Class acts: Climate change and accelerating learning, one student at a time
Published: June 28, 2012
Here’s an unusual recipe for academic success: Take two seemingly unrelated goals—cutting the achievement gap and slowing climate change; add inspired teachers and a hefty dose of student initiative. Blend carefully. Stand back and prepare to be awed.
Following this somewhat unlikely set of instructions, the staff and students from Menlo-Atherton High School in San Mateo County’s Sequoia Union High School District have created a groundbreaking initiative that’s won both statewide and international acclaim.
“Behavior Change OR Climate Change: A Program for Students, by Students” started out small in the winter of 2009, when five Menlo-Atherton ninth-graders spent hundreds of hours developing and testing a four-session “edu-tainment infused” instructional program.
It’s designed to teach young people the basics of climate change science, inspire them to adopt greener personal habits and bridge the opportunity gap between students from the relatively affluent Menlo-Atherton neighborhood and their peers from neighboring communities with fewer advantages.
Dozens of Menlo-Atherton students have pitched in, refining the climate-change curriculum and delivering it to hundreds of students from diverse backgrounds. With financial support from the local PTA, student climate-change instructors traveled to Copenhagen to present at the prestigious “Behavior, Energy and Climate Change” conference. They were the only high school students in attendance.
The program has also won domestic honors. CSBA awarded the Menlo-Atherton curriculum a CSBA Golden Bell in 2011, and it won first prize in the statewide 2011 Climate Generation competition sponsored by the California Air Resources Board.
“I wasn’t that environmentally aware when I joined the program,” says Sara Orton, a recent graduate headed for Stanford University this fall. “I learned to teach and to lead by example.”
—Carol Brydolf