Using Teacher Training to Create a Sustainability Class

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Originally appears in the Winter 2019 issue.

SOME MATH TEACHERS might feel out of their element at a summer professional development course focused on energy and sustainability; however, in the summer of 2016, I attended a five-day Summer Teaching Institute entitled Framing Energy through Sustainable Building Science Technology. I signed up for the class because the topic was sustainability. Even though I was teaching mathematics, I was working on my Master’s degree in conservation science. What I didn’t realize was that exactly two weeks later I, along with two other teachers at the institute, would be teaching our own sustainability class. We ran it as a two-week 70-hour summer course as those were the parameters of the teaching opportunity. The ideas and activities from our course can be used for a standalone program or separately as part of an existing class or program for students aged 14–18.

Background
The Sustainability and Sustainable Building Science Technology Institute, a one-week experience that was sponsored in part by South Seattle College and the National Science Foundation Project Grant no. 1406320, had a theme for each day: sustainability, problem/project-based learning, energy in the Pacific Northwest, high-performing buildings, and group work and presentations.

My team — Hrudya Nair, Nanotechnology/Physics Teacher at North Seattle College; Bruce Morris, Science Teacher at Auburn High School; and I — decided for the class we would teach, we would combine this daily theme idea with the project-based learning model that we had been shown at the Institute. Project-based learning is also the model that is used for all classes at Cleveland High School in Seattle, WA, the school in which we would be teaching.