Teacher Learning

We build teachers’ capacity to implement inquiry-driven learning about water issues impacting their students’ lives.

  • We provide teachers with immersive field-based learning experiences so they can start to see these environments as essential components of great science teaching. Teachers not only gain firsthand knowledge of socioecological phenomena, they also learn how to facilitate field-based investigations with their students.

  • Our professional learning includes structured opportunities for teachers to practice new inquiry-based teaching moves, so they can hone their technique before trying new skills with students.

  • Teachers learn how to analyze student models, writing, and discourse to leverage student thinking to build toward increasingly sophisticated science explanations.

  • We partner with teachers to develop and test all curriculum and teaching tools. We collect data, provide coaching, and assess student mastery before, during, and after each unit is complete.

Challenges we see

Providing students with inquiry-based, phenomenon driven water literacy instruction demands a lot of teachers, most of whom never received this kind of science education as students. For many, it represents an entirely new way of teaching. 

Further, water issues like flooding, coastal land loss, and subsidence are inherently complex, prompting many students to wonder about the ethical, social, and cultural dimensions of those issues. This poses challenges to traditional models of science teaching.

Our approach

We provide teachers with wraparound support for making water literacy a part of everyday, ambitious science instruction, including:

  • Field-tested, NGSS-aligned curriculum

  • Curriculum-based professional development so that teachers can deeply and flexibly engage with scientific content 

  • Successive opportunities to practice new inquiry-based teaching moves to help teachers build their pedagogical content skills 

  • Dedicated support from skilled instructional coaches and a community of like-minded educators 

  • Strategic partnerships with education researchers, artists, and other individuals outside of formal K-12 to explore new methods for engaging students in the ethical and sociopolitical dimensions of water issues impacting their lives

Our Teacher Learning Projects

Bringing elementary school teachers and students into the field

Standards-aligned water literacy courses for high school

Integrating art and science to understand rapid environmental change

Catalyzing standards-aligned science teaching through water literacy

Continue exploring our vision for water literacy education in the areas of curriculum design, field-based learning, and strategic partnerships.

Make it stand out.

  • Being part of this fellowship made me feel privileged and also seen…I felt Ripple Effect understood that it is important that teachers have this type of experiential knowledge, not just a professional development for 30 minutes.

    Catherine Driskell, Elementary Visual Arts Teacher, Ripple Effect Fellow

  • Once the students understood that this was a real-life problem, happening right now–that was powerful.

    Dr. Marcus Woods, 3rd Grade Teacher

  • I had an epiphany. RE’s process for curriculum design was extremely helpful.

    Louisiana High School Teacher, Coastal Teaching Fellowship program

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