Building teachers’ self-efficacy in teaching about climate change through educative curriculum and professional development

Abstract

Professional development is vital to help teachers gain skills and knowledge to teach about current environmental and societal issues. For climate change education, educators may need information paired with content-specific teaching strategies in order to build confidence to incorporate the topic into their curriculum. We applied educative curriculum guidelines as well as efficacy strategies in the development of a secondary instructional resource. The objectives of the study were to understand and assess the changes in teacher efficacy regarding climate change through an innovative professional development model. The results provide evidence that, while generally climate change could be a challenging topic to educators to choose to teach about, professional development which specifically addresses self-efficacy and pedagogical content knowledge, provides many benefits for teachers, especially for those who do not have previous experience with teaching about climate change.

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded by the Pine Integrated Network: Education, Mitigation, and Adaptation project (PINEMAP), a Coordinated Agricultural Project funded by the USDA Institute of Food and Agriculture, Award #2011-68002-30185, and the School of Forest Resources and Conservation at University of Florida.