Local teachers wade into stream, environmental literacy training

If you want teen-agers to succeed in school, ask them a good question. And let them go outside the classroom to figure out the answer for themselves.

That was an underlying message this week as 20 of the state’s top science and social studies teachers underwent an unusual week-long professional development course. The overall goal of the course was to help students become more environmentally literate—a new state requirement.  But to get students to take off their headphones and get outside to learn, teachers must first engage them in meaningful problem solving, course leaders said.

So they practiced.  Teachers on the course waded into and studied a healthy stream in Columbia, conducted laboratory experiments aboard a Chesapeake workboat in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, and spent three days exploring remote Smith Island and its surrounding waters.

 “This is great. I’m seeing the real deal,” said Arlene Ginn on Tuesday as she scribbled in her notebook aboard the workboat Snowgoose.

The teachers used an assortment of equipment to test the Inner Harbor for oxygen and turbidity, nitrates and phosphates, and other indicators of health. They assembled data, shared their results and theorized answers to how city neighborhoods affect Harbor water quality.  

Ginn is a veteran science teacher of 38 years, and currently teaches a ninth-grade environmental literacy class at Washington High School in Somerset County. The county’s school district established the class last year to help students meet the new state environmental literacy standard.

Ginn said part of her passion for teaching about the environment was the death of three students at her former school in Florida in 2007 as a result of a rare infection by warm-water amoeba. She also wants to help reduce water pollution in an area of the state where livelihoods hang in the balance.   

“We want to be able to stop the erosion of our water quality,” Ginn said.

It was that kind of thinking in 2011 that prompted the Maryland State Board of Education to make environmental education a priority. Maryland became the first state in the country to establish an environmental literacy requirement.  School districts have implemented much of the regulation.

But Tom Ackerman, director of teacher training with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF), said many schools had difficulty with one particular part of the new regulations: students must be able to “investigate and analyze an issue, and develop and implement a local action project.” That kind of critical thinking challenge likely doesn’t exist in the current curriculum, Ackerman said. But it is one of the most important, both to engaging students, and also to teaching “S.T.E.M.” (science, technology, engineering and math) concepts.

Enter the Maryland Environmental Literacy Partnership (MELP). Experts from the Maryland Department of Education, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, CBF, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration teamed up with nine school districts around the state to teach teachers how to put a high schooler’s brain through a mental obstacle course. 

The result was a series of four, week-long courses which are being held through the summer. By August about 100 teachers from the nine participating counties (Howard, Anne Arundel, Baltimore City, Carroll, Frederick, Harford, Montgomery, Prince George’s and Somerset) will have taken the course. They, in turn, will help steer their school districts to further implement the state environmental literacy standards.

Lauren Roberts, a social studies teacher at Reservoir High School in Howard County, said she wants her students to understand how government policies contribute to clean or dirty water as much as any sewage pipe. She will use what she learns to design educational projects, possibly investigating the maintenance of the drinking water reservoir near her school. 

The state regulation doesn’t require districts to create new classes. Nancy Bourgeois, a biology teacher at Broadneck High School in Anne Arundel County who participated in the MELP course this week, said her district didn’t need any “massive curriculum jump,” just “tweaking.”

But Laura Murray, a researcher from the University of Maryland’s Horn Point Laboratory who assisted in the course this week, said the key to all environmental education is “learning by doing.” The first day of the course the teachers studied a stream near Robinson Nature Center in Columbia. In addition to conducting water quality tests in the Inner Harbor, the teachers also trawled the bottom of the Patapsco River near the Key Memorial Bridge for oysters. On Smith Island they were scheduled to undergo a series of other outdoor investigations.

Donna Balado, a teacher at Westminster High School in Carroll County, said the training comes at a perfect time. Project-based learning provides precisely the type of instruction that will help students meet new S.T.E.M standards as well as the environmental literacy requirements. It’s all about doing, she said.

“They need to be driving the bus” of their own education, Balado said.