Giving Compass' Take:

• David Devraj Kumar and Michael Hansen report that many teachers in the United States lack the knowledge, resources, and pedagogy to teach climate change science well. 

• How can funders help teachers get the support they need to teach climate change science well?

• Learn more about the role of education in spreading understanding of climate change. 

Helping science teachers effectively teach students about climate change is one of the most important topics in science education. Science teachers, however, often report feeling ill-prepared in both content and pedagogical knowledge to teach environmental science and related topics, including climate change. Thus, many classrooms are led by teachers who do not feel equipped to provide meaningful learning experience in the topic—a situation that has been dubbed “climate confusion.”

This confusion is admittedly a bit ironic: Environmental topics inherently have real-world applications, which should provide an advantage in comparison to more abstract science fields. Paired with the right teaching toolkit, simple observation of the world outside the classroom is all that is needed to offer information-rich contexts for teaching children the underlying scientific concepts behind climate change, improving critical thinking skills, practicing informed decisionmaking, and developing environmental literacy. Climate change is a topic specifically named in the Next Generation Science Standards; however, attempts to often sensationalize environmental topics like climate change by non-scientists (who often have their own ideology) tend to hamper its successful implementation in classrooms. When this happens, the opportunity for students to learn real-world science content is lost, along with any associated benefit from cognitive or affective gains.

Most teachers are now confused on how to address climate change topics within the classroom. This confusion was even evident in teachers’ beliefs about whether global warming is natural or man-made. The deficiency is partly due to the lack of content knowledge: Allison Anderson pointed out content knowledge as one of the barriers to quality teaching about climate change.

Read the full article about teaching climate change science by David Devraj Kumar and Michael Hansen at Brookings.