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A prairie of possibility

Professional development class inspires new twist on soil studies

By Amie Johansen | amie@charlescitypress.com

Last week a handful of Charles City teachers ranging from elementary to high school attended an EII — Environmental Issues Initiative. EII is a collaborative class designed to help teachers broaden their lessons on environmental issues.

“This is a professional development for teachers,” Barb Ehlers, Director of Environmental Issues, said. “It’s to teach them how to teach environmental issues.”

The program began last Wednesday and concluded Friday. It was held at the Sleep Inn and Suites in Charles City. This year’s EII class focused on soils.

“The middle school and high school teachers that were there, our biggest take away we created a curriculum for sixth through 12th grade for doing a prairie at the new middle school grounds,” Rob Pittman, high school social studies teacher said.

“We don’t know a lot about it yet, but our end goal — since we talked about soil — is to lay the groundwork (to put in a prairie),” Phoebe Pittman, middle school science teacher said. “The kids are going to have to do some soil testing and determine what kind of soil is on site, they are going to need to understand what would be a good site for a prairie out at the high school-middle school. Location will affect what kind of plants they choose.”

Being able to develop a new lesson plan is part of the purpose of the EII class.

“I love EII because I always come back to the classroom with labs and information that I can give directly to my kids,” Phoebe Pittman said. “I come back with a full unit plan.”

In order to develop a full unit plan, EII is broken into four sections.

Rob Pittman explained the first section is to discuss societal motivators. The second section is devoted to developing the information through experiments. The third step challenges teachers to challenge their students with the question “why?”

“It’s where you examine the issue,” Rob Pittman said. “You’ve heard that we want to have good essential questions… basically why is soil important?”

The fourth section encourages a response to the newly learned materials.

“Then you take action,” Rob Pittman said. “Which is our idea of building a prairie.”

Building a prairie is a large project and will require work from more than one class.

“It’s not only cross-curricular but across grade levels,” Phoebe Pittman said. She explained EII classes are presented in a way that teachers from all grade levels are able to benefit.

With a single campus, expanding the prairie project across grade levels will be more easily accomplished.

“Ideally in the perfect world it would involve multiple grade levels, in a way that the students can take ownership,” Phoebe Pittman said.

EII is funded by Resource Enhancement and Protection and Conservation Education Program. REAP CEP serves a diverse audience with education programs for teachers ranging kindergarten through twelfth grade.

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