Environment, Literacy, and the Common Core

by editor | Sep 7, 2025 | Critical Thinking, Environmental Literacy, Experiential Learning, Learning Theory, Sustainability

Environment, Literacy, and the Common Core

by Nancy Skerritt and Margaret Tudor, Ph.D.

ABSTRACT: This article describes how Common Core ELA standards provide an important opportunity to build background knowledge on environmental topics in preparation for a deeper study of those topics through science performance tasks guided by the Next Generation Science Standards Disciplinary Core Ideas (DCI’s).
GRADE LEVEL: K-8

The Common Core ELA standards demand a level of rigor that will challenge many students. Unlike previous curriculum reforms that were content specific, the Common Core expectations involve the integration of skills across content areas including social studies, science and language arts. Students must apply reading, writing, research, and speaking and listening to content provided through articles, speeches and videos. The new performance tasks that are a key component of Smarter Balanced assessment system require research skills, note-taking abilities, and the difficult challenge of synthesizing ideas into well-written essays or speeches that explain or advocate.

In order to engage students in these rigorous expectations, teachers must find rich content for the students to explore. Environmental issues provide relevant topics and complex problems that invite analysis and research. Students can practice and apply the ELA expectations using topics related to our environment. Resources supporting environmental issues are readily available on line in the form of articles, videos, and speeches. In addition, students can gather relevant data through outdoor learning experiences, a unique benefit to this content area. Teachers can structure rich and relevant investigations that mirror performance tasks on the new assessments, using the environment as a context for learning.

Designing a Performance Task

Let’s visit a grade three elementary classroom where the children have been studying the life cycle of the salmon including how to preserve and protect water quality and quantity so that salmon can continue to survive. After visiting a local fish hatchery, the students illustrate the life stages of salmon, monitor their own water consumption, and create a rule that they can enact at school to preserve and protect water. In addition, they visit a local creek to view the salmon first hand, appreciating their beauty and endurance. How might the Common Core ELA standards support the learning in this unit? What might students research, what issue might they weigh in on, and what product might they create—an essay or a speech?

The new performance assessments are designed to measure proficiency in reading, writing, research and speaking and listening. The students are given a scenario that is grounded in a real world context. Then they acquire knowledge of the topic or issue by reading pre- selected articles and watching chosen videos. The students are expected to take notes on the information provided, keeping in mind the task that they are given in the scenario.

Here’s how this might play out in our elementary classroom. The students are provided with this scenario:

You have been asked to explain why salmon need clean water to survive. You will read an article and watch a video that provides you with information about the needs of salmon for their survival. You will take notes on the articles and the video, writing an informational essay explaining why salmon need clean water to survive.

Students read the article provided, preferably on the computer since all of the new assessments will be delivered using technology. Students will work in an entirely online environment so must learn how to navigate websites, read material on a computer screen, and compose their essays using a keyboard. For our hypothetical Salmon task, reading and viewing material might include the following:

Article #1: Short piece explaining the salmon’s need for clean water. Video #1: Showing pollution in our waters and its effects on salmon.

Scoring Performance Tasks: Research Skills and Writing Rubrics

All performance tasks include research questions that require the students to draw information from the multiple sources in preparation for writing an essay or speech. These questions are measuring specific research skills.

The research skills include the following:

The ability to locate information
The ability to select the best information including distinguishing relevant from irrelevant information and facts from opinions.
The ability to provide sufficient evidence to support opinions expressed

Rubrics are provided for each of the three skills and are used for scoring student responses.

Here are some example research questions that link to our salmon task:

According to the video, what are two important steps we can take to preserve and protect our salmon? Use details from the video to support your answer. (Locating Information)

Which source, the video or the article, best helps you understand the needs of salmon? Use details from both sources to support your answer. (Selecting the best information)

Based on the reading and the video, what do you think is the one most important thing we could do to protect our salmon? Use details from both sources to support your answer. (Using sufficient evidence)

Students write their responses to the research questions using the notes that they have taken while reading the article or viewing the video. They submit their answers for scoring and on a second day, proceed to part two of the assessment.
Part two involves writing an essay or outlining and delivering a speech. The Common Core ELA requires that students be skilled in their ability to write in three different modes: informative/explanatory, opinion/argumentative, and narrative.

Students must also be able to outline and deliver a speech on a given topic. In our elementary grades salmon task example, students might be given the following prompt:

You have been asked to write an informational essay where you share what salmon need to survive. Use information from both the article and the video to support your ideas.

To demonstrate the CC ELA writing standards, students must use information from the various sources, clearly summarizing their information with text-based evidence.

Background knowledge is not a factor when scoring these essays. Students must cite text-based evidence to support their ideas, not prior knowledge from other sources. Essays are scored using a five trait rubric. Close reading of text is paramount in the ELA CC standards.

Scenario-Based Problems

Performance tasks require students to engage with a scenario-based problem, research information presented in various media, extract key ideas from the information, answer research questions, and compose an essay or speech that presents their original opinions and ideas supported by text based evidence. Task developers follow a specific template when creating performance assessments. The template includes identifying a plausible scenario, locating appropriate source material, designing research questions and structuring an essay or speech that synthesizes information from the research.

Selecting the content for these tasks is critical for the content must be relevant and problem based. Students practice and apply career and college ready skills including critical thinking and analysis. Topics connected to the environment provide real-world scenarios that can capture the interests of our students.

Here are some examples of Environment focused Performance Tasks that the Pacific Education Institute has developed for K-12 teachers to assign to their students:

Healthy Waters: How do water treatment plants work and why are they important?
SOS: Saving Our Sound: What can we do to improve the health of the Puget Sound?
Stormwater Engineering: How do engineers solve problems linked to storm water runoff?
Earth Day: What is the history behind the environmental movement and how has this movement influenced legislation today?
Ocean Acidification: What can we do to ensure the survival of our shellfish?

Field Experiences and Performance Tasks

Field experiences, an important component of environmental education, can be part of a performance assessments, either embedded in the assessment itself or as a follow up activity. Students can enhance their knowledge acquired through text-based research with knowledge gained in a systematic way through direct experience. Scenarios may be developed that incorporate outdoor learning experiences where students reinforce their understanding of the topic provided through direct observation and data gathering. In our salmon example, students could be prompted to take pictures on their field experiences to the fish hatchery and to the local stream, providing visual images of the salmon to support their text-based evidence. These photos can serve as primary source material when students compose their essays or outline their speeches.

Much has been written and created regarding sustainability issues. Teachers can select a topic appropriate to their grade level curriculum and locality, compose a scenario that is directly relevant to the student, and identify source material for student engagement. They can also incorporate outdoor learning experiences that enhance understanding, promote enthusiasm for the environment, and add to their knowledge base. By designing performance tasks using the environment as the context for learning, students work with relevant information, learn about the challenges we face, and form opinions at a young age that will guide their future thinking and civic involvement.

Democracies, for their survival, demand an informed electorate. Environmental issues may be the most critical issues our children will face. We can accomplish two important goals by linking performance assessments to sustainability education. One goal is to teach and practice the ELA skills that the students will need to be career and college ready. The second and equally important goal is the ability to form reasoned judgments about environmental issues. By connecting the Common Core ELA standards to the environment, students benefit on two fronts: Acquiring both environmental literacy and literacy in English Language Arts.

Our children face crucial decisions regarding a sustainable future. Their knowledge base, critical thinking skills, and ability to effectively communicate are keys to informed decision-making. We must educate our children to effectively read, write, research, speak and listen. They need to think critically and creatively in order to solve the complex problems we face.
Let’s make content choices for our curriculum that are meaningful today and into the future. Nothing is more relevant, engaging, and crucial than issues related to preserving and protecting our environment.

Nancy Skerritt is an educational consultant after 22 years as a classroom teacher in the Tahoma School District in Washington.

Margaret Tudor is the founder and director of Pacific Education Institute.

Jim Martin: Is Science Communication?

by editor | Mar 26, 2015 | Questioning strategies

Is Science Communication? Can students, moving around and talking, do science?

by Jim Martin
CLEARING Associate Editor

You’re trying to answer a question. Student work groups have designed their own investigations to understand the question, develop inquiries to investigate what they have found and thought about, then present their findings to the other work groups in a symposium. There are many processes going on here. Let’s look at a few as they engage them to see what emerges in addition to discovering and testing possible answers to the original question.

Start small. In groups, you help students learn to communicate effectively. How to say, “Here’s what I think, and why;” and to listen and respond when other group members do the same. This is very basic to developing effective work groups. You have them keep notes on these conversations, and use them to elicit concepts, plan work, etc. (Basic, but essential. They need to know why they think what they do, and make what they think and why clear to others. And to learn to be advised or informed by others in their group.)

When your groups are communicating effectively, you observe for outcomes of their collaborative discussions. Do they understand their data, its patterns, its shape in graphs, etc. Are they showing signs of being able to relate data patterns to their question: Is it answered? What is the convincing evidence? What if the evidence doesn’t support their guesses about the answer to question? Or, does their question itself come into question? Are they becoming less mechanical and more purposeful in their work?

Further questions can move the groups along the learning curve by developing their critical thinking capacities: Are their interpretations of data supported by evidence? How confident are they of their data? Can they explain or justify data interpretations they have made, and their validity? What do their interpretations say about possible next steps?

You can continue to build on this conceptual foundation, each step easier because the foundation is becoming broad and more stable. You have them assess the design of their investigation and interpretations of data: How certain are they that they got the right data and used the best techniques of data acquisition? How certain are they that their data do, in fact, tell them what they need to know? Has their knowledge and expertise increased during this process? How much do they really know? Questions like these will tend to focus their thoughts on how they are learning and doing. Metacognition. Students who know how to learn know how to learn. Communication within effective work groups helps generate this capacity.

When they are ready, you have the groups report in a symposium. This is where their communication skills will be called upon to build conceptual understandings. How familiar are they with their evidence and its interpretation? How well do they comprehend other groups’ data and interpretations? How well do they generalize what they’ve learned and developed about collaborative communication within their work groups? Do they move it outward to carry on effective discussion with all of the work groups in the class? When an entire class develops the capacity to engage in substantive conversation about what they are learning, they’ll learn and nail down more than you could ever teach them using the publishers’ prepared materials and recommendations in the Teachers’ Editions.

Learning about science, but not doing science, does not develop the capacities described here. By only collecting and reporting data, students don’t engage the critical thinking capacities of their brain. I’ve observed science classes in which students looked up the boiling point of a liquid, say water, boiled the liquid and noted that it did boil at that temperature. What do they communicate amongst themselves? Is communication actually involved here? Or, are they simply engaging a perfunctory ritual? Might they have learned more if they had heated 3 or 4 liquids, noted their boiling points (or figured out how they’d know the boiling points, then test that), then looked up boiling points and made a guess about what their liquids were?)

Nor do they develop their capacity for conceptual learning when they simply learn about science, and commit science facts to memory. When students do engage in self-directed inquiries, examine the relevance of their collected data, critique it and the process of collecting it, and formulate interpretations they agree upon, they become involved and invested in the work, and empowered as persons. Engaging life. Engaged students are learning students. What our schools need today.

There’s not a lot of information out there on how to engage this part of teaching. There should be. This kind of work supports critical thinking, so it is of value. Critical thinking uses a part of the cortex that is especially well-organized for conceptual learning. That’s the prefrontal cortex, where relevant information from associative memories throughout the brain are brought together in working memory to nail down this new learning, then send it back out to associative memory; not as a fact to memorize for a test then forget, but as something more akin to common sense – something integrated into associative memory that you ‘just know.’

This critical thinking system turns on when you ask a question that is meaningful to you, and seek an answer to it. Science inquiry is a perfect complement and extension of this cortical learning system. In contrast, learning simply to prepare for a test won’t, of itself, entrain critical thinking. Instead, because of its aversive nature, learning content in order to answer test questions is accompanied by some level of anxiety, and entrains the limbic system, which isn’t good at engaging critical thinking. At least in this context, learning facilitated by anxiety about passing a test.

As the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) continue to influence teachers’ and students’ experience in school, they present some level of anxiety to many, whether from an unfamiliar expectation for performance, change from structured, curriculum-directed teaching and learning to a more open-ended, active learning model, or from increased paperwork and accounting with no accommodating increase in free time for such work. Anxiety is processed through the limbic system, which impacts how the brain learns; which of its resources are freed for the task. As student and teacher stress levels increase, it becomes increasingly difficult to engage critical thinking. Instead, the limbic system, busy processing anxiety, increasingly limits communication with the prefrontal cortex, where critical thinking does its work. Instead, learning is limited to simple thoughts, which remain connected solely to the need to pass questions on a test, with little or no integration into associative memory, as occurs in critical thinking.

On the other hand, when students and teachers are free to explore new learnings (which the CCSS and NGSS seem to be interested in), to ask questions and seek answers to them, the limbic system supports this work with a heightened sense of pleasure and excitement, and feelings of well-being and inquisitiveness. And by assuring the doors to the prefrontal cortex are open.The different limbic involvements in learning are entrained by the properties of the learning environment. As they were when our brain evolved in the savannah during the Pleistocene. Might we use that history to revisit how we teach? How we organize student-student interactions while they learn? In the classroom and on-site in the natural world? In these cases, the limbic supports the work of the cortex, especially the prefrontal cortex, where working memory resides, and the brain’s conscious executive functions do their work. Work in which goals direct effort, reasoning and abstract thought are supported, and critical thinking takes place. Where we actively construct knowledge and commit it to long-term associative memory; ask questions, design investigations, develop needs-to-know which drive us into the information we seek, desire to complete and communicate our work.

When we are driven only by anxiety about not being able to answer questions on tests, this wonderful part of our brain is lost to us. The limbic system limits its use, and we simply memorize disconnected bits of information long enough to use them on a test, then forget. Are we teaching for fight or flight, or for higher-order critical thinking?

Used knowledgably, communication as practiced in doing science has the capacity to produce a foundation for critical thinking. By the information it generates, the testing of the information, and its processing and communication, it involves and invests students in critical thinking; in using their prefrontal cortex, its executive and working memory functions. The key feature is that the students, not the teacher, are involved in constructing knowledge. The teacher, while responsible for producing an environment where a constructivist approach to learning will probably happen, becomes a facilitator of their work. A difficult transition for many of us to make. I went into it willingly, but once committed, sorely missed lecturing and wowing students with the wondrous things I could show them in the lab. In spite of this, when I would pull out my old lesson plans, it would be immediately clear to me that this constructivist model was much, much more effective and empowering. And I eventually discovered this was because it used those sites and connections in the brain which were organized to engage conceptual learning. Something my pre-service and graduate education in teaching never addressed. It should have. Had it, and we learned as our brain is organized to learn, we just might have learned well.

Communication, when it is substantive, has the capacity to facilitate critical thinking. It does this by requiring us to consider what we are saying and doing, which is a readily useable road to the prefrontal cortex and working memory. Sort of like working in a shared workspace, a place with all the resources and facilities you need to focus on what you are learning, and the executive capacity to follow up on what you have learned.

This is a regular feature by CLEARING “master teacher” Jim Martin that explores how environmental educators can help classroom teachers get away from the pressure to teach to the standardized tests,and how teachers can gain the confidence to go into the world outside of their classrooms for a substantial piece of their curricula. See the other installments here, or search Categories for “Jim Martin.”