What are the challenges around doing inquiry projects in K-12 schools? Our Sky School has been working on creating professional development resources for teachers, focusing on building comfort and confidence facilitating small-group student projects, especially in schoolyard settings.

The other weekend, Rebecca Lipson (assistant director for education) and I went up to Prescott for the Arizona Association for Environmental Education (AAEE) meeting to pilot a teacher-training workshop.

We took a group of teachers and environmental educators out into local environments and explored student-centered ways to develop and test hypotheses.

We hope the teachers learned a lot and had a great time escaping a conference room for the field. On our end, we learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t, and will be developing a longer and even better version for other groups this year. We see teacher professional development as a key way to build community buy-in and to scale up our education efforts.