The MWEE's four supporting practices describe “what teachers do,” along with their partners, to ensure success. Throughout this course you will notice that these practices are inherent to each of the case studies and examples provided.
Teacher Facilitation
MWEEs require that teachers support student learning for the duration of the MWEE—both inside and outside the classroom. Teachers ensure that the essential elements ("what students do") of the MWEE come together to support academic goals for learning while creating opportunities for students to take active roles in their learning.
Partners are often involved in MWEEs in varying capacities as you'll see throughout this lesson and the MWEE case study videos. Partners can provide professional development opportunities that support teachers' content knowledge, understanding of pedagogies, and confidence to implement a MWEE independently. Partners can also lead MWEE activities or lessons at their site or in the school, but in these instances teachers should remain actively engaged. Teachers should connect these partner-led experiences to prior learning, foster critical thinking, and lead reflection after the experience so regardless of the facilitator, the entire MWEE experience feels cohesive to the students. Partners can also be important in planning and developing MWEEs, which we'll explore further in the partnerships section of this lesson.
Learning Integration
We know that classroom teachers are already incredibly busy and that's why it's important to remember that the MWEE is not something extra, but an approach to learning that helps educators meet the standards they already have to teach. MWEEs are anchored to curriculum standards and support formal goals for learning and student achievement. They provide authentic, engaging opportunities for interdisciplinary learning. Some portions of the experience, such as the outdoor field experiences, may occur off school grounds and/or be facilitated in partnership with external providers; however, the MWEE is integrated into the scope and sequence of the academic program.
Sustained Experience
MWEEs rely on teachers to plan and implement a series of rich and connected learning opportunities where each essential element—from asking questions to taking informed action—builds upon and reinforces the others. To accomplish this, MWEEs are incorporated into a unit or multiple units, where learning happens both in and out of the classroom. This provides adequate time for students to not only reflect on the individual lessons and experiences, but also on how all of the elements cohesively come together. While an individual lesson may occur in one class period or field experience, that lesson or experience should be explicitly connected to the larger learning sequence of the MWEE.
Local Context
MWEEs situate standards-based learning within the contexts of local environmental issues, problems, and phenomena. In this way, students learn disciplinary core ideas while making sense of real-world and life-relevant topics. Outdoor investigations may take place in a variety of settings including on school grounds, in the local community, or with a field-based education provider. Situating the MWEE within local contexts promotes learning that is rooted in the unique culture, history, environment, economy, literature, and art of a students’ school, neighborhood, or community.
Emphasizing the local context enables students and teachers to develop stronger connections to, and appreciation for, their local environments and communities. This also enables students and teachers to explore how their individual and collective decisions affect their immediate surroundings and in turn affect larger ecosystems and watersheds.
When brainstorming your Local Context remember, “Watershed" doesn't mean your MWEE must focus on water!
The MWEE is a project-based framework focused on improving student environmental literacy. While MWEEs can directly support watershed education by exploring issues such as water quality or land-use impacts, they can also provide rich learning around climate change, air quality, food systems, environmental justice, and many other issues that are also an important part of community, environmental, and watershed health!
You may ask why the word “watershed” is in the term MWEE at all? Put simply, watersheds can be connected to virtually every environmental issue, and since every person on Earth lives in a watershed, they are universally relatable and relevant. The intersection of the natural and social systems that make up a watershed provide an opportunity for students to use systems thinking to understand how their actions impact humans, animals, and ecosystems, how natural systems and processes within a watershed affect humans, and how civic engagement factors into the equation. Understanding these relationships requires knowledge and skills from multiple disciplines, as well as 21st century skills like active learning, critical thinking, and effective decision making.
As you continue to learn more about developing a MWEE, how to guide students through asking questions and conducting investigations and, brainstorming your own MWEE program, don't feel restricted to water issues—explore whatever environmental issues make sense for your classroom or program!