http://www.www.2apr.gov.bt
http://www.2apr.gov.bt/images/stories/pdf/unresolutiononhappiness.pdf
http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/sitefiles/file/Sachs%20Writing/2012/World%20Happiness%20Report.pdf
http://www.gnhusa.org

On January 10, 2012 school garden teachers along with others were fortunate enough to listen to Jaimie Cloud present at the Amy Greenwell Garden in Captain Cook. Jaimie is a visionary leader in sustainable education.  The Cloud Institute “prepares K-12 school systems and their communities to educate for a sustainable future by inspiring educators and engaging students through meaningful content and learner-centered instruction.”
 
Through discussion and exercises in sustainability participants learned valuable tactics in teaching sustainability to others.  This was a wonderful presentation enhanced by the beauty of the Amy Greenwell Garden.

It’s more than a sound bite or a fun thing to imagine. It is, in fact, a Mental Model of Sustainability. I am totally on board with the goal and still stumble sometimes putting it into action consistently. I’m struck by how hard it is to retrain my brain to shift toward that new way of thinking. Even doing this work full-time, when push comes to shove, sometimes I revert to doing things on my own; which is ironic because it’s precisely when things get hardest that it’s MOST important to bring in your crew.

Inevitably, when the moment passes, I’m left with two conclusions: a) it’s not nearly as fun as it would have been if I’d been doing it with folks along the way, and b) the product would have looked different, and maybe better. Don’t get me wrong—I love the way my mind works and the creative things it thinks of – the thing is I like the way ALL minds work and that each comes up with different responses. So I'm always left wondering, “what if….” How much more creative and win-win the product (insights and responses to the same issue) might have been with more fabulous minds working on it with me? We know that asking different questions and activating the creative process are two good strategies for shifting mental models, so I’ll pose the same questions to you that I ask myself in this situation. Think about them. See what YOU come up with!

What would it mean to our work if we took it to heart that we are all in this together—truly? In a world where we are all in this together there is no “they” only “we.” If we act on the principle of being in this together, how differently would we draw on the support and resources that we offer each other in the NJ Learns Community? What would change in the way we approach the people we want to influence—especially those we seem most UNlike or with whom we disagree the most? (Yes, THAT person.) How would this change your life, or the face of the community you live in, now and in the future?

We’re all still learning how to put this into action and there’s no single correct way to do it. Everyone’s got a good story about how this goes for them, the highs and lows. Check out the story below to get a window into the work of our Hillsborough team to see how they’re working together to build a broad foundation in their town.

In the last four years, sustainability has become a part of everyday language for more and more people. There is more mainstream information and acceptance about the causes of unsustainability, and more resources, like Sustainable Jersey, to help individuals and communities learn about behavior changes that contribute to sustainability. As a result, over the years, the number of applicants to the NJ Learns program has increased three-fold, and the quality of applicants has improved notably. Applicants are clearer in their motivation for doing this work, have diversified teams, and are more organized in their ability to take strategic action toward their visions.

The Hillsborough team is an example of that. Their five person team is comprised of two self-identified “concerned residents” (one of whom is a parent of school-aged children), a School Board Member, a business person, and a public school teacher. This mixed team is an example of how the Keystone Year seeds change on an organizational level by bringing individuals and teams from schools and communities to learn and change together for the shared goal of sustainability. They joined NJ Learns for several reasons, among them that they have strong ties with Sustainable Jersey and had heard Winnie Fatton from Sustainable Jersey talk about the transformational changes that can occur after a team experiences the NJ Learns program.

According to Bill Dondiego, the team’s vision was always about “awareness and support.” At the outset of the Keystone Year, the team had their sights set on systemic change in the town, working together to expand people’s understanding of sustainability to include an awareness that thinking, learning, and education have a role in the shift toward sustainability. Children and young people are pivotal players in this vision. As Bill put it, the “Start young, so they know and respect the Commons. If they respect the Commons, they’ll respect each other.” To that end, each team member is working from their particular place in the system to create conditions for Hillsborough residents of all ages and in all sectors of the city—government, schools, business, etc—to make the connections between sustainability and learning together.

He’s convinced that if they can increase awareness and provide support, “the whole state can move the needle forward. We get to follow in the footsteps of others who went before us and be the next in line to grow this. It’s going to take knowledge, truth, and integrity to achieve our long-term mission.”

This “we are all in this together” orientation, fundamental to EfS, shows up in the team’s actions to make connections across sectors within their town and beyond

Hillsborough’s borders, too, as evidenced by the range of actions below:

• In town, Bill is applying to be on the energy council in the hopes of creating a nexus between agencies.
• Other members of the team are participating in the Citizens’ Campaign class for Citizen Legislators to parlay EfS more effectively in the government sector.
• At the same time, the team recently organized the Central Jersey Green Teams Best Practices Conference focusing on energy, transport, and recycling, and which was attended by about 65 people from more than ten municipalities.
• They applied for, and won, a “Green Maps” grant with Montgomery, Princeton, and Lawrence to map sustainability along that corridor.
• They have taken on an informal mentorship role with NJ Learns team from Jersey City, sharing their resources with the relatively less wealthy city to the north.

The Cloud Institute Releases New Education for Sustainability (EfS)
Standards and Performance Indicators

(New York, New York) - - The Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education, a non-profit organization and leader in the field of education for sustainability is, for the first time, making their EfS Standards and Performance Indicators available for free as a download.

The 14-page package of nine EfS core standards and performance indicators were developed for PreK-12 school systems, and are designed to equip teachers and students with the new knowledge and ways of thinking needed to achieve economic prosperity and responsible citizenship while restoring the health of our living systems.

The interdisciplinary content standards replace the traditional problem-based approach to learning with pedagogy that is aspiration-based. “Moving toward an aspiration offers a broader perspective and solves more than one problem at a time, while minimizing the creation of new ones,” says Jaimie P. Cloud, founder of the Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education. “Our standards promote greater awareness and sense of efficacy in students, and support teachers with a rich and highly flexible foundational system to educate for a sustainable future.”

The Department of Education has not approved a set of national standards for education for sustainability. This means that states, districts, and individual schools have an opportunity to enhance existing frameworks and curriculum by selecting the EfS Standards and Performance Indicators that are most closely aligned to their educational vision.

As part of The Cloud Institute’s teaching and learning system, these standards draw upon the most progressive fields of study - biomimicry, neuroscience, environmental ethics, systems thinking, and others - and have been aligned to Common Core, State Standards, Character Education, Cultural Competencies and Partnership for 21st Century Skills. The content is influenced by top leadership principles including The Entrepreneurial Mindset, Systems Thinking and System Dynamics, Characteristics of Resiliency, Habits of Mind (Costa and Kallick), and the attributes of catalytic or “quiet” leadership (David Rock).

The nine Core Content Standards are: Cultural Preservation and Transformation, Responsible Local and Global Citizenship, Dynamics of Systems and Change, Sustainable Economics, Healthy Commons, Natural Laws and Ecological Principles, Inventing and Affecting The Future, Multiple Perspectives and Sense Of Place.

According to Dr. Moira Wilkinson, The Cloud Institute’s Senior Director of Education and Research, “Any one of The Cloud Institute’s EfS Standards on their own, offer a valuable contribution to education. The nine core content standards that we promote, and the indicators that accompany them, are woven together to produce catalytic results. This collection is both comprehensive and rigorous, based on relevant and carefully selected fields of thought, and designed to integrate smoothly into existing programs.”

To learn more about the Cloud Institute’s EfS Standards and Performance Indicators and to download your free copy, visit http://www.cloudinstitute.org/cloud-efs-standards

A.  Since 1987, Jaimie Cloud has been collecting and organizing opinions about the core competencies associated with being sustain-able on planet Earth.  Drawing from the literature and the work of selected scholars across a wide range of disciplines as well as her own experience educating for sustainability, The Cloud Institute’s EfS Standards and Performance Indicators have been developed, organized, tested, revised, and used to define the field and to design 21st century curriculum and systemic change, domestically and globally.  Our EfS Standards and Performance Indicators are informed by comprehensive research, drawing on publications and perspectives from the leading voices in the field of Education for Sustainability and complementary areas of study such as  Agenda 21 Chapter 36, the U.S. Task Force on Education for Sustainability, Robert Costanza, Herman Daly, Sabine O’Hara, Hazel Henderson, Fritjof Copra, Anne Perraca Bijur, Jack Byrne, Keith Wheeler, Jaimie Cloud, Karl Henrik Robert, Paul Mankiewicz, Julie Mankiewicz, Paul Ryan, Harland Cleveland, Edward DeBono, Buckminster Fuller, Garrett Harding, David Sobel, Paul Hawken, David Orr, Jean Perras, Peter Senge, Willard Kniep, Franziska Oswald, Lees Stuntz, Linda Booth Sweeney, Jonathan Rowe, Elinor Ostrom, Betty Sue Flowers, Wade Davis, Stephen Sterling, and Daniella Tilbury.

Q. Who is using them, how do they use them, and what difference are they making?

A. All Cloud Institute partners and clients, including districts, schools, and individuals, use our EfS Standards and Performance Indicators.  Now they are available to everyone.  Here is how we use them:  Once people gain a shared understanding of the meaning of sustainability and the attributes of Education for Sustainability, develop a personal rationale for why they should educate for sustainability, and become inspired and hopeful about contributing to sustainability through education, we introduce them to our Standards and Indicators so that educators and administrators may become familiar with, and align them to, their curriculum across grade levels and disciplines.  Then they all produce an integrated EfS curriculum map so everyone can access the big picture. No one teacher, grade level, discipline, course or unit does it all (though the richer the courses the more they can do). This is a collective effort. 

When alignment has been done, educators who are “early adopters” decide where to begin. They choose which unit they want to innovate and they choose the EfS Standard(s) and Performance Indicators that are appropriate for their students to address. They then embed the standards and indicators in their curriculum through a backwards design process. Understanding By Design (Wiggins) is a popular structure for this work.  With professional development and coaching from the Cloud Institute, they embed our EfS Standards and Indicators into their unit overviews, their assessments, their performance criteria and their lessons.  Over time, they look for evidence of them in student work.

Once the educators are ready to share their designs and exemplary student work samples, they “make the feedback visible, desirable, and doable,” and that inspires the next cohort of innovators, and so on.  In districts and schools that are ready and have administrative and organizational support, the time horizon for EfS to be the norm in curriculum and instruction is approximately 3-5 years.  Evidence shows that, over time, when districts and schools commit to EfS, they see concrete improvement in student learning and standards achievement, enhanced attitudes toward learning and students’ feelings of academic success.  Further, teachers report meaningful effects on their own attitudes and say that EfS helps both new and veteran teachers to achieve strong academic outcomes from their students.

Q. What Standards and Principles have these EfS Standards and Indicators been aligned to?

A. The Cloud Institute’s Standards and Indicators have been aligned to Common Core, State Standards, Character Education, Partnership for 21st Century Skills, Cultural Competency, The Virtues, The Entrepreneurial Mindset, Systems Thinking and System Dynamics, Characteristics of Resiliency, Habits of Mind (Art Costa, Bena Kallick), and the attributes of catalytic or “quiet” leadership (David Rock).

CLICK HERE TO REVIEW & DOWNLOAD OUR EFS STANDARDS & INDICATORS

The grant of $17,000 a year for the next three years, entitled “New Jersey Schools Learn,” was provided by the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation to the Cloud Institute, which then picked Cranford and two other school districts in New Jersey to pass the funding on to last spring. It will be used for professional development, curriculum development, and support resources through the team.

The Education for Sustainability program, which is run through the Cloud Institute, was pushed for by Cranford Environmental Commission member Mary Catherine Sudiak and the district’s Science Supervisor Lisa Hayeck, both of whom were trained by the Cloud Institute to facilitate the program.

We thought the video was worth sharing, and will hopefully spark a conversation.  What do you think about the Impossible Hamster?

“My knowledge was fairly good of…Sustainability…so I did have some basis, but in terms of EfS and some of the Systems Thinking portions, I didn’t have the formal knowledge. NJ Learns provided that, connected things I already knew, and allowed me to go deeper. It was inspiring – I think we all felt hugely invigorated – and it sparked a lot of curiosity and excitement.”   - NJ Learns Level 2 Participant

This space is reserved for stories from you, by you, about things you’re doing.  This time, we’re using the space to share the biggest take-aways from the evaluation.  You’re still the authors this time around, just that your collective voice is coming through the report.

By Moira Wilkinson

“Can we take a group picture?  I feel really connected to these people and would love to see a picture of us on our homepage to remind me of our time together.” ~ NJ Learns Keystone Year participant

Thursday, May 26th marked the beginning of the fourth cohort of NJ Learns and it was just about noon on Friday May 27th that one of the participants said this to me.  As a social scientist, I’m always studying group dynamics.  As an educator, I’m always studying how people learn.  His comment was confirmation to me that I wasn’t the only one noticing that something big was happening.