We all know that teachers need to use their state academic standards.  We also know that environmental education content and skills are well-represented in most state academic standards.  It's just a matter of finding the links. One way of making these links explicit is to use Excellence in Environmental Education: Guidelines for Learning (K-12) as the framework and to create a crosswalk with your state academic standards.

Aligning your state academic standards to the EE Guidelines for Learning (K-12) will help teachers and other educators design and implement a comprehensive, cohesive, standards-based environmental education curriculum. It will help educators map out the best ways of infusing environmental education throughout the school year.

Additionally, this crosswalk can be a useful first step in the development of your state Environmental Literacy Plan (NCLI). Using the EE Guidelines for Learning (K-12) as your framework, you will identify the state academic standards that support environmental education. Importantly, you will also identify the gaps! This can give you a road map for working with your state department of education.

To provide examples, the crosswalks between the K-12 EE Guidelines for Learning and the state academic standards for Oregon, Maine, and Texas. Let us know if you have created a crosswalk and we will share it here too.

See the other posts that align the K-12 Learner Guidelines with the Ocean Literacy Principles and the Climate Literacy Principles.