As a kindergarten teacher, one of my goals at the beginning of each school year is to have my students reading and (hopefully!) writing by June. At the beginning of every year I realize what a monumental task it is as I gaze at my classroom on that first day of school. If you’ve ever […]
Science is central to how we understand and make sense of the world around us. Could it be that the best way to teach science might be to turn that idea on its head? The natural world is central to how we understand and make sense of science. Across California, where schools are implementing new […]
If a teacher decides to adopt a project based learning (PBL) approach, even the Gold Standard Project Based Learning unit, the most comprehensive tier of PBL strategies, starts with a simple question: What’s the content that teachers will use to foster a successful classroom? There is no shortage of sources from which to choose: […]
In her blog post earlier this year, Ten Strands Board member Sheila Nahi provided an unequivocal yes to the question of whether we are still in a ‘Goldilocks moment’ to achieve environmental literacy in California, as first posed by Ten Strands Founder and President Will Parish in July 2015. With the active implementation of A […]
History and Development of the Get Outside Workshops In early 2012, the California State Board of Education was on the brink of adopting the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)—standards that would radically change how teachers would approach teaching science to their students. Anticipating the need for teacher support while transitioning to NGSS (which was adopted […]
“The students cleared a local pond that frequently gets clogged with natural or human-made pollution. On their return visit, they saw that a huge log had been thrown into the pond–but when they went to remove it, they found a thriving ecosystem of snails reclaiming the wood. So the students made the independent decision to […]
Nearly every day we hear news that pertains to the environment, whether it’s a local, state, national, or global issue. Of course, this news is not isolated to a single moment in time, but is connected to a wide variety of choices made in the past, some of which were grounded in economics, others in […]
On July 29, 2015, Ten Strands’ Founder Will Parish published a persuasive blog entitled A Goldilocks Moment for Environmental Literacy. With Trump’s upcoming inauguration, I returned to Will’s piece with a sense of urgency to evaluate whether we indeed still have the right mix of conditions to successfully bring environmental literacy to California’s 6.2 million […]