Excellence in

Environmental Education —

Guidelines for Learning (K-12)

Self Assessment Tool

Excellence in Environmental Education - Guidelines for Learning (K-12) describes what learners should know and be able to do when they have successfully completed a comprehensive, multidisciplinary environmental education program. Many of us know we do not yet have such a program for our students, but would like to know how we are doing and how far we have come. In other words, we want to assess the program elements we currently deliver, see the degree to which they provide a comprehensive set of learning experiences, and determine where the gaps are.

The following checklists were developed to enable educators to self-assess their environmental education programs. School administrators, classroom teachers, and environmental educators in other settings may use them to find out whether they are providing learners with the entire array of K-12 educational experiences that will enable them to become environmentally literate.

We do not expect any one program to fully address all of the guidelines. For example, a nature center that provides school programs may find that their programs concentrate on developing student knowledge and skills in only one or two strands. A school district may use this tool to determine the guidelines that are entirely addressed through their classroom curricula and those that are best delivered in collaboration with community-based institutions.

We hope that you will use these checklists to identify the areas you feel you are fully addressing and then will ask yourself:

Are there other places or educators that provide these learners with appropriate educational opportunities in the strands that we do not, and if not, should we or other partners in our community take on those challenges to enable all learners to get a more complete environmental education?

As noted at the beginning of each of the checklists, reading the entire entry for a guideline in the volume entitled Excellence in Environmental Education - Guidelines for Learning (K-12) will give you a deeper understanding of the concepts and skills learners are expected to develop and some specific examples of ways in which learner achievement might be demonstrated. We believe you will want to use that document and these checklists together, referring back and forth from one to the other.

Grades K-4