Systems Thinking Leads to Long-Term View For Students at Trevor Day School (By Grant Lichtman)

Reposted from: http://learningpond.wordpress.com/2012/10/04/systems-thinking-leads-to-long-term-view-for-students-at-trevor-day-school/

Teaching context, the weaving together of content, is more powerful than teaching content alone. But teaching context to our students allows them to understand that one set of contextual relationships. Teaching them the skills of how to acquire context allows them to develop context on their own for the rest of their lives. This is the challenge of teaching students to become life-long self-evolving learners. It is hard. For years I have been looking for a school or set of educators who do this overtly, not assuming that through a generally good education their students will acquire these skills, but actually teaching them alongside the other critical skills of education like reading, and writing and math. If you are interested in how a school is teaching students to be systems thinkers, to both understand and create their own long term perspectives, read on.

Trevor Day School is a multi-campus New York City preK-12, and I only got to visit with the elementary division, but I also got to spend a lot of time with their two educational leaders, veteran Head Pam Clarke and Assistant Head Lisa Alberti. They told me that Trevor has had some rough patches in its history, including the difficult merger of two schools. They also have a cultural history of self-reflection. Their teacher conferences, even at the lowest grade levels, have always been organized around a student-teacher meeting to set goals, followed by a student-teacher-family conference to review performance and talk about how the student-set goals can best be achieved. Recently they have undertaken the departmental reviews by external teams that so many schools find helpful in revising curriculum and teaching methods. Trevor takes advantage of their location and invites university experts in along with K-12 colleagues on these reviews. They filter the reviews and reports to steer changes along pathways that are consistent with their mission. As we discussed, all ideas are not good ideas, or good for the time, and many schools fail to take the important step of filtering out change for the sake of change.

The exciting takeaway from Trevor is that they are intentionally teaching the skills of systems thinking in order to truly instill an understanding of longitudinal perspective in the students. The details that follow are mostly from the lower grades, and Pam and Lisa were clear that this mindset has not migrated completely upwards to the upper grades. But is it moving as the students bring these understandings with them.

Systems thinking is the core set of skills that allows students to understand complex relationships, which, of course, are at the heart of the complicated world in which we live. (Full disclosure of bias: they are also at the heart of my teaching and book, The Falconer. If you are interested, look to the right of this page and check it out; you can download the intro for free.) Many believe that we can’t teach these skills at a young age; they have been at the top of Bloom’s taxonomy and we have incorrectly thought that we have to teach all the lower parts of Bloom before students can get to the top. (See my post on Flipping and Doubling Bloom.) Trevor is proving we can teach these skills, and that, as with all skills, it is critical to have a multi-year, integrated sequence of exposure and practice.

As with many of the other schools I have visited, it was clear to me that none of this would have happened without the highly intentional direction and support of Head Pam Clarke. She is not only a strong and dynamic leader, but also a keen academician who has been a leader in what we call 21C since well before the dawn of this young century. Getting faculty to collaborate along all-school pathways is never easy and Pam had to put people and processes into the “right places on the bus” in order to get the pieces moving in coordination. She is also a supporter of teaching systems thinking, which is a key, if not the key, to so much of the cross-grade collaboration that is deeply rich with what we call 21C skills.

We visited a 2^nd grade class that is studying plant biology. The teacher was using a Venn diagram to introduce the system of nutrients (sun, water, soil) required for plant germination. The second graders not only learned and understood the use of Venn, but they independently saw how to solve for missing nutrients in a scientific experiment. Our visit ended with the students and teachers huddled on the floor, placing seed pots into the spaces of the Venn relative to their upcoming experiments. Venn diagrams are a tool, but they also represent a mindset, both of which can be extrapolated in the future to more complex, multi-variable systems. Trevor extends this long-term view of the world through its off-campus relationships, including a forest conservation and biodiversity project in upstate New York, and with ongoing research projects in Central Park and on the Hudson River:

• 1^st graders have a 2.5-hour block of time in Central Park every week to research and collect data on plants that are revisited every year to compile and compare longitudinal data.
• 2^nd graders study the system of trees, and adopt and research individual trees in the Park.
• 3^rd graders research and collect field data on the Hudson, and participate in a major Snapshot day where many university researchers collect and compile data on the ecology and health of the river.
• 5^th graders study the local marsh communities, and fold environmental indicators in to their study of economics.
• 7^th graders study biodiversity indicators including salamander populations in the Black Rock Forest.

Through these programs, the students develop a common language of what it means to have a long view of the world around us. They prescribe to Jaimie Clouds ideas of common and shared resources and try to understand their own world, from the classroom to their areas of study, within this context.

Lisa told me they do not see the choice that stresses some schools between being “rigorous” and being “supportive”. Support is a core part of the culture demonstrated in their use of space, as they have Common Time and a Common Room that is a core for each group of grade level classes. Teacher’s desks are in these Common Rooms; students can find help and a place to work, and the teachers have dedicated time for collaboration and a place to meet.

I wish I had time to visit the other divisions at Trevor, but my dance card was full! It was exciting to see intentional systems thinking instruction, even at the youngest ages validating much of my assumptions about teaching these critical skills to our students. Now, my only worry is that Pam is an expert editor and proof reader and she is sure to find some typos or errors in this post!

EfS Curriculum Design & The Cloud Approach - FAQ's

Jaimie Cloud answers the most frequently asked questions about EfS curriculum design and the Cloud approach.

Q. Is this another “add on”? Where am I going to get the time? I am swamped as it is! I have no more time in my day or in my curriculum! A. No. Education for a sustainable future is not an “add on”. It is education that contributes to the future we want. Educating for an unsustainable future doesn’t make any sense—no matter how much time you have or don’t have. Don’t think of the curriculum as a crowded room that people keep trying to stuff more and more things into. Think of the curriculum as a rich colorful garden. The richer and the more productive the better—and it all happens within the same amount of time and space. Here are some useful analogies: When you add children or new friends to your life, your day does not get longer. You re-orient your day. You consolidate. You integrate. You prioritize. You accomplish more than one goal at a time… . When you add a new vocabulary word to your lexicon, your head does not get bigger. In fact, your sentences often get shorter, because finding a precise way to say something is more efficient and more effective, and therefore saves time.

Tap the power of limits. When you embed the attributes of EfS into your curriculum through “backwards design”, the learning is precise, authentic, effective, applicable, sticky, engaging, transferable and causes more and varied cognitive connections to be made. It takes time up-front to re-orient the curriculum—that is certainly true, and it saves more time over time, increases student achievement and civic participation, produces happy teachers, improves school culture and contributes to sustainable community indicators (citations). If you are already achieving all those outcomes consistently over time, you are already educating for sustainability and by all means keep doing what you are doing. If not, educate for sustainability. The goal: Healthy and sustainable communities in which our children can reach their individual and collective potential. The means: Education for Sustainability. Next question?

Q. The science teachers already teach about the environment. Why do we have to do this too? A. EfS is not about the environment. It is not even about sustainability, and it is certainly not about the indicators of un-sustainability (pollution, destruction of rainforests, etc.). EfS is education for a healthy, vibrant and sustain-able future for generations to come. It is completely interdisciplinary and includes the “hard” sciences, the arts and humanities and a great number of social sciences. After all, we are the ones who need to learn how to live sustainably on the planet. Education of any kind always yields results. The “learned curriculum” includes “the hidden curriculum” as well as the explicit one. Why not be intentional about the future we want by explicitly educating for it?

Q. How can I educate for sustainability when I have to teach to the test? A. Standardized tests are an indicator of student achievement. They are not the goal of a great education. The more you manage the indicators, the harder and harder it will be to achieve them and you will create new problems by doing so. (It mimics the “Shifting the Burden Archetype” in System Dynamics literature in which the symptom is addressed in the short run, but over time, becomes worse and worse and creates new problems.) In addition, standardized tests measure 13% of the Content and Performance Standards students must meet (Martin-Kniep). Having said that, there is growing evidence that educating for sustainability increases student achievement, and achievement measured by standardized tests (citations). Educators for Sustainability rely on State and Common Core Standards as base knowledge and skills into which we embed the attributes of EfS. If your students are meeting the Standards by being educated for sustainability, it will increase their chances of doing fine on the tests AND it will increase their chances and future generations’ chances to thrive over time. EfS solves more than one problem at a time and minimizes the creation of new problems. That makes it a sustainable innovation for schools.

Q. Can you walk me through what it looks like when all the parts of the EfS framework are implemented? A. Yes. We have a tool called the EfS Reality Check that we designed for this purpose. You can find the beta version at http://efsrealitycheck.cloudinstitute.org/. It will be revised again this year so stay tuned. In a nutshell, we begin by inviting a representative group of stakeholders in the school community (everyone or a sub group—depending on the school) to attend an introduction to sustainability and education for sustainability.

The introduction is designed to:

1. Develop a shared understanding and vocabulary

2. Give everyone a chance to develop a personal rationale for educating for sustainability

3. Inspire everyone to be hopeful about the role of teaching and learning in making the shift toward sustainability.

Then we invite a First Cohort of educators to innovate (sustainablize) units of study and to produce exemplars that other educators in the community can see. That is how we get Cohorts Two, Three and so on. There are designers, adapters and deliverers in every building. We work with them all at the appropriate levels of engagement. While we are regularly working with the faculty who are ready and able to innovate curriculum, we are also working with administrators to help them create the policies and practices necessary for the school to become a learning organization that educates for sustainability.

Q. What do we need to know, be able to do and be like if we are to contribute to our ability to thrive over time? How can we ensure that our students are being educated for sustainability? A. Complete an inquiry online, or call The Cloud Institute directly 212-645-9930.

I hope this list of common questions and our anwers has been useful to you.

Jaimie P. Cloud, Founder and President
The Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education

Citations

• Academy for Educational Development (2007). An evaluation of the Cloud Institute’s “Business and Entrepreneurship Education for the 21st Century” and Inventing the Future curricula. Washington: AED.

• Barrat Hacking, E., Scott, B., and Lee, E. (2010). Evidence of impact of sustainable schools. Bath, U.K.: University of Bath, Center for Research in Education and the Environment. Downloaded April 16, 2010 from http://publications.teachernet.gov.uk/eOrderingDownload/00344-2010BKT-EN.pdf

• Duffin, M., Murphy, M., & Johnson, B. (2008). Quantifying a relationship between place-based learning and environmental quality: Final report. Woodstock, VT: NPS Conservation Study Institute in cooperation with the Environmental Protection Agency and Shelburne Farms. 

• Duffin, M., & PEER Associates (2007). Why use place-based education? Four answers that emerge from the findings of PEEC, the Place-based Education Evaluation Collaborative, (Presentation version). Retrieved on May 10, 2011 from http://www.peecworks.org/PEEC/PEEC_Reports/S01248363-0124838. 

• Sobel, D. (2008). Nature and children: design principles for educators. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers

• Ofsted, The Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills (2009) Education for Sustainable Development: Improving Schools - Improving Lives. Manchester, UK. Crown http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/education-for-sustainable-development-improving-schools-improving-lives
  

• Gayford Christopher (2009) Learning for Sustainability: from the pupils’ perspective. Godalming, Surrey: World Wide Fund for Nature http://assets.wwf.org.uk/downloads/wwf_report_final_web.pdf

Green Ribbon School Awards | Denver Green School & EfS

Green Ribbon School Awards

We are proud to congratulate our clients and partner schools who each received the 2012 Green Ribbon School Award this year. "Schools that take a green approach cut costs on their utility bills, foster healthy and productive classrooms, and prepare students to thrive in the 21st century economy," said Nancy Sutley, Chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. "These Green Ribbon School award winners are taking outstanding steps to educate tomorrow's environmental leaders, and demonstrating how sustainability and environmental awareness make sense for the health of our students and our country."

U.S. Department of Education Green Ribbon Schools (ED-GRS) is a federal recognition program that opened in September 2011. Honored schools exercise a comprehensive approach to creating "green" environments through reducing environmental impact, promoting health, and ensuring a high-quality environmental and outdoor education to prepare students with the 21st century skills and sustainability concepts needed in the growing global economy.

The 78 awarded schools were named winners from among nearly 100 nominees submitted by 30 state education agencies, the District of Columbia and the Bureau of Indian Education. More than 350 schools completed applications to their state education agencies. Among the list of winners are 66 public schools, including 8 charters, and 12 private schools. In total, the schools are composed of 43 elementary, 31 middle and 26 high schools with around 50 percent representing high need, and at-risk schools.

We would like to acknowledge:

Hawaii Preparatory Academy, Kamuela, Hawaii
The Willow School, Gladstone, New Jersey
Gladstone High School, Gladstone, Oregon
Tahoma Junior High School, Tahoma, Washington
The Denver Green School, Denver, Colorado

We would like to give a special shout out to our most recent and youngest school partner, the Denver Green School (DGS) because 2012 marked the end of their second year as a Denver Public School. DGS is a Neighborhood Innovation School in southeast Denver – meaning they implement their own unique program design, approved through a rigorous process by the Denver Public School Board. The innovation they proposed was Education for Sustainability. Their emphasis on project-based learning allows teachers and students to engage in relevant, self-directed, teacher-facilitated learning. DGS refers to the current national "Green Movement"- but they also believe that "green" has a deeper meaning. They believe that green must mean a focus on the whole student and the whole community. 

Apparently the Denver Public Schools (DPS) agrees, and so do the test scores. DGS was also recently awarded the DPS’s “green school” designation—which in that context means that DGS met and exceeded the DPS’s expectations for academic achievement this year. Of course, at the heart of their success, is their focus on carbon footprint reduction and on environmental and social sustainability. Think deep dark green squared! Next year DGS will complete their growth as a Pre-K-8 school at 550 students. 

The Cloud Institute began working with the leaders and faculty partners of DGS one year before they opened their doors. They did it right. Even though almost everyone coming to work at DGS had another job that year, by the time the school opened, the team was ready. Every year the faculty has worked with the Cloud Institute to design, document and map curriculum aligned with State, Common Core and EfS Standards, and the faculty has worked tirelessly to produce learner centered instruction that educates for the future we want, while administering assessments that produce learning.

Additional highlights from the first two years include the ongoing study of the rights to, and responsibilities for tending the Commons by the Pre-School students, an energy audit and reduction of energy consumption led by the second graders, and the small group of 6th graders that facilitated our fish game simulation to 75 US Green Building Council Members in the first year (with the usual results). This year, another group of 6th graders determined that DGS has used ONE MILLION gallons of water a year LESS since it opened (with hundreds of people in the building and a CSA Farm on the property run by their partner Sprout City Farms) then it did when it was unoccupied for the several years before it opened. That is what we call contributing to the regenerative capacity of a place. Elegant curriculum and instruction, co-leadership, faculty partners, community involvement—THIS is the new paradigm. It works. 

It gives us great pleasure once again, to honor the Denver Green School, Hawaii Prep Academy, The Willow School, Gladstone High School, Tahoma Junior High School and all the other winners of the 2012 Green Ribbon Schools Award for their contribution to a healthy and sustainable future for us all.

Reflections on ‘Happiness and Wellbeing: Defining a New Economic Paradigm’. By Jaimie Cloud

On April 2nd of this year I attended a meeting at the U.N. Hosted by The Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Bhutan, Lyonchhen Jigmi Y. Thinley entitled, ‘Happiness and Wellbeing: Defining a New Economic Paradigm’.  Bhutan is famous for developing the Gross National Happiness Index, a stunning measure of sustainable development that  takes a holistic approach towards notions of progress and gives equal importance to both economic as well as  non-economic aspects of wellbeing.   In attendance at the full day meeting were,  Her Excellency Ms. Laura Chinchilla, President of the Republic of Costa Rica,  H.E. Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations, Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, our U.S. based friends and colleagues Mathis Wackernagel (The Ecological Footprint), Bob Costanza (Ecological Economist and  Professor and Director of the Institute for Sustainable Solutions (ISS) at Portland State University), Hunter Lovins (Co-Author, Natural Capitalism) and Gifford Pinchot (Bainbridge Graduate Institute), and the list goes on. It was thrilling to see and hear so many important dignitaries talking about the need for alternative indicators to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and about re-thinking what we really want and how to measure what really counts.  The Cloud Institute and other educators for sustainability have been educating young people and educators about that since 1995.

It was an amazing event and I was very proud to be included in the conversation.  I would have loved to see a public figure from the field of PreK-12 Education for Sustainability included in a panel.  It is, however,  not uncommon for the leaders of  professional sectors engaged in the shift toward sustainability (business, economics, government, higher education, architecture and design) to inadvertently leave out the Pre-K-12 Education sector in their deliberations.  It is a commonly held belief that Pre-K-12 education requires a twenty year return on investment period—in other words, that it will take twenty years before the children who are educated for sustainability will grow up and make a difference that can contribute to sustainability.  This, of course, is not true.  It is, in fact, the children and young people who are educated for sustainability that are “making the difference that makes the difference” (Gregory Bateson) right now.  They have everything to gain from the new paradigm and everything to lose in the old one.  They get that more than most. See our Inspiring Kids section for evidence.

Working documents and frameworks from the initiative and from the meeting:

http://www.www.2apr.gov.bt
http://www.2apr.gov.bt/images/stories/pdf/unresolutiononhappiness.pdf
http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/sitefiles/file/Sachs%20Writing/2012/World%20Happiness%20Report.pdf
http://www.gnhusa.org

Jaimie Cloud Presents at Amy Greenwell Garden in Hawaii

by Donna Mitts
(Reposted from: http://kohalacenter.org/schoolgardensblog/?p=803)

On January 10, 2012 school garden teachers along with others were fortunate enough to listen to Jaimie Cloud present at the Amy Greenwell Garden in Captain Cook. Jaimie is a visionary leader in sustainable education.  The Cloud Institute “prepares K-12 school systems and their communities to educate for a sustainable future by inspiring educators and engaging students through meaningful content and learner-centered instruction.”
 
Through discussion and exercises in sustainability participants learned valuable tactics in teaching sustainability to others.  This was a wonderful presentation enhanced by the beauty of the Amy Greenwell Garden.

We Are All In This Together, by Dr. Moira N. Wilkinson

You’ve likely heard that phrase before; it’s a common enough idea with lots of variations on the theme: “All for one and one for all!” “The more the merrier!” to name just a couple. We might get so used to hearing it that we tune out to its full significance.

It’s more than a sound bite or a fun thing to imagine. It is, in fact, a Mental Model of Sustainability. I am totally on board with the goal and still stumble sometimes putting it into action consistently. I’m struck by how hard it is to retrain my brain to shift toward that new way of thinking. Even doing this work full-time, when push comes to shove, sometimes I revert to doing things on my own; which is ironic because it’s precisely when things get hardest that it’s MOST important to bring in your crew.

Inevitably, when the moment passes, I’m left with two conclusions: a) it’s not nearly as fun as it would have been if I’d been doing it with folks along the way, and b) the product would have looked different, and maybe better. Don’t get me wrong—I love the way my mind works and the creative things it thinks of – the thing is I like the way ALL minds work and that each comes up with different responses. So I'm always left wondering, “what if….” How much more creative and win-win the product (insights and responses to the same issue) might have been with more fabulous minds working on it with me? We know that asking different questions and activating the creative process are two good strategies for shifting mental models, so I’ll pose the same questions to you that I ask myself in this situation. Think about them. See what YOU come up with!

What would it mean to our work if we took it to heart that we are all in this together—truly? In a world where we are all in this together there is no “they” only “we.” If we act on the principle of being in this together, how differently would we draw on the support and resources that we offer each other in the NJ Learns Community? What would change in the way we approach the people we want to influence—especially those we seem most UNlike or with whom we disagree the most? (Yes, THAT person.) How would this change your life, or the face of the community you live in, now and in the future?

We’re all still learning how to put this into action and there’s no single correct way to do it. Everyone’s got a good story about how this goes for them, the highs and lows. Check out the story below to get a window into the work of our Hillsborough team to see how they’re working together to build a broad foundation in their town.

In the last four years, sustainability has become a part of everyday language for more and more people. There is more mainstream information and acceptance about the causes of unsustainability, and more resources, like Sustainable Jersey, to help individuals and communities learn about behavior changes that contribute to sustainability. As a result, over the years, the number of applicants to the NJ Learns program has increased three-fold, and the quality of applicants has improved notably. Applicants are clearer in their motivation for doing this work, have diversified teams, and are more organized in their ability to take strategic action toward their visions.

The Hillsborough team is an example of that. Their five person team is comprised of two self-identified “concerned residents” (one of whom is a parent of school-aged children), a School Board Member, a business person, and a public school teacher. This mixed team is an example of how the Keystone Year seeds change on an organizational level by bringing individuals and teams from schools and communities to learn and change together for the shared goal of sustainability. They joined NJ Learns for several reasons, among them that they have strong ties with Sustainable Jersey and had heard Winnie Fatton from Sustainable Jersey talk about the transformational changes that can occur after a team experiences the NJ Learns program.

According to Bill Dondiego, the team’s vision was always about “awareness and support.” At the outset of the Keystone Year, the team had their sights set on systemic change in the town, working together to expand people’s understanding of sustainability to include an awareness that thinking, learning, and education have a role in the shift toward sustainability. Children and young people are pivotal players in this vision. As Bill put it, the “Start young, so they know and respect the Commons. If they respect the Commons, they’ll respect each other.” To that end, each team member is working from their particular place in the system to create conditions for Hillsborough residents of all ages and in all sectors of the city—government, schools, business, etc—to make the connections between sustainability and learning together.

He’s convinced that if they can increase awareness and provide support, “the whole state can move the needle forward. We get to follow in the footsteps of others who went before us and be the next in line to grow this. It’s going to take knowledge, truth, and integrity to achieve our long-term mission.”

This “we are all in this together” orientation, fundamental to EfS, shows up in the team’s actions to make connections across sectors within their town and beyond

Hillsborough’s borders, too, as evidenced by the range of actions below:

• In town, Bill is applying to be on the energy council in the hopes of creating a nexus between agencies.
• Other members of the team are participating in the Citizens’ Campaign class for Citizen Legislators to parlay EfS more effectively in the government sector.
• At the same time, the team recently organized the Central Jersey Green Teams Best Practices Conference focusing on energy, transport, and recycling, and which was attended by about 65 people from more than ten municipalities.
• They applied for, and won, a “Green Maps” grant with Montgomery, Princeton, and Lawrence to map sustainability along that corridor.
• They have taken on an informal mentorship role with NJ Learns team from Jersey City, sharing their resources with the relatively less wealthy city to the north.

Press Release: The Cloud Institute Releases New EfS Standards

For Immediate Release

The Cloud Institute Releases New Education for Sustainability (EfS)
Standards and Performance Indicators

(New York, New York) - - The Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education, a non-profit organization and leader in the field of education for sustainability is, for the first time, making their EfS Standards and Performance Indicators available for free as a download.

The 14-page package of nine EfS core standards and performance indicators were developed for PreK-12 school systems, and are designed to equip teachers and students with the new knowledge and ways of thinking needed to achieve economic prosperity and responsible citizenship while restoring the health of our living systems.

The interdisciplinary content standards replace the traditional problem-based approach to learning with pedagogy that is aspiration-based. “Moving toward an aspiration offers a broader perspective and solves more than one problem at a time, while minimizing the creation of new ones,” says Jaimie P. Cloud, founder of the Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education. “Our standards promote greater awareness and sense of efficacy in students, and support teachers with a rich and highly flexible foundational system to educate for a sustainable future.”

The Department of Education has not approved a set of national standards for education for sustainability. This means that states, districts, and individual schools have an opportunity to enhance existing frameworks and curriculum by selecting the EfS Standards and Performance Indicators that are most closely aligned to their educational vision.

As part of The Cloud Institute’s teaching and learning system, these standards draw upon the most progressive fields of study - biomimicry, neuroscience, environmental ethics, systems thinking, and others - and have been aligned to Common Core, State Standards, Character Education, Cultural Competencies and Partnership for 21st Century Skills. The content is influenced by top leadership principles including The Entrepreneurial Mindset, Systems Thinking and System Dynamics, Characteristics of Resiliency, Habits of Mind (Costa and Kallick), and the attributes of catalytic or “quiet” leadership (David Rock).

The nine Core Content Standards are: Cultural Preservation and Transformation, Responsible Local and Global Citizenship, Dynamics of Systems and Change, Sustainable Economics, Healthy Commons, Natural Laws and Ecological Principles, Inventing and Affecting The Future, Multiple Perspectives and Sense Of Place.

According to Dr. Moira Wilkinson, The Cloud Institute’s Senior Director of Education and Research, “Any one of The Cloud Institute’s EfS Standards on their own, offer a valuable contribution to education. The nine core content standards that we promote, and the indicators that accompany them, are woven together to produce catalytic results. This collection is both comprehensive and rigorous, based on relevant and carefully selected fields of thought, and designed to integrate smoothly into existing programs.”

To learn more about the Cloud Institute’s EfS Standards and Performance Indicators and to download your free copy, visit /cloud-efs-standards

The Cloud Institute’s Education for Sustainability (EfS) Standards and Performance Indicator’s Q & A

Q. Who and what informed the development of these standards?

A.  Since 1987, Jaimie Cloud has been collecting and organizing opinions about the core competencies associated with being sustain-able on planet Earth.  Drawing from the literature and the work of selected scholars across a wide range of disciplines as well as her own experience educating for sustainability, The Cloud Institute’s EfS Standards and Performance Indicators have been developed, organized, tested, revised, and used to define the field and to design 21st century curriculum and systemic change, domestically and globally.  Our EfS Standards and Performance Indicators are informed by comprehensive research, drawing on publications and perspectives from the leading voices in the field of Education for Sustainability and complementary areas of study such as  Agenda 21 Chapter 36, the U.S. Task Force on Education for Sustainability, Robert Costanza, Herman Daly, Sabine O’Hara, Hazel Henderson, Fritjof Copra, Anne Perraca Bijur, Jack Byrne, Keith Wheeler, Jaimie Cloud, Karl Henrik Robert, Paul Mankiewicz, Julie Mankiewicz, Paul Ryan, Harland Cleveland, Edward DeBono, Buckminster Fuller, Garrett Harding, David Sobel, Paul Hawken, David Orr, Jean Perras, Peter Senge, Willard Kniep, Franziska Oswald, Lees Stuntz, Linda Booth Sweeney, Jonathan Rowe, Elinor Ostrom, Betty Sue Flowers, Wade Davis, Stephen Sterling, and Daniella Tilbury.

Q. Who is using them, how do they use them, and what difference are they making?

A. All Cloud Institute partners and clients, including districts, schools, and individuals, use our EfS Standards and Performance Indicators.  Now they are available to everyone.  Here is how we use them:  Once people gain a shared understanding of the meaning of sustainability and the attributes of Education for Sustainability, develop a personal rationale for why they should educate for sustainability, and become inspired and hopeful about contributing to sustainability through education, we introduce them to our Standards and Indicators so that educators and administrators may become familiar with, and align them to, their curriculum across grade levels and disciplines.  Then they all produce an integrated EfS curriculum map so everyone can access the big picture. No one teacher, grade level, discipline, course or unit does it all (though the richer the courses the more they can do). This is a collective effort. 

When alignment has been done, educators who are “early adopters” decide where to begin. They choose which unit they want to innovate and they choose the EfS Standard(s) and Performance Indicators that are appropriate for their students to address. They then embed the standards and indicators in their curriculum through a backwards design process. Understanding By Design (Wiggins) is a popular structure for this work.  With professional development and coaching from the Cloud Institute, they embed our EfS Standards and Indicators into their unit overviews, their assessments, their performance criteria and their lessons.  Over time, they look for evidence of them in student work.

Once the educators are ready to share their designs and exemplary student work samples, they “make the feedback visible, desirable, and doable,” and that inspires the next cohort of innovators, and so on.  In districts and schools that are ready and have administrative and organizational support, the time horizon for EfS to be the norm in curriculum and instruction is approximately 3-5 years.  Evidence shows that, over time, when districts and schools commit to EfS, they see concrete improvement in student learning and standards achievement, enhanced attitudes toward learning and students’ feelings of academic success.  Further, teachers report meaningful effects on their own attitudes and say that EfS helps both new and veteran teachers to achieve strong academic outcomes from their students.

Q. What Standards and Principles have these EfS Standards and Indicators been aligned to?

A. The Cloud Institute’s Standards and Indicators have been aligned to Common Core, State Standards, Character Education, Partnership for 21st Century Skills, Cultural Competency, The Virtues, The Entrepreneurial Mindset, Systems Thinking and System Dynamics, Characteristics of Resiliency, Habits of Mind (Art Costa, Bena Kallick), and the attributes of catalytic or “quiet” leadership (David Rock).

CLICK HERE TO REVIEW & DOWNLOAD OUR EFS STANDARDS & INDICATORS

Cranford School District to Build Community Sustainability Team | By Glenn Eisenberg, The Cranford Chronicle

The Cranford school district has been selected by the Cloud Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to sustainability education, to receive funding for its “Education for Sustainability” program, in order to build a team of community volunteers who can work with the program.

The grant of $17,000 a year for the next three years, entitled “New Jersey Schools Learn,” was provided by the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation to the Cloud Institute, which then picked Cranford and two other school districts in New Jersey to pass the funding on to last spring. It will be used for professional development, curriculum development, and support resources through the team.

The Education for Sustainability program, which is run through the Cloud Institute, was pushed for by Cranford Environmental Commission member Mary Catherine Sudiak and the district’s Science Supervisor Lisa Hayeck, both of whom were trained by the Cloud Institute to facilitate the program.

Continue to NJ.com to read the full article

The Impossible Hamster

During our EfS Summer Design Studio, one of our participants shared this funny (and thought provoking) video with us.  The "Impossible Hamster" video, created by The New Economics Foundation (NEF), illustrates what would happen if there were no limits to growth.  The video confronts this topic head on, and puts a finger on a very important point--"As economic growth rises, we are pushing the planet ever closer to, and beyond some very real environmental limits."

We thought the video was worth sharing, and will hopefully spark a conversation.  What do you think about the Impossible Hamster?

Jaimie meets the Mayor of Cleveland, OH

On a recent visit to Cleveland, OH, where we are interested in launching a Sites Learn initiative, Jaimie attended the Schools that Can Conference and met with educators from across the city.  She also had the opportunity to meet with  Cleveland's Mayor, Frank G. Jackson, who in August 2009 convened the first ever Sustainable Cleveland 2019 Summit.  The Summit brought together hundreds of people interested in applying the principles of sustainability to the design of the local economy.

Learn more about Cleveland's sustainability plan here...

EfS in Schools (UK video)

Pencils : A Classroom Commons

This 3 minute video podcast entitled, Pencils : A Classroom Commons, was produced by Betsy Kates , a teacher in our PNW BOCES EfS Curriculum Design Project , and her son Gabe.  Betsy got very excited about the work of educating for sustainability—particularly passionate about the EfS Standard, “Healthy Commons”,  and decided to produce this video about the lessons her students learned by studying the Commons through their use of pencils in the classroom.  

Marla Gardner, Director of the The BOCES Curriculum Center got very excited about this podcast as a great way to communicate what the EfS Standrds are all about, and decided we should have a podcast for every one of the Cloud Institute’s EfS Standards.  She offered mini grants to all the teachers in the project to produce additional podcasts.  Three have been produced so far.  Click here to check them out. 

Stayed tuned for more…