CRACK! CRACK! The ice finally breaks after a series of sharp blows from a hammer. A student plunges a plastic bottle into the hole, retrieving a sample of water from the lake that sits across the street from their home. Later that morning the student arrives in class, bottle in hand, and gets started on testing their water sample for phosphorus, chloride, and other common pollutants. Soon the student is discussing their findings with their classmates and postulating not just the sources of the contaminants, but steps that could be taken to reverse them. Soon, they are creating visuals that will be posted around their neighborhood sharing their findings and suggest ways that the community surrounding the lake can help protect its health.
If you’re a teacher reading this, I hope a part of you is thinking “That sounds like an awesome thing to do with my students,” but I suspect a larger part of you is incredulously asking “What teacher has the time to do this?!?”
In my work coaching teachers his very real and relevant question has surfaced over and over again. It certainly was the biggest challenge I confronted during my decade in the classroom and in all the years I’ve spent since as an instructional coach. Regardless of where I might be, be it a sprawling urban school district or a small rural school, the biggest challenge that educators everywhere are consistently trying to tackle when it comes to the creation of high-quality, engaging project experiences for their students is the eternal four letter word; T-I-M-E.
One of the biggest potential time-sucks in project planning is locating, vetting, and integrating relevant resources required for project-based learning. While we want students to lead their own learning, in my experience, students are able to do this best when they are supported by both structures and resources procured by an informed and passionate teacher. If only there was a one-stop shop where lesson plans, multimedia resources, and knowledgeable experts could all be found in service of real-world, project-based learning!
Well, I have some good news for you. There is, and believe it or not, you’re already paying for it, just by being a tax-paying citizen!
Established well over 100 years ago, the National Park Service (NPS) has a long and storied history when it comes to educating visitors about the natural and cultural treasures that they are charged to oversee. The 400+ sites that make up our national park system include one-of-a-kind ecosystems as well as historic sites that are critical to the telling of our national narrative. Since a well informed public is essential to the continued preservation of these parks, the NPS has devoted a large amount of time and energy focused on creating educational resources.
After nearly a century of fulfilling its educational mission, the NPS has created what is now considered by some scholars to be one of the largest collections of educational resources in the country, accessible (for free) by every teacher in the nation, and all in service of PBL experiences.
If you’ve ever been to Minnesota, you know about the lakes. Lots and lots of lakes. The centrality of lakes to the culture and lives of everyday Minnesotans makes issues around water quality and water impairment especially poignant, which is why in the fall of 2021, science teacher Kathleen Babich and I decided to place them at the center of her middle school unit on hydrology.
However, developing a multi-week project focused on the impairment of lakes presented three major challenges. First, there was the issue of developing student knowledge of science concepts like the hydrological cycle and the role that “indicator species” play in measuring lake water quality. Then there were the challenges inherent in all inquiry-based work: if the students developed specific questions that Kathleen was unable to answer, it would mean hours of additional research! Finally there was the problem of finding appropriate data to compare their own testing to. Where on earth could she hope to find readily-accessible data on the water quality of lakes?
As luck would have it, Minnesota is one of thirty states home to a designated national park, and the one Minnesota hosts is essentially one gigantic lake. Nearly a third of Voyageurs National Park in the far northern part of the state is lake water, and thus, understanding lake ecology is central to the park’s educational imperative. By connecting her unit of study to this park (and others!), we were able to integrate several park-developed lesson plans into her project, saving herself an immense amount of planning time. For example, a simple keyword search revealed a collection of resources from Acadia National Park focused on how contaminants like phosphates make their way through a watershed and into lakes. Another resource provided by Wind Cave National Park illustrated parts of the water cycle such as infiltration and how groundwater interacts with lakes.
These resources are just a sample of what can be found on the National Park Service educators portal (nps.gov/teachers), a resource almost as old as the internet itself. The NPS educators portal is, as the name implies, the “portal” to all the NPS’s online educational resources, making it a logical first stop. In addition to more than 1100 lesson plans (most of which are aligned to national frameworks such as the Common Core and the NGSS) it provides a helpful index for multimedia content, professional development offerings, and the many distance learning programs offered by the parks (which we will discuss a little later).
The activities and lessons provided on this site are free to download and can help students develop the content knowledge crucial to the formation of solutions or as part of larger inquiry cycles. Many of the lessons can also be used to demonstrate how subject-area specific skills are used outside of the classroom. For example, an elementary school classroom looking for ways to bring attention to the plight of local endangered species might complete the Bison by the Numbers lesson created by Badlands National Park. This lesson, developed by park rangers who help manage the recovery of this iconic north american land mammal, explains how data visualization can be used to illustrate population fluctuation, a skill that is both aligned to elementary math standards and could be used by students to enhance their projects.
The lesson plans that Kathleen found on the NPS educator portal streamlined her planning and enriched her project, but she was still concerned about the unpredictable directions that her students’ questions might take them, and she knew she didn’t have the level of specific expertise she would need in order to guide her students’ research and keep them from either getting stuck or relying on dubious online sources. So we used the general information number provided on the Voyageurs National Park website and gave them a call, asking to speak to someone with knowledge of the park’s work monitoring the water quality of the lakes within its boundaries.
The park connected her with a ranger with expertise in the kinds of water contaminants her students were likely to find in their samples. She was also given an overview of available web resources and important of all, an email from one of the park rangers gained her access to decades of water-quality data collected by the NPS that provided an essential point of comparison for her students who were testing the quality of water from lakes and streams in their own community. Working with the NPS cut her planning time, while adding depth and authenticity to the work—not a bad deal.
Kathleen’s lake project was awesome. Students were working collaboratively to understand and solve an issue that affected nearly 60% of the lakes and streams in their state while deeply learning science concepts and content. But when she and I reflected on it afterwards, we realized we missed an opportunity to make a more direct connection between the students and the park itself. While we gathered information, resources and data from the park and presented them to the students, it would have been even more powerful to have allowed the students to do that themselves. But outside of loading the students on a bus and driving them north to the park, we didn’t see an easy way to foster this connection until we learned about the distance learning programs offered by the park’s partner organization, the Voyageurs Conservancy.
While it is estimated that every American lives within two hours of a national park, that doesn’t always mean that they are accessible to everyone. Logistics, weather, and, of course limitations due to time, make an in person visit difficult, if not impossible, for some schools and their students, but this is something that park rangers know. In recognition of the difficulty that many students, especially those from underserved communities, experience in trying to visit parks, more and more parks have made the learning resources they offer available through engaging distance learning programs that can be reserved with relative ease, especially during less busy seasons. Generally the programs are delivered by rangers live over video conferencing platforms. Some come with pre- and post- activities that integrate them into units of study or provide assessment opportunities. While many parks have diverse offerings on a number of different topics, some provide more flexible programming that allow students to ask questions or inquire about topics related to their own need to know questions.
On the surface a virtual visit to a park may seem like a poor substitute for an in-person experience and therefore not worth the planning time. If you feel that way, I encourage you to think of them as their own category of experiences rather than a “substitute” for a trip to a park that you can’t do anyway. For many students, a visit virtual or otherwise is a memorable experience. Teachers who have scheduled virtual programs for their students have remarked at how during the lead up to the program they would overhear their students discussing their, “upcoming visit to the Everglades” like they were actually boarding a plane bound for Florida.
Finding these programs isn’t always easy as the offerings can change both with the seasons and with the movement of rangers. Starting off by visiting the NPS Teachers portal that has an option for “distance learning” in the “refine search” options. If what you are looking for isn’t readily available there, you might try reaching out to the park unit that connects to your area of focus directly and see what they might offer. Smaller park units that don’t have the same resources as larger ones might provide their own programs, but only through a direct inquiry.
Sitting at the north entrance to Yellowstone National Park is a stone arch inscribed with the words, “For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People.” While there isn’t any evidence to suggest that those words were selected with project-based learning in mind, our national parks continue to prove to be an amazing resource for inquisitive students and their teachers. Hopefully, some of the ideas in this article will be of use to you as you plan your next project or learning experience so that you can help the next generation of park protectors benefit and enjoy these special places.
As for Kathleen and her students, the final products they created we put to good use. After collating their findings and researching how to prevent the accumulation of the pollutants their testing revealed, they posted their work near the lakes they drew samples from in order to help those who live close by to take a more active role in protecting their health and integrity. Simple actions like bagging lawn clippings, carefully disposing of pet waste, reducing the use of salt in the winter could help contribute to the overall health of the waters near their homes.
You can learn more about Mrs. Babich and the exemplary work of her students on the project website!
Tags:
