A climate-changed year of teacher professional development
Note: I engaged in this work as a Siegel Fellow at STEMteachersNYC.
Climate change had always felt abstract to me. Yes, I understand scientific models’ predictions about the future of our ecosystems; yes, I’ve taught students who are climate refugees; and yes, I’ve worked in a variety of activism and climate education arenas. But still my climate anxiety was abstract, existential. I never felt like I literally couldn’t breathe.
Until this month.
On June 7, New York City finally experienced the downstream effects of wildfires in a way that other locales have known for years. While teaching 7th period in a windowless classroom, more and more students started to leave the room until I realized they were flocking to windows in the hallway to take pictures of the orange sky. I forewent my pre-planned lesson and we developed models to explain the sky-ash situation, specifically (1) why do these particles in the air make the sky look orange? and (2) what happens when we breathe it in?
By the end of the next day, my mild cold had evolved into coughing and gagging fits, with tears pouring from my eyes. After ten minutes outside, it hurt to breathe. As climate change makes wildfires more extreme, this will be an increasingly common experience in New York City — as it already is in California and elsewhere. The experience reminded me that this is why I make climate change a key piece of my physics classes.
This post is in many ways a follow-up to this piece I wrote 2 years ago. There is an incredible wealth of climate education resources out there, which means it can be overwhelming. To me, the best way to improve one’s instruction is in collaboration with others. This past year, STEMteachersNYC hosted a ClimateSTEM series with a dozen workshops and meetings held on Zoom and in person throughout the school year. I attended four of the workshops and facilitated two of them. I attended the series reunion in June. What I learned is that it’s all about emotions. By leaning into my emotions as a teacher of climate change, student of climate science, and citizen of a world in flux I become better at navigating all these roles.
Our understanding of climate change today is vastly different from the 1990s when I was growing up. It’s always hard to teach topics we ourselves didn’t learn as kids, all the more so when the topic is fraught with uncertainty and political weight , and the knowledge that we’re solving it too slowly.
I’m grateful to Glen Stuart, whose workshop (in collaboration with the Cloud Institute) launched me into a valuable emotional spiral. During the workshop, Glen had us play the role of students in his classroom. We were asked collectively to solve an artificial challenge, we was an analog for sustainability on earth. Glen told us that his high school students had solved the game. But we, a bunch of teachers, couldn’t do it. After a couple hours, my fellow participants were frustrated but still trying to work through it. I became overcome by insecurity and self doubt: why don’t I see the answer? Why can’t we figure this out? It doesn’t seem that hard. We’re working together. We’re using heuristics and systematic thinking. We’re communicating and collaborating as a team. We’re doing everything right, and yet our answer is wrong. Or is it wrong? It feels like all we’re missing is a small insight, and Glen is sitting on this insight because he thinks we can get it ourselves, so what’s wrong with us? As a way of processing my emotions, I ended up graphing my emotions as a coping mechanism for dealing with them. As the workshop continued, I added to the graph.
The more experienced we become as teachers, the more imperative it is to deliberately put ourselves into “student mode,” to experience that feeling when where there’s an answer to be figured out and we just don’t see it yet. When it comes to climate change, the whole world is in “student mode” right now. We need to practice operating in this zone of not knowing.
During his workshop, Glen gave us a framework with which to categorize emotions as positive/negative or towards/away, but that framework didn’t work for me. For me, the positive emotions (excitement to be learning something new) and the negative emotions (fear I’m not good enough to learn it) were so interconnected that they were one thing. The more relevant dichotomy to me was how much of my experience was driven by emotions versus being driven by reason. It was a good reminder that real learning happens when both are present: emotions drive the desire to learn and the likelihood of remembering what’s learned, while reason enables the experience to resolve into lasting mental structures. If a person goes to far into the emotional realm, they lose sight of the goal. If they go too far into reason, they lose sight of the humanity, which is the reason we do any of the work we do.
I also think there are two types of big emotions we experience while playing the role of learner. In the first scenario, we (as learner) are in a position of less power. There’s a teacher/boss/leader who knows the answer and we don’t. So there’s a struggle to understand something that another person is leading us towards. We know that learning comes from the struggle, but because we know the answer lives within the leader there’s a wish we could just extract it from them and skip the struggling part. To me, this type of learning can feel personal and isolating. Or, when it’s happening as a community of learners then it sets up an us-versus-them mentality. In Glen’s workshop, as we struggled to solve the problem he posed, there were moments where we talked about how to extract the answer from him, or in the words of a fellow workshop participant, how to “take him down.” In the world outside the classroom, this dynamic happens when those with less power are angry that someone with power isn’t resolving problems — for example when oil companies block legislation that would decrease their emissions but also limit their profits.
The second learner emotion scenario is where you’re on equal footing with the teacher or leader. It’s the case where the anxiety comes from the fact that nobody knows the answer and we have to solve it together. To me this type of emotion feels connective; it brings us together over a common challenge. During the workshop, our debrief felt like this: we were all teachers on equal footing trying to figure out how to apply the work we did together to our home classrooms. In the world outside school, this is what solving climate change feels like on a good day: we’re working with people who agree about what is known and unknown, who care about the science, and who want to make a difference. It works well when the community comes together, prioritizing society over its privileged members.
These conversations are all theoretical, and they must translate into practical action: what do we actually implement in our classrooms to equip our students for the world we’re leaving them? When I get too theoretical and maudlin, I can turn to the practical resources I developed during the STEMteachersNYC ClimateSTEM series. In addition to the materials from the Cloud Institute (which you should definitely look at), two additional tools I learned about from workshops are the Energetic board game and the Water Calculator. I facilitated workshops on climate energy modeling in physics and the En-ROADS simulator. I gained additional links and reference materials on ecological succession, collaborating with local parks, and green roofs. I’ve been steeped in the NYC climate educator scene for a few years now, and I know I’ll never stop discovering new things and thinking, “How did I not know about this before?” Instead of being overwhelmed by the myriad of resources, I remind myself to keep going, to keep learning, to love the fact that there’s always more to do and know.
And then we implement. At the ClimateSTEM series reunion in early June, facilitators and participants from all the year’s workshops came together to cement what we learned and make a plan for the future. We formed partnerships between schools and out-of-school education opportunities. We discussed ongoing ways to connect, such as a climate educators’ working group. We exchanged contact information. And no matter what we do, we keep these experiences in mind when opportunities arise in our teaching. At night on June 7, my school decided to conduct school over Zoom the next day so that students would not need to go outside and breathe the ashy air. Because I’d been working on climate education, I had the confidence to post this tweet:
I’ll say my biggest disappointment was that teacher Twitter didn’t want to let the kids decide!
When it comes to climate education, it’s not just about climate anxiety, but also anxiety about how to teach climate well. How do we engage with those who disagree, keep our students thinking critically, work with our school buildings and broader community structures? This year, I’ve had the privilege of deep climate conversations with people who don’t agree that the situation is as dire as mainstream scientists think — and it’s been a productive exchange where we’re both learning and figuring things out together. In the end, we’re all students.