The Audience

Recognize that issues and context for different geographic regions impact educator and natural resource manager priorities for the relative importance of selected concepts, skills, and values.

Tie water and water resource education to local values and needs of:

• The geographic region
• Educator identified priorities
• Natural resource manager identified priorities

Determine whether teachers can implement topics. Check if:

• They have knowledge about the topics.
• They have a place to fit the topic in their curriculum.

Understand the roots of the environmental management problem and select your target audience based on a specific need. For example, if economic activity is most closely associated with the environmental problem, outreach initiatives should relate to the needs and interests of the target audience engaged in the economic activity.

Message content

Message delivery vehicle

Outreach strategy

Educate teachers about innovations in curricula to ensure that they are implemented.

Encourage and support use of a community-based curriculum based on water monitoring. (This type of curriculum has been shown to be highly acceptable among teachers and to provide professional satisfaction.)

Encourage teachers to include the following elements in their environmental education programs:

• Flexible curriculum
• Collaborative learning environments
• Students’ bearing the consequences of the behavior
• Teacher competency in listening and questioning
• Diverse instructional strategies
• Resourcefulness in accessing resources
• Creativity, especially in knowledge of how to do without,
• Facilitation skills
• Ability to make connections
• Understanding of local-to-global connections
• Ability to integrate curricula
• Using personal/student strengths/passions
• Experiential teaching orientation
• Cooperative and inclusive learning
• Nurturing a sense of place
• Consistent can-do vision
• Infectious passion for EE and teaching in general
• Humor in the classroom
• Practice of environmentally responsible behavior
• Risk taking
• Recharging oneself

Public participation

Supporting and motivating professionals

• Building teacher self confidence in understanding water concepts that are less familiar to them.
• Helping teachers figure out how to integrate water topics into their regular curriculum.
• Providing teachers with new science skills and pedagogical knowledge to build self confidence.
• Providing teachers with the following, to assure that they can successfully implement a curriculum:
  • Supportive curriculum resources
  • Training to support thorough understanding of scope and content objectives

Provide teacher training that is hands-on, intense, comprehensive, and includes work in the field. A successful training could:

• Include an introduction to the watershed topic(s), water quality testing, use of equipment, hands-on instruction, introduction to inquiry-based learning, introduction to and use of field-based science investigations, and related science and career topics.
• Assure availability of any resources required for the training
• Include practice training activities designed to match the situation where teachers will apply the activities.
• Provide professional development in: student initiatives, action research, interdisciplinary approaches, and help with barriers to program implementation.

Evaluation

• Document information and outreach work to help improve ability to assess the relationship between outreach and outcomes and to exchange materials and knowledge with others.
• Evaluate progress toward clearly defined objectives.
• Apply an evaluation strategy which helps educator to identify reasons and consequences for training outcomes.

The Individual

Enables the learner to link new knowledge to their existing knowledge in meaningful ways.

Provides a nurturing context for learning, with attention to: cultural or group background and influences, the physical environment, and the use of tools or practices appropriate to learner skills and abilities.

Provides opportunities for extended effort and practice.

The Class or Group

Is facilitated by quality instructors who have been trained in effective teaching methods and are supported by the program sponsor.

Is based on and shaped by some form of needs assessment and use of a planning model.

Content and delivery is determined in cooperation with the target audience and stakeholders.

Builds environmental literacy, especially for knowledge of environmental processes and systems.

Builds from key principles underlying environmental education.

Incorporates methods for assessing the value of the experience, especially as it relates to desired outcomes.

Web-Based Learning

The Community

Takes into consideration the community as a whole, including socio-political, economic, historical, and cultural influences.

Provides training to increase skills needed to accomplish goals identified by the group.

Beyond the Community