ACLIPSE

Advancing Climate Literacy through investment in Pre-Service Educators

Provide inservice teachers, pre-service faculty and their students with opportunities to:

• Develop in-depth content knowledge of climate science and climate change, specifically focused on sea level rise, greenhouse effect, carbon cycle, and ocean acidification.
• Be able to use an NGSS-aligned, three dimensional approach to teaching.
• Develop necessary skills to work with real-time data and use data in authentic ways to foster student-led inquiry.

The materials were developed by the Lawrence Hall of Science, Rutgers University and Padilla Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, with funding from NOAA’s Environmental Literacy Grants.

The ACLIPSE university course instructional materials, and associated grades 6-12 teacher professional learning opportunities and materials, engage participants in climate science activities while using data in authentic and locally-relevant ways.

The curriculum course, and teacher professional learning opportunities use climate science as the context for teaching about and applying current teaching and learning research, as well as how to use real and near-real time data in the classroom in engaging ways to build teachers’ and their students’ data skills.

Explore the ACLIPSE session materials below.

• Session 1. Teaching and Learning Science: This introductory session of the course begins with participants sharing and discussing their ideas and prior knowledge about some of the themes around which the course was designed.
• Session 2. Learning Conversations and Ocean Currents: This session focuses on learning conversations, the purpose and value in learning and ways to support students engaging in academic discussions. Participants explore ocean currents through multiple activities that include a hands-on investigation and observing a computer animation
• Session 3. How Learning Happens and Ocean-Atmosphere Connection: This session probes into how learning happens – specifically, how learners construct an understanding of the world around them through experiences, social interactions, and making connections with their prior knowledge.
• Session 4. Introduction to Working with Climate Data: Participants first refer back to research on learning and are asked to discuss their own experiences as learners in this session. Participants consider the challenges in bringing real and near-real time data into the classroom in authentic ways, and strategies that support data use in the classroom.
• Session 5. Three-Dimensional Learning and Energy and Matter: In this session, participants examine their understanding of how the ocean and atmosphere are interconnected. They write their initial ideas, and are then presented with a puzzling weather phenomenon.
• Session 6. The Nature of Science and the Greenhouse Effect: In this session, participants gain insight into the nature and practices of science in the best way possible—by doing and reflecting on science. They take a critical look at what is and is not an accurate view of science by attempting to define it.
• Session 7. Using Evidence and Reasoning, and Tracking Carbon: The content focus of this session also reflects the progression of ever-deepening understanding of the Crosscutting Concept of Energy and Matter in both physical and life processes through a deep dive into the carbon reservoirs and flows of the carbon cycle.
• Session 8. Designing Learning Experiences and the Carbon Cycle: In this session, participants continue to explore the carbon cycle through multiple experiences and discuss how the structuring and sequencing of activities about the carbon cycle can promote deeper understanding.
• Session 9. Stability and Change in Global Atmospheric Carbon: In this session, participants gain experience with the difficult task of narrowing a topic area down to a more focused question.
• Session 10. Cause and Effect, and Ocean Acidification: This session focuses on the causes and effects of ocean acidification, the crosscutting concept of cause and effect, making and interpreting graphs, and how graphs are useful to make predictions.
• Session 11. Evidence of Sea Level Rise and Climate Change: Participants examine evidence of the effects of sea level rise on a local and global scale, and engage in an activity that explores the causes of sea level rise, allowing them to make claims as to the causes.
• Video: Acidifying Waters