decision-making model will you use? (eg. majority-rules, or consensus decision-making)

• When and how often will you meet with each group?

• How will discussions be handled to encourage constructive dialogue?

• Reflect on your role in the group: see the ladder of student involvement found at the bottom of this page.

ACTIVITY Majority Wins (vote) (30 minutes)

Definition/Example: In Canada, the party which wins the most seats in a general election forms the government. If the party wins more than half of the seats in the House of Commons or legislative assembly, then the party forms a majority government. A majority government can pass legislation and maintain the confidence of the House of Commons or legislative assembly to stay in power much more easily than a minority government. http://canadaonline.about.com/od/elections/g/majority.htm

Facilitating effective Action Learning projects requires that the teacher move away from a conventional ‘sage on the stage’ role toward a ‘guide on the side’ role. This is no small task! Students and teachers are used to teachers holding most of the power in the classroom. A facilitator role helps to distribute the power more evenly between the teacher and the students.

Consider the following questions:

• Do you feel ready to move toward the position of a ‘guide on the side’?

• How will it feel for you to move away from the ‘sage on the stage’ role to the ‘guide on the side’/facilitator role?

• What are you already doing that supports a ‘guide on the side’ relationship?

• What will need to change in order for you to successfully be a ‘guide on the side’?

• What skills will you need to work on in order to be an effective ‘guide on the side’?

• How will this change the dynamic for the students?

• How will students’ past experiences (at home, with other teachers, etc.) influence their perception of/feelings about this type of relationship?

• What skills will the students need to develop in order to effectively capitalize on the new power-sharing dynamic?

3. Create an Assessment Plan

• List the knowledge and skills that you would like to assess

• Check in: does my assessment plan align with my priorities for this project (see point 1 above)?

• Students are encouraged to keep a personal narrative account or learning journal of the process (see below)

• The planning tools available in this website may be useful to use for assessment (see Step 4 and 6)

Small Groups…

Working in a small group presents some challenges, especially for evaluation. You may like to consider how you are going to evaluate this project. Choices include: individual evaluations, one mark per group, self evaluation, peer evaluation, and/or a composite of these options.

Suggestions to manage this include:

• Keep your own observation journal as you facilitate the class (making notes about who is doing what in each group and any issues that you perceive). In form the students that this is what you are doing and use it to refer to when making some decisions.

• Use the “12 Minute Briefing” (see Step 7) for two groups per lesson. This will keep you up-to-date with each groups activities and progress throughout the learning period.

• Ensure students to maintain their own learning journal that records their (personal) journey through this group project as part of the

Project Portfolio (described below). Reviewing this will demonstrate how effective they were at group work.

NOTE: make sure students have a secure place to keep their work and that all members of the group have copies of the necessary information/plans. This should be at school (or online) so that one student’s absence does not affect the entire group’s progress.

The Project Portfolio (a group portfolio describing the action learning group project)

The Project Portfolio is your group’s records of what actually happened from the very beginning to the very end of the project. It will be made up of three main components:

1. Your individual reflections that you write/create at the end of each period. You may be given some guiding questions for these reflections. Describe the ‘story’ of what actually happened for you. This story should be clear enough that someone who was not in the class can pick up your log and understand what you did, what happened when, etc. You can use any combination of the following things to tell the story: words (text), pictures (drawn, photos), videos, podcasts, or other.

2. Research about your project, the activities that you progress through in the planning stages, and documents that your group develops for your project (brochures, posters, podcasts, webpages, etc.). include: notes from interviews with people involved, photos of activities undertaken, other items that illustrate your groups project journey.

3. Part of this section of the Project Portfolio should be a well maintained Action Plan (see Step 6). Each time the Action Plan is updated, the subsequent plan should be titled “draft 2”, and so on. Thus at the end each group will have a series of draft action plans that will demonstrate their progress.

4. A copy of your groups Final Presentation

5. Your own completed assessment of the Action Learning Group Project – Portfolio using the rubric below. The criteria in each rubric square need to be negotiated with the class to provide specific detail. You may need to include curriculum criteria.

Tips for Successful Action Learning Projects

• Take Only Positive Positions: Instead of saying what you’re against, think about what you are FOR.

• Listen to All Peoples’ Views: Attempt to see all sides of the issue. Focus on the good in others, the good in yourself, and the good you are doing. Maintain an open mind and listen actively to what others have to say.

• Avoid Stereotyping: It is easy to lump individuals into a category or group like “All developers care about is making money.” Stereotyping is misleading, often blocking solutions rather than building bridges among people or groups. Recognize that each person holds his or her own identity within a group.

• Accept Responsibility: Never blame anyone or anything else for your lack of success. Accept responsibility and move on, look to what you could have done better. When you encounter a block, back off, reconsider your options and directions, then try another route.

• Be Persistent: Hang in there! Environmental problems are complex and usually take years to develop, so long-term commitment is important. Look at the big picture and don’t let small obstacles get you down. Think long term, but break your plan into smaller projects and monitor progress on these as you go.

• Act: Micro-movements are better than no movements!

• Communicate: at every step of the process, if possible. Let your community know what you are trying to achieve, there might be someone out there who can support you.

This list is adapted from the work of Susan Staniforth, Bill Hammond, and a group of Florida Lee County High School Students who came up with this list of tips for successful action projects.

And this list offers a humorous list of Twenty LEADEN Rules to Make Sure Your Project Stinks! It is written to address a teacher – you might like to share this with your students!

1. Do not involve students in your initial plans. Students are apathetic and not willing to help the environment.

2. Keep the long-term view to yourself. Today's students are concerned only with the immediate future.

3. If a student makes a suggestion, ignore it. It is your plan, and if it needed any improvement you would have thought of it yourself.

4. If a student offers a resource such as a parent's help, ignore the offer. What practical insight can a parent who spends his/her lunch break helping geese at the company's lagoon have to offer? Your lagoon is a school lagoon. There is a big difference.

5. Be sure to divide activities on the basis of gender. Let only the boys do the cutting, hammering, and nailing of the dock. Let the girls do only the "girl stuff."

6. Keep the project under wraps from your custodian. Custodians have enough to do inside the school and they might have a few suggestions. You definitely do not want to find out that your head custodian helped to save and restore a disappearing marsh that is now an international educational tourist attraction.

7. When you want to build the components of a floating dock in your classroom, do not discuss your building plans with the cleaning staff. It is possible that they will not notice what you are doing. If they do notice, be sure to leave pieces of lumber and flotation devices lying all over the place. After all, it is their job to clean up your room.

8. Your school administration should not know about your plans. Administrators like to be able to tell parents, central administration, and elected school trustees that they do not know what is happening in their school. Administrators are also more likely to give you moral and financial support if they do not know anything about the project.

9. If you have to get permission from divisional maintenance or the school board, do not follow proper channels. The people you bypass have enough to do and would not be able to help your project anyway.

10. Conservation groups and owners of private wildlife sanctuaries are not willing to come out and make suggestions, so why bother asking them in the first place?

11. Doing research on successful stewardship projects is a waste of time. Each project is different.

12. Do not involve such groups as wildlife federations and government agencies, especially when they offer seed money to start your project. You do not need to use the fact that you have a grant from a national organization to give an extra boost to the students. Besides, having a grant will not help to convince people that you are serious and the project is worthwhile.

13. Once your site is usable, make sure that your classes have so many observing, sketching, and sample-taking assignments that they do not have time to enjoy the wonder of nature and the joy of sharing discoveries with you and their classmates. School is a serious business and students should not enjoy themselves.

14. Pre-teaching and explanation of what you want the students to accomplish should be done outdoors. When the weather is miserable, be sure to take extra time to make your explanations as detailed as possible. Students need to learn to overcome the adversity of sketching with shaking hands.

15. Follow-up in the classroom is to be avoided. You do not want students to be able to synthesize their experiences and see the larger environmental picture. They might get ideas.

16. Do not involve other teachers. They might want to "help." Worse, they might even see a use of your stuff for their classes. Even worse, there might be someone to continue the project if you leave the school.

17. Keep all the glory to yourself. Why should students and others feel good about their suggestions and work? It was your idea.

18. Try not to bother with a timetable. If you must have a timetable, make sure it is only for the short term. Long-term planning just invites long-term problems.

19. With your next environmental project, start from scratch. What you have learned from a habitat project has absolutely no relevance to any other possible environmental project.

20. Do not look around your own area for a potential outdoor classroom. To be good, an area must be located a great distance from your school.

Perry, J. (2004) Twenty Leaded Rules to Make Sure Your Project Sinks! Green Teacher: The Middle Years. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island. p 227-228

Meaningful Student Participation (retrieved on 19th July 2010 from http://www.freechild.org/ladder.htm)