Teaching Climate Change workshop part of ORAU professional development series

 

On Thursday, Oak Ridge Associated Universities’ Center for Science Education hosted the Teaching Climate Change workshop as part of their Summer Technology Professional Development series of workshops.

ORAU’s summer workshop program hosts 13 STEM-based lectures offered free to K-12 teachers.

ORAU Program Manager Meiko Thompson said the organization “sees a benefit in making sure that local educators have the opportunity to get professional development” outside of the typical school system offerings.

“One thing I know is that just because you’re a scientist doesn’t make you a good teacher,” Thompson said. “So, what I would really like for them to do is really know how to engage their students.”

Barry Golden, a professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, led Thursday’s climate change workshop along with his assistant, Ross Toedte, who retired from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and is now a graduate student at UT.

Golden said that he also hopes the workshop will help educators and that they will learn to be “a little less fearful” of teaching climate change. He said that his goal was to have some “tools at their disposal to focus on scientific data and data analysis.”

The workshop was centered entirely around the data that scientists use to study climate change. Educators worked in groups to form conclusions based on that data, then shared their conclusions with their peers in the workshop.

Tadte, who finished up the workshop with a similar presentation of his own, said that this sort of workshop was a merging of his data analysis work at ORNL and his current work as a graduate student in science education. While he doesn’t plan to teach any students of his own, he does hope that he can affect curricula in the future, as technology becomes more prevalent in education.

While the seminar was largely scientific, science teachers weren’t the only educators in attendance. Denise Sawyer, who teaches language at Anderson County’s Norris Middle School, admitted that the seminar wasn’t what she expected it would be, but she still felt she was learning useful techniques.

“As I have been listening, I’ve been starting a list of research ideas that I can start teaching them in language class,” she said. “The more knowledge I have of things like this, the better I can help them as a teacher.”

The lectures in this particular series will be held through next Tuesday, June 17. Although registration is now closed, you can learn more about the workshops here.