K-12 TEACHER & LEADER EFFECTIVENESS
NEW YORK CITY PUBLIC SCHOOLS
GOALS
To facilitate rigorous and meaningful learning for all children in the school by providing ongoing professional development and Coaching to teachers and administrators on advancing school’s academic and environmental stewardship mission. Education for Sustainability; Common Core; ReadyGen curriculum integration
CLIENTS
New York City Public Schools Alain L. Locke Magnet School of Environmental Stewardship, PS 208 “Our school will be a place where all community members, children, educators, parents, support staff and community based organizations will work rigorously and collaboratively in creating academic, extra curricular and project-based opportunities, where students can both discover and develop the gifts and talents that lie within.”
Project participants included three administrators, 25 teachers, 200 students, and I.
RESULTS
Q. Teachers’ proudest Education for Sustainability teaching & learning moments?
“Since the beginning of the school year I have watched the children become increasingly interested in creating a healthier environment and earth.”
“Getting students to self-reflect on their accomplishments and setting individual goals.”
“Listening to the students use the systems language.”
“Students have been continuing to learn about diet and exercise, Grade 5, wrote books about the benefits of exercise and wrote opinion pieces to nonfiction articles on health.”
Q. Impact of our Coaching on their teaching and their lives?
“EfS has changed my teaching because it opens students thinking to know that the teacher’s perspective can be challenged.”
“It is how I plan for instruction-aligning it with other programs and learning tools.”
“EfS impacts my teaching and my way of thinking and that impacts my students because they are thinking on a larger scale, thinking about how living things affect one other.”
“It has helped me enhance my thinking, broadening the scope of my own sense of value or purpose in the community/world.”
MY CONTRIBUTION
I worked with teachers on a unit-by-unit basis to align Common Core Standards, Education for Sustainability Standards to ReadyGen curriculum in a way that is relevant to the school community and honors the school’s vision. I assisted teachers in developing standards-aligned assessments for each of 12 social studies and science units, design integrated rubrics for each unit and curate sustainability resources to deepen EfS methods and knowledge.
