The Environmental Educator Knowledge and Skills: Guidelines for Excellence is a comprehensive set of recommendations about the knowledge and skills or competencies educators use to provide effective environmental education. Environmental Educator Knowledge and Skills: Guidelines for Excellence outlines the experiences and learning that will help educators foster environmental literacy, plan environmental education programs, and implement them.

The guidelines are designed for:

• faculty in preservice and in-service education programs who design and teach courses across disciplines and across the human lifespan (from early childhood to older adults)
• environmental educators—from novices to veterans—who want to grow professionally and develop their knowledge and skills
• those who offer professional development or organize professional learning communities for educators who will work in formal, nonformal, and informal educational settings
• educators who don’t necessarily have environmental education in their title, but weave it into what they do
• supervisors of those who provide environmental education administrators of environmental education certification programs

These guidelines suggest a broad vision—a goal to work toward and a guide for personal, professional, and programmatic development.

Through the National Project for Excellence in Environmental Education, the North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE) is taking the lead in establishing guidelines for the development of coherent and comprehensive environmental education materials and programs. These guidelines draw on our best thinking honed by scholars and practitioners across a variety of fields and settings, including formal and nonformal education, curriculum development, instructional design, early childhood education, and adult education.

To ensure that these Guidelines for Excellence reflect a widely shared understanding of environmental education, they were developed by a team of environmental education professionals from a variety of backgrounds and organizational affiliations. This team took on the challenge of turning ideas about environmental literacy into tangible recommendations and examples. In addition, drafts of these guidelines were circulated widely to practitioners and scholars in the field (e.g., teachers, educational administrators, environmental scientists, and curriculum developers), and their comments were incorporated into successive revisions of the document. As such, hundreds of practitioners have participated in the writing of these guidelines. To learn more and to access additional resources, visit the Guidelines for Excellence website.

Environmental Educator Knowledge and Skills: Guidelines for Excellence represents a major revision of Professional Development of Environmental Educators: Guidelines for Excellence which was first published in 2000 and most recently revised in 2019.