WORKSHOPS
Breakout Session 1 - 10:30 - 11:30am
School Recycling & Organics Collection - Mary Most, DSNY
Learn why, what, and how to recycle at your school from Sanitation Department experts. Presentation and Q&A include effective recycling setup, organics collection, free resources for schools, curriculum and activities for students, and how to win huge cash prizes in the Golden Apple Awards.
Sustaining Sustainability: Lessons learned from a proposed High School concentration - Julia Chillemi-Kouyomdijan, High School Teacher
The first 15 minutes of the session will provide a brief history of the Sustainability program at New Rochelle HS and discuss the three main lessons learned in the process. The next 25 minutes will be dedicated to workshop time whereby participants may work individually or in teams to brainstorm new or revised programming for their respective schools. A printed guide that mirrors the main points of the presentation will be distributed and Julia will provide support as needed. The final 10 minutes will be allocated for volunteers to share their ideas and for final questions to be answered.
Sustainability Built into our Schools - Richard Eiden, NYC School Consturction Authority
During this workshop you will learn about sustainable construction practices which saves energy; and how the design of the school building actually enhances the learning process by keeping everyone comfortable and protected. The presentation will briefly explain the process of schoolhouse construction which includes various green and sustainable design features. The highlighted features are usually not noticed by the students and teachers but are none-the-less important. You will enjoy this glimpse into how your school building works.
Green STEM: Taking Learning Outdoors - Emily Fano, National Wildlife Federation (CLOSED)
Green STEM blends traditional STEM with environment-based education and emphasizes project-based learning and real world problem-solving. Research and experience has shown that environment-based - and specifically outdoor - education improves students’ motivation to learn and enhances academic achievement in all subjects. Join NYC Eco-Schools to discover how teachers are using Green STEM to make learning fun and empowering students to become agents of positive change in their communities.
Cycles and Interdependence: Do You Know Your Stuff? - Aimee Arandia-Ostensen, Children's Enviromental Literacy Foundation (CELF)
Where does it come from? Where does it go? This interactive workshop will combine core concepts of sustainability and complex systems with curriculum design and fundamentals of educating for sustainability. We will use games and group activities to engage participants in expand their thinking about what sustainability means in real life.
Breakout Session 2 - 11:30am - 12:30pm
Solar One Green Design Lab - Sarah Pidegon, Solar One
Solar One will train teachers on energy related activities pulled from the Green Design Lab (K-8) and CleanTech (9-12) curriculum which uses the school building as a teaching tool to explore sustainability and energy efficiency. Teachers will receive lessons plans for each activity covered during the training. Activities may include taking a tour of the school boiler room, conducting an energy audit of the building, and reading an electric meter. Discussions will focus on how to engage the school community in efforts to save energy.
Recycling Champions Best Practices - Kate Winsatt & Jackie Junttonen, GrowNYC (CLOSED)
“Best Practices” will highlight what’s working for K-12 recycling programs in all five boroughs, including: effective recycling set-ups; starting and engaging a Student Leadership Green Team; incorporating recycling into curriculum; and establishing and maintaining communication between adult stakeholders for continued success. This workshop provides an outline for how to implement a successful school wide recycling program. Several hands on activities will demonstrate that recycling education can go beyond sorting games and is relevant to many areas of the curriculum.
The History and Ecology of NYC's historic reservoirs - Matt Malina, NYC H20
NYC H2O offers tours of the historic reservoirs located in city parks in all five boroughs. This presentation will demonstrate how these field trips engage students in STEM, history, and ecology, as well as providing them with much needed physical activity.
A Classroom & Schoolyard Farming Program - Tina Wong, Urban Farm Educator
The main topic will be about sharing the success story of P.S.208's classroom hydroponic farm program, but participants will be able see the value of how this type of integrated study enhances motivation, improves problem-solving skills, develops deeper understanding, and helps students make connections across subject areas and the world itself. Learning about where food comes from not only teaches children to eat better and live healthier lives; it also gives them the tools needed to make smarter decisions. Session participants will be given the roadmap on how to create such a program at their own schools; that this can be done in a small or large scale, depending on budget. Time will also be focused on discussing challenges they may face and possible solutions will be proposed.
Leading Culture Shifts at Our Schools - Maya Camou, M3D Consulting LLC
Looking to lead and implement sustainability in your Schools. This workshop that will help you get on the path to being the “Innovation Agent” that your organization needs. The workshop will have a presentation that will introduce the subject matter and will be followed by a collaborative working group that will help participants find solutions and strategies for ideas that need resolutions.
Breakout Session 3 - 2:00pm - 3:00pm
Project ECS@ESC: Encouraging Connections through STEM at the Environmental Study Center- Jacqueline Pilati, Department of Education
Through a 2014 National Leadership Grant by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, school librarians and science teachers are teaming up together to create a digital depository of instructional materials and e-content that connects STEM instruction. Utilizing programs taught through the New York City Department of Education’s Environmental Study Center (ESC) students and teachers in PREK-12 have access to this rich content in their classrooms and school libraries. Hear how this collaboration utilizes non-fiction texts and e-content as a vehicle to support science instruction and find out how you can begin to develop your own resources within your school/district. Each unit of study is aligned to Common Core Learning Standards and infuses information literacy skills as a springboard to enhance and support classroom science instruction. Session attendees will participate in a portion of Project ECS@ESC’s unit of study “Eat or Be Eaten” by completing an owl pellet dissection coupled with supporting texts and e-content vetted by participants of this grant to support the prey/predator unit of study.
Sustainability and Diet: Green to the Max! - Amie Hamlin, Coalition for Healthy School Food
Learn about the cow (and chicken, and fish) in the room: the often unspoken connection between what we eat and the impact on the environment. Animal agriculture is a leading cause of global warming, resource usage, and pollution relative to plant-based agriculture. The same diet that is healthier for the planet is also healthier for people, too. Find out some surprising reasons why. Then learn about various menu choices for your school, how you can access them, and how you can support the move to a healthier menu through education.
NYC Water for the Future - Robin Sanchez, NYC Department of Education
The Department of Environmental Protection's NYC Water for the Future Workshop will present information on the value of NYC's water resources and the importance of water conservation in classrooms and school communities. The workshop will focus on NYC's drinking water supply and wastewater treatment systems, and will include a presentation, hands-on activities, and sample takeaway lessons. Learn how you can encourage water conservation and sustainability in your classroom and school community!
Envisiong the future of NYC: Using Visionmaker NYC to teach environmental concepts in classrooms - Dave Johnston & Anine Booth, Wildlife Conservation Society
In this BYOD (bring your own device) workshop, learn how the Wildlife Conservation Society's Visionmaker NYC platform allows students to explore NYC's historic and contemporary ecology. Participants can begin to design their own personal vision for the future of NYC and can see how the decisions that they make affect various environmental performance indicators. Explicit connections will be drawn to CCSS, NGSS, and NYS content standards for middle school and high school subjects. Participants are encouraged, but not required, to bring a laptop to this presentation.
Reuse in the Classroom with Materials for the Arts - Omar Olivera, Materials for the Arts
Participants will learn how to include and advocate creative reuse in the Public Schools through Project-Based Learning activities linked to the Common Core standards in Science, Math, and English. Materials for the Arts makes art supplies available to the public in NYC by transforming our city’s leftover materials into art supplies. Discover how classrooms can be empowered when they are inspired to creatively rethink the boxes, bottles, hangers and other available materials around them.
The Cafeteria Ranger Program Overview - changing Cafeteria Culture through hands-on service learning and creative engagement - Debby Lee Cohen & Rhonda Keyser, Cafeteria Culture (CLOSED)
Since 2012, Cafeteria Culture’s unique “ARTS+ACTION Cafeteria Waste Reduction” program has been taught as a demonstration project to over 4,000 K-8th graders from 14 NYC schools, located primarily in low income communities of color. We teach the "why" before the "how,” then empower students with hands-on leadership roles as Cafeteria Rangers, who oversee all recycling, composting and sorting at the end of each lunch period. The parallel program component is an interdisciplinary "Make Change Messaging" curriculum. Students become the schools’ change-makers, designing arts-based advocacy campaigns to engage communities on the links between garbage, environmental justice, and climate change. These student led campaigns heighten community awareness and interest on the typically unappealing topic of NYC garbage.
This workshop will be an introduction to implementing the Cafeteria Ranger program with a primary focus on the elementary and middle school program. The workshop will also include a brief overview of the Make Change Messaging curriculum, which includes student designed engagement campaigns to ensure community wide buy-in for the success of the cafeteria sorting program.