Teaching, Learning, and Climate Change: Anticipated Impacts and Mitigation Strategies for Educators.

The impacts of climate change present numerous risks to the present and future state of teaching and learning. Natural disasters such as hurricanes, heat waves, flooding, blizzards, wildfires, sea level rise, and droughts threaten our ability to produce the learning outcomes promised to our pupils. Taking action to adapt to imminent climate-related challenges and mitigating measures that provoke and prolong ecological challenges is critical to the survival of these cultural institutions. Paradoxically, centers of teaching and learning can be seen as both victims of climate change as well as an instrumental part of the solution. Providing an efficient and effective education to the world's youth is a catalyst for the innovations that future generations of skilled professionals will use to combat climate change. Educational settings are also crucial venues for raising social awareness about anthropogenic climate change to undermine the complacency and denialism that have stagnated the global response to this crisis thus far. This paper incorporates suggestions from climate scientists and learning scientists about how to change how we teach, where we teach, and what we teach to ensure teaching enterprises survive and thrive in the face of a changing climate.

From Private Practice to Public Service: A Preliminary Investigation of the Fit LiteTM Model With At-Risk Students.

Like many Title 1 schools in the United States, the host site for this study in rural South Carolina represents a widespread literacy crisis in our public education system. In this particular school, only 20% of 3rd graders demonstrated proficient reading skills. Although extremely effective precision teaching-based literacy intervention programs have been developed in the private sector, such as the Fit Learning™ model, the extensive time and related costs of training classroom teachers in those methods prohibit struggling schools on tight budgets. As such, the current study sought to develop and test the feasibility of a truncated version of the Fit Learning™ model, dubbed Fit Lite™. Fourteen students identified by the school as "high risk" for literacy struggles were instructed in the Fit Lite™ model in their after-school program. With expert oversight and only 1 week of training, a group of 4 implementers with no prior experience using precision teaching or implementing Fit Lite™ produced promising reading improvements. Over the course of approximately 12 weeks, the 14 students improved by an average of 16 percentile points against the national average on standardized progress-monitoring tools. Details of the Fit Lite™ model, results achieved in this study, and considerations for future replications are described.