What Teachers Want to Know About Teaching Climate Change

Inspire the next generation to create a sustainable and hopeful future

Climate change is one of the greatest threats humanity has ever faced. The most recent 10 years have been the hottest on record, and the results have been increasingly extreme storms, flooding, and fires around the world. Understanding the causes of climate change and potential solutions is essential learning for students, and is aligned with NGSS standards. A recent report by the North American Association for Environmental Education Research indicates that 74 percent of U.S. teachers and 80 percent of administrators agree that climate change will have an overwhelming impact on students’ futures. But according to the same survey of more than 1000 teachers, only 42% say they even mention climate change in the classroom.

In an effort to support teachers, Corwin conducted a market survey sent to more than 135,000 educators and school leaders in North America, asking about their concerns regarding teaching climate change. The top three issues reported were concern that the content was not related to their subject (65%), a worry that children were too young or vulnerable for such an upsetting topic (20%), and lack of confidence in their ability to understand and teach the science behind climate change (17%).

In response to these concerns, authors Bertha Vazquez, Kimi Waite, and Lauren Madden wrote What Teachers Want to Know About Teaching Climate Change to provide research-based and classroom-tested guidance for K-12 educators to teach climate change accurately, effectively, and confidently. The book gives busy teachers the tools they need to incorporate climate change education across disciplines and align the content with existing standards without adding a new topic for overworked teachers to tackle.

Offering a practical roadmap for teachers to integrate climate change lessons into their existing curriculum, this book

•  Includes crowd-sourced tips for reducing our carbon footprint and inspiring success stories from teachers who have effectively taught climate change in their classrooms
• Focuses on overcoming additional obstacles to teaching climate change, such as lack of data literacy and potential partisan pushback
• Debunks the 10 most common misconceptions about climate change and encourages critical thinking skills to help students identify misinformation
• Fosters hope in students by acknowledging their personal agency and encouraging collective and meaningful action that builds community
• Provides bibliographies of free curriculum, lessons, and other content for teaching climate change across various age groups and disciplines

This book is an essential resource for educators and leaders inside and outside of the science classroom who want to help their students build a better tomorrow.

Bertha Vazquez is a retired science teacher who taught middle school for 34 years in Miami-Dade County Public Schools. She is the education director at The Center for Inquiry, an international nonprofit organization that promotes reason and science. She runs a teacher-led network of more than 100 teachers who have presented more than 400 professional development sessions for their fellow teachers in all 50 U.S. states. Her multi-faceted approach to teaching climate science has been featured in the New York Times, NPR, Earth magazine, and in a book and film series by Lynne Cherry titled, Empowering Young Voices for the Planet. Her efforts awarded her the 2008 National Environmental Education Charles C Bartlett Award, among others. She is the editor and contributing author of the book, On Teaching Evolution, published in 2021. She has also worked on several translation projects, including the translation of Maria Jinich’s book into English, A Brief History of Four Billion Years of Evolution: Understanding Darwin. She is a regular speaker at skeptical and humanist conferences, and is a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

Kimi Waite is an Assistant Professor of Child and Family Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. A former elementary school teacher in South Los Angeles and a STEM curriculum specialist in Compton, she has received both national and state recognition for her leadership in environmental education, social studies, and climate change education. She is an early career fellow with the UCLA Center for Diverse Leadership in Science; the 2021 California Council for the Social Studies Outstanding Elementary Social Studies Teacher of the Year; a 2021 Public Voices Fellow on the Climate Crisis with the OpEd Project and the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication; and a 2019 Environmental Education 30 Under 30, awarded by the North American Association for Environmental Education. Since 2019, she has been a steering committee member for California’s statewide climate change initiative, the Environmental and Climate Change Literacy Projects (ECCLPS). Her work has been published by outlets such as PBS, The Boston Globe, Grist, Ms. Magazine, The Progressive Magazine, The Journal of Curriculum & Pedagogy, and more.