What is Teacher Facilitation?

MWEEs require that teachers support student learning for the duration of the MWEE, both inside and outside the classroom. Teachers balance facilitation, direct instruction, and coaching roles to create a student-centered learning experience where the essential elements of the MWEE come together to support goals for learning and create opportunities for students to take active roles in the learning process. Teachers provide space for student choice and voice by creating learning experiences that center on students' values.

Classroom Connection- Meaningful Community Partnerships

Community partners are often involved in MWEEs in varying capacities. Partners can provide professional development opportunities that support teachers' content knowledge, understanding of pedagogies, and confidence to implement a MWEE independently. Partners can also lead MWEE activities or lessons at their site or the school, but teachers should remain actively engaged.

There are many community partners available to collaborate with on your MWEE. 

What is Learning Integration?

The MWEE is an educational framework that helps teachers engagingly meet their learning objectives. MWEEs are not meant to be something “extra” but rather a means of enhancing lessons for deeper student learning while meeting academic standards. To achieve this vision, MWEEs should be embedded into the school curriculum to support learning and student achievement goals. They can also provide authentic, engaging, interdisciplinary learning that crosses traditional boundaries between disciplines. 

Classroom Connections- Curriculum Anchor

The Curriculum Anchor of the MWEE identifies the connections of the MWEE to academic standards and establishes relevant, local contexts for learning. By defining the learning objectives and the driving question within the local context, the Curriculum Anchor component demonstrates the MWEE supporting practices of Learning Integration and Local Context. Usually, the Curriculum Anchor is completed by the teacher with no student involvement so the teacher can place the MWEE essential elements within their curriculum.

What Is Sustained Experience?

MWEEs rely on teachers to plan and implement a series of rich and connected learning opportunities where each essential element - from asking questions during Issue Definition through implementing Environmental Action Projects - builds upon and reinforces the others. To accomplish this, MWEEs are incorporated into a unit or multiple units, where learning happens both in and out of the classroom. This provides adequate time for students to reflect on the individual lessons and experiences and how all of the elements cohesively come together. While an individual lesson may occur in one class period or field experience, that lesson or experience should be explicitly connected to the larger learning sequence of the MWEE.

Classroom Connection- Celebrating Your Success

MWEEs take effort to establish, so it is important to both celebrate your success and create a plan to ensure it continues into the future. Building broad awareness about a MWEE may strengthen its support and, ultimately, its long-term success. This can help increase your school’s understanding of and excitement for the MWEE and 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 out 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.

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What is Local Context?

MWEEs use the local environment and community as a context for learning relevant to students’ lives. Situating the MWEE within local contexts promotes learning rooted in the unique culture, history, environment, economy, literature, and art of students’ schools, neighborhoods, or communities. To enrich MWEEs, local resources (e.g., partners, expertise, field sites) should be incorporated. Partnerships, such as those with local community-based organizations, create opportunities for students to engage with members of their community of diverse cultures, values, and expertise that can make a more equitable and inclusive experience. Emphasizing the local context enables students and teachers to develop stronger connections to and appreciation for their local environments and communities. This also allows students and teachers to explore how their individual and collective decisions affect their immediate surroundings and, in turn, affect larger ecosystems and watersheds.

Classroom Connections- Local Issues

Learn about many of the complex problems facing the Great Lakes region. Identify environmental issues that are locally relevant to your students as the base for developing your MWEE. 

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