Center Offers Climate-Math Course

ORONO – The University of Maine and the Challenger Learning Center of Bangor have launched a professional development program designed to help the state’s middle and high school educators learn how to use climate change as a novel way to teach math, science, geography and even social studies.

“C’s to Shining C: Connecting Climate to Curriculum” is a three- year program aimed chiefly at improving student achievement levels at schools that now are performing below federal and state standards for math and science.

Organizers also believe the program can be of great benefit to high-performing schools whose teachers may want to learn more about climate science from UM’s experts in the field so they can better teach it to their students.

“The Earth’s climate system is ideal for this,” says project leader Annette Brickley, the professional development director for the Challenger Learning Center. “It’s a hook for both the kids and the teachers because it’s current and real and it does a nice job of bridging the different fields of science.”

The $175,000 program, funded by the federal government through the state Department of Education, initially will involve 24 to 30 middle and high school teachers from the Bangor and Hermon school systems, Old Town School District, SAD 22 (Hampden, Winterport, Newburgh), as well as the United Technologies Center in Bangor.

Beginning in August, teachers will attend monthly workshops at the Challenger Learning Center to learn good science teaching practices while broadening their understanding of such fundamental concepts of the climate system as density, pressure and energy. The workshops will also focus on the unifying themes of national and state standards, which include systems, models, scale, constancy and change.

Next year, those teachers will bring in other teachers from their schools to integrate a deeper understanding of climate change across a curriculum that could include mathematics, geography, social sciences and history. The regional consortium of teachers will spend the third year implementing the classroom lessons, evaluating how well they work and fine-tuning them as necessary.

The program is a continuation of the successful, NASA-supported weeklong summer workshops, “Understanding Climate Change,” that were begun by Brickley and Deirdre Byrne, a researcher in ocean current and climate variability in UM’s School of Marine Sciences who is the university’s lead coordinator for this new project.

The other UM faculty members participating in the “C’s to Shining C” program are marine scientists Fei Chai and Lee Karp-Boss as well as Molly Schauffler, a research assistant professor with the Climate Change Institute.

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