Consider: What are the core elements (policies, standards, efforts, etc.) that guide the way you approach teaching environmental literacy?

Implementing a Meaningful Watershed Educational Experience (MWEE) helps meet Michigan's Academic Standards across grade bands and subject areas. MWEE's can offer an opportunity for cross-curricular learning and engagement. 

Your school district may also have an environmental literacy plan that lays the foundation for district-wide implementation and integration of environmental literacy programming, including MWEEs, into the curriculum.

Consider: What issue(s) are particularly relevant to your community and school? 

There are many ways to generate ideas for planning a MWEE, ranging from an inspiring learning objective that lends itself to field-based learning to a compelling local environmental issue. MWEEs are not meant to be something “extra” but rather a means of enhancing lessons for deeper student learning while meeting academic standards. You may want to start by exploring and gathering information on local environmental issues and/or reviewing your curriculum for lessons that address environmental issues. 

To organize your ideas, start with the MWEE Think Cloud planning tool. This tool can help you with initial brainstorming about program ideas, collaborators, and resources and can be used to facilitate planning conversations with partners and team members.

Visit the Issues Definition webpage to explore more!

Your entire MWEE will be framed around a driving question. The driving question is the “big picture” question that sparks curiosity and organizes student inquiry and investigations. It engages students in learning about, investigating, and taking action to address an environmental issue.

As you work towards developing the driving question for your MWEE and as you help guide your students to developing supporting questions, take a moment to pause and think about whether the driving question or issue could lead to realistic and relevant action. Use the Developing Driving Questions planning document to create effective driving questions. 

Consider: What curriculum resources are available for information on the issue you identified and to meet your academic and learning standards? 

The Environmental Literacy Model (ELM) Curriculum Anchor component identifies connections of the MWEE to academic standards and establishes relevant, local contexts for learning. The ELM can guide you through the Issue Definition and Investigation process. Usually, the Curriculum Anchor is completed by the teacher with no student involvement so the teacher can place the ELM within their curriculum.

Explore the Curriculum Anchor webpage to find resources to support Meaningful Watershed Educational Experiences in your learning space and community. 

Consider: How do outdoor field experiences help to answer or look more deeply at the driving question/supporting questions?

Outdoor Field Experiences can take place on school grounds or at locations close to schools, such as streams or local parks. They can also take place at off-site locations such as county or state parks and nature centers.  A range of partners can help facilitate field experiences. Teachers and partners should ensure an accessible outdoor learning environment for all participants, including students with a range of physical, cognitive, emotional, and social abilities. Use the Incorporating Outdoor Field Experiences planning tool to identify sites that could support your MWEE.

Check out the Outdoor Field Experiences webpage for 10 tips and tricks for taking students outdoors and for additional classroom connections. 

Consider: As an educator, it’s important that you list the criteria that you know to be a limiting factor for your action project. However, at the same time, you still want to support youth voice in the project selection process. What can you do to ensure that the students and your criteria are recognized in the process? 

Once an action project has been identified, students engage in the process of planning how to make their vision a reality. Encourage students to practice claim evidence reasoning to turn their issue investigations into action. This section outlines logistics: setting timelines, assigning roles, sourcing supplies, and maintaining clear communication to ensure smooth project implementation.

Because the MWEE is student-led, these tasks should not fall onto the shoulders of the educator; instead, the educator should provide the students agency in taking them on and supporting them through the process. One way to ensure that all students feel empowered and find meaning in the action project is by harnessing student talents and interests. Support students as they develop their plans using the Environmental Action Planning Worksheets. Pull out the worksheets that make sense for your project, or use them all! The worksheets are designed for students or a class to work through each page as they plan, implement, and maintain their action project.

Visit the Environmental Action Projects page for action project ideas and support!

Consider: How can you celebrate student success? 

Now that your MWEE environmental action project is complete, celebrate your success! Celebrating student success can help increase your school’s understanding of and excitement for the MWEE and to build toward or reinforce a school culture that embraces environmental education. It is also important to recognize community partners who lend support through resources, money, or time teaching and supporting students. A news blast can be sent to your school or PTA newsletter, website, or social media accounts. 

Students can deliver powerful testimonials about their MWEE during a student showcase or school board meetings. The community surrounding a school is generally interested in learning more about school initiatives, especially because many of the community members have family who are attending, will attend, or have attended the school.

Visit the Synthesis and Conclusions webpage for more ideas!

The NOAA Bay Watershed Education and Training (B-WET) program is an environmental education program that promotes locally relevant, authentic experiential learning focused on K-12 audiences. Regional B-WET programs, like the Great Lakes B-WET, provide support and respond to local education and environmental priorities in collaboration with Great Lakes Restoration Initiative partners.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce. NOAA has a mission to understand and predict changes in climate, weather, ocean, and coasts, to share that knowledge and information with others, and to conserve and manage coastal and marine ecosystems and resources, which is accomplished through service, stewardship, and science. 

The Meaningful Watershed Educational Experience (MWEE) is a learner-centered framework that focuses on investigations into local environmental issues and leads to informed action. MWEEs are made up of multiple components that include learning both outdoors and in the classroom. MWEEs are designed to increase environmental literacy by actively engaging students in building knowledge and meaning through hands-on experiences.

A form of open collaboration in which individuals or organizations participate voluntarily in the scientific process in various ways, including enabling the formulation of research questions; creating and refining project design; conducting scientific experiments; collecting and analyzing data; interpreting the results of data; developing technologies and applications; making discoveries; and solving problems. 

Environmental literacy includes: 1) the knowledge and understanding of a wide range of environmental concepts, problems, and issues; 2) a set of cognitive and affective dispositions; 3) a set of cognitive skills and abilities; and 4) the appropriate behavioral strategies to apply such knowledge and understanding in order to make sound and effective decisions in a range of environmental contexts.

Educational opportunities for participants to connect with local ecosystems and provides tools that can help them understand how individual behavior impacts the environment. These activities, including stewardship, encourage people to take an active role in managing and protecting these resources.

The responsible use and protection of the natural environment through conservation and sustainable practices to enhance ecosystem resilience and human well-being.

Experiential education programs engage learners in constructing meaning by immersing them in direct and meaningful hands-on experiences. This approach incorporates learning using real-world problems and interaction with natural phenomena.

The traditions, culture, and belief systems of people whose ancestors inhabited a place or country before people from another culture or ethnic background arrived on the scene.

A set of lifelong learning activities that are delivered or facilitated by an educator, meet clearly defined learning objectives, and are provided outside the established formal education system. Participants engage in these activities with the aim of enhancing their own knowledge, skills, and competencies from a personal, civic, social, and/or career-related perspective.

This method of instruction encourages participants to use the schoolyard, community, public lands, and other special places as resources, turning communities into classrooms.

A method under which participants learn and develop through active participation in thoughtfully organized service that is conducted in and meets the needs of a community; is coordinated with an elementary school, secondary school, institution of higher education, or community service program, and with the community; helps foster civic responsibility; and is integrated into and enhances the academic curriculum of the students, or the educational components of the community service program in which the participants are enrolled; and provides structured time for the students or participants to reflect on the service experience.

The activities, behaviors, decisions, and technologies carried out by stewards—individuals, groups, or networks of actors. Those executed collectively by groups or communities are used to manage common-trust resources. The actors involved largely depends on the scale and complexity of the issue.

A cumulative body of knowledge, practice and belief evolving by adaptive processes and handed down through generations by cultural transmission, about the relationship of living beings (including humans) with one another and with their environment.