At the beginning of Fall 2021, NESS received a three-year grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that will expand environmental education opportunities for students enrolled in Hartford HeathCare’s Natchaug Hospital clinical day treatment schools and for professionals in alternative education.
The approved Ocean Experiential Learning Program (OELP) is a two-part project for the grant, which includes student programs and a teacher professional development program focused on educators and staff at New England alternative schools. As part of the grant, NESS is incorporating NOAA resources and real-time data into our programs within our Natchaug partnership schools while also facilitating a research cohort of alternative schoolteachers within the Natchaug system. The goal is to determine best practices in experiential environmental education for alternative school settings. Through NESS-led lessons with alternative school students, NESS will connect students with their local watersheds and provide decision-making and leadership opportunities that encourage a stronger, more sustainable, and equitable community.
The NESS B-WET Tacklebox is a free educator resource toolkit including NESS lesson plans specifically geared for students using NOAA resources. This toolkit is free to educators, thanks to funding from the NOAA “B-WET” grant and the New England Science & Sailing Foundation.
Explore the B-WET environmental education program that provided the funding that promotes place-based experiential learning for K-12 students and professional development for teachers to grantees, like NESS.
MWEEs are central to many lesson plans created and delivered by NESS educators in Natchaug schools this past academic year. Cohort participants also focus on implementing and assessing best practices that focus on student-centered learning, which focus on local environmental issues in watersheds and local communities. To learn more about the essential elements and definitions, check out this website.
NOAA released a new searchable database of education resources that were created by NOAA and their partners. Filter through lessons by audience, subject, resource type, and subject to find additional information and activities to supplement MWEE in your classroom and beyond.
Investigate with 5 modules to analyze and apply data sets in your classroom. Explore topics such as El Nino, Sea Level Rise, Coral Bleaching, Water Quality, and Ocean Acidification.
Estuaries, where The river meets the sea. Estuaries are incredibly productive ecosystems, found all along the coasts of New England. There is an incredible amount of ecosystem services provided by estuaries, and it proves to be an excellent subject to use when creating Meaningful Watershed Educational Experiences. Check out the following resources to learn more, and incorporate MWEEs into your curriculum.
Explore free resources created by National Estuarine Research Reserves (NERRs) from around the country for teachers and students. You can also download real-time data collected from the Research Reserve System’s System-wide Monitoring Program (SWMP) from various NERRs.
NOAA Planet Stewards aims to build up scientifically literate individuals and communities by providing educators with access to workshops, webinars, connections in the environmental community with other educators, and other opportunities.
In response to COVID-19, NOAA, Woods Hole Sea Grant, and Woods Hold Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) created NOAA Live! Webinars to provide students with connections to scientists, sharing real-life career paths, and opportunities to investigate topics varying from marine life, space, archaeology, and more. Search the archive from recordings to learn more.
All of the Meaningful Watershed Educational Experiences essential elements culminate in students creating an environmental action project. After investigations of an environmental issue in students’ local communities, reflection naturally leads to the development of an action project. Environmental action projects can take many different forms. Major topics include restoration or protection, everyday choices, community engagement, and civic engagement. If your students are interested in creating a restoration project, you can access the RESTORATION ATLAS released by NOAA to identify projects in your local watershed. Examples of restoration projects are removing invasive plants, restoring protective vegetation, performing a clean-up, installing rain gardens, and more. If your students are interested in performing a community clean-up, you can log the debris collected with the MARINE DEBRIS TRACKER to submit your data to the NOAA MARINE DEBRIS PROGRAM and the Southeast Atlantic Marine Debris Initiative.
Have you ever seen trash on the beach and wondered how it got there? Discover how marine debris impacts the environment as you experiment with buoyancy and design a model ocean with circular currents. Learn about harmful microplastics and brainstorm ways to keep our ocean clean and healthy!
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NESS Educators Moana, Spindrift, and Sunshine travel to three Natchaug schools each week to deliver various hands-on lessons covering topics such as wave science, marine mammals, weather and climate, and more. For the 2021-2022 school year, students are investigating their local environment with an emphasis on watersheds and the use of NOAA resources. Classroom lessons use various NOAA Education resources and lessons, including NOAA Fisheries, NOAA real-time data, and the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research Okeanos Explorer materials. For example, students used scientific tools to do a local weather report and then compared this data to weather across the country using NOAA’s real-time weather data maps. Students were also able to travel to NESS and spend time out on the water and in the water exploring the Long Island Sound! At the end of the school year, students will reflect on the knowledge gained by NESS programs and develop a stewardship action plan to address various environmental issues in their community. This is the second year of programming NESS has been involved in for two of the three Natchaug schools, and we are excited to continue and grow our collaborative partnership!
Aside from scientific content, NESS programs are designed to promote social-emotional learning. NESS programs, both in school and in the field, inspire communication, self-management, responsibility, and inclusiveness, as modeled by our organizational core values. To continue to develop meaningful relationships with students outside of academics, the NESS Sea AmeriCorps program provides one-on-one mentorship and classroom support for students within the Natchaug system. After the end of the academic year, students are surveyed to measure their growth in teamwork, self-confidence, and perseverance.
Outside of school programming, NESS established a three-year teacher cohort study and research group with alternative schoolteachers aimed at developing and testing best practices for achieving identified B-WET program outcomes in alternative school settings. Ultimately, the cohort research group will help create B-WET program modifications to meet the learning needs of alternative school students by identifying both experiential learning and alternative learning best practices. At the end of each year, NESS will host an annual convening designed to bring alternative schoolteachers together to network and learn about local environmental issues in the field. The research cohort will work to develop a toolkit, which includes the B-WET program modifications and best learning practices used to effectively deliver MWEE, which will be shared among alternative schoolteachers at the convening. The OELP professional development program also gives teachers the knowledge and encouragement to conduct MWEE in their classrooms using the best practices discovered in the alternative teacher cohort study and research group.
Our B-WET Teacher Cohort is expanding, and we’re looking to build the team to a maximum of 12 alternative teacher or alternative educational professionals. The cohort meets monthly to investigate hands-on lessons that incorporate NOAA resources, experiential learning practices, and use them in alternative school settings. Joining the team would not only provide the opportunity to design and test lessons that support MWEE concepts in your classroom but provide the opportunity to share those findings and connect with other professionals in the area. Meetings are usually on Zoom but include an in-person visit to NESS’s Stonington campus.
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