By Sue Wintering and Colleen Sexton

Introduction
In the second week of the semester it was announced to the science methods students that they were going to run an Environmental Field Day for over 250 fifth grade students during a two day period at the university’s Biology Field Station. “We’re going to do what, for how many students?” they cried, as the professor enthusiastically talked about the logistics of the day.

Sharing all of the resources available at the Biology Field Station with elementary students was a thrilling prospect. What a perfect opportunity for preservice teachers to experience planning and delivering lessons found in Project Learning Tree’s (PLT) PreK–8 Environmental Education Activity Guide. “Relax,” said their professor, “I don’t expect you all to be environmental experts, besides I have just the resource to help you pull this off without panicking too much!” Their fears were the perfect segue into introducing environmental education (EE) resources into their science methods course.
     
Preparing future elementary and secondary science teachers is not an easy task. Often the preservice elementary teachers come to a science methods course with little understanding of science content knowledge. With little experience, is it any wonder that preservice teachers often become overwhelmed at the prospect of trying to teach a science concept to a large group of students that they’ve never met, in an outdoor setting that they’re just becoming familiar with, teaching content that they’re just not quite sure about? In fact, the prospect could be daunting, even for a veteran teacher.

A PLT Workshop within a Science Methods Course
So just how can a science methods professor walk into a science methods class and make an announcement such as the one above, confident that the students will not write scathing course evaluations at the end of the term? It’s simple once you understand how nicely the guiding principles behind PLT’s PreK-8 Guide align themselves with the standards for good science teaching.

In Ohio, we work on modeling just how PLT and other EE resources can be integrated into the college science methods courses. The two of us and Dr. Ralph Martin, Ohio University in Athens, have led countless PLT workshops for both preservice and inservice teachers over the years. Together we have developed and delivered workshops to science educators from universities and colleges across the state to share with them strategies on how to integrate a PLT workshop into their methods courses.  Just how we do that is revealed through the following discussion of the outline we follow for our higher education workshops.
     
I. The PLT Mission
PLT uses the forest as a “window on the world” to increase students’ understanding of our complex environment; to stimulate critical and creative thinking; to develop the ability to make informed decisions on environmental issues; and to instill the confidence and commitment to take responsible action on behalf of the environment. 

This mission statement, while intended for K-12 students, is also true for preservice teachers.

PLT serves as a vehicle to improve preservice teacher content knowledge while they also learn the skills needed to teach that content. How many classroom teachers do you know who shy away from doing science with their students because they are unsure of the science content? If you’re looking for ways to encourage your future teachers to do science with their students, what better resource to share with them than PLT? PLT provides activities for teaching the science concepts, and also provides the background science content that future educators will need to bring their students to proper concept formation.
     
II. PLT Storylines
Effective science teaching means that the teacher will first identify the science concept before seeking activities to teach that content. Some undergraduate students (future teachers) will find an activity and then figure out a way to use it in the classroom. This strategy is contrary to good science teaching. By sharing the idea of storylines with students, we find the future teachers soon learn to first ask, “What is the concept I will teach?” and then ask, “What activities can I do?” We have found that the storylines help with:

1. Constructing an Understanding of Key Issues: Use of the storylines aids in modeling for the college students how to lead PreK-12 students through activities, which help them construct an understanding of the science concepts, rather than just telling the students what the concept was once the activity was completed. 

2. Concept Development: The storylines help to model the importance of “connectedness and continuity” for building upon both content knowledge and science process skills when planning and delivering science lessons.

3. Revealing Misconceptions: The storylines also allow us to show how to construct a science concept and how to look for any half-formed or misinformed understandings. We ask the college students to develop their own storyline and to identify PLT activities and activities from other EE resources that will fit with their storyline. We discuss their selections and their reasons for linking particular activities together under their storyline.  This gives us an opportunity to check for conceptual understanding. We ask ourselves, “Which lessons are the students linking? What relationship do they see among these lessons? Does it make ‘science sense’ to link these lessons, or are they (the future teacher) suffering from a misconception?” 

4. Modeling Constructivist Practices: In our methods courses, constructivist teaching practices are emphasized. Constructivist educators value making connections between what the student already knows and new information. The use of the storyline models how assimilation occurs—where the learner adapts new information to structures formed from prior experiences.

III. PLT Activities
The activities found in the PreK–8 Environmental Education Activity Guide, as well as those found in secondary modules, serve as a model for identifying all of the components any good teacher should think about before they teach a lesson. We share the obvious things such as objectives, materials, process skills, time considerations, and the task details which are included within each lesson with our students. Of course, your students can go to other resources to find science activities that also have these components, but the PLT activities go beyond this. They also provide:  
1. Clearly written concept statements: The concept statements listed with each activity are excellent examples of how to write a concept statement and show how they are different from an objective. 

2. An overview of the lesson: The lesson overview provides a quick—at a glance—idea about the lesson. Our students are typically in field placements where the classroom teacher gives them a topic, and without further guidance, our students are expected to develop a lesson. Our expectation is that our students will create a concept map based on the given topic, find grade level standards which are aligned with the concepts on the map, and then identify which concepts they will be teaching based on that alignment between the standard and their concept map. Once this task is completed, we have found that the students may spend hours on the web reading over lessons, which, by their title, seem to fit their identified concept, but in reality have little to do with it. The Overview in each PLT activity provides a quick way to determine whether the activity will meet their needs.

3. Background and additional readings to increase content knowledge: In our experience, we have found that novice teachers, even those at the secondary level, will question their understanding of the content. Often, their lack of content knowledge will keep them from doing science with their students. Or the teacher may read the textbook for their given grade level and think they understand all of the content, only to find themselves flustered if their students raise questions that they cannot answer. The PLT activities anticipate some of these anxieties by providing the educator with background knowledge and references that lead to additional readings about the content.

4. Activities presented within a learning cycle format: The key to effective science teaching is not just in doing science with your students, but also in making sure there is time to reflect on what they did to make the concept concrete. A teaching strategy which reflects that you value the doing and reflecting is a Learning Cycle. This is a cycle of learning designed to produce greater concept formation. We teach a Four “E” Cycle of Explore, Explain, Expand, and Evaluate. The design of the PLT activities makes it easy for the novice teacher to pick out which part of the activity they can use for each of the four phases. For example, the Assessment Opportunity in each activity can be used for the evaluation phase.

5. Activities which are consistent with principles of constructivism: Constructivism is the dominant perspective on learning in science education.  Constructivism emphasizes the active role of the learner—mentally, physically, and socially. It is a theory that assumes that knowledge cannot exist outside of the learner and that knowledge is a construction of the learner’s reality. As we often state in a PLT workshop, the lessons are designed to “teach students how to think, not what to think.” This philosophy is consistent with the principles of constructivism.  By using the PLT activities in our methods class, we can easily model how a teacher would construct an understanding of a concept, rather than just tell the students what the science was that the student learned through an activity. We also use PLT activities to model what Constructivist Teachers do. By taking our students through some PLT activities we can model how constructivist teachers:

* Use or create learning opportunities that are meaningful to students.
* Encourage students to make real decisions.
* Encourage peers to exchange views in order to refine thinking and deepen understanding.
* Advocate hands-on, minds-on learning to promote the interplay of what is already known and what new ideas will be formed
* Value prior ideas of students.
* Urge students to identify mental discrepancies linked to prior ideas, correct for proper concept formation.
  
We also use PLT activities to model constructivist teaching methods such as:

* Presenting   
* Observing
* Asking questions   
* Posing problems
* Organizing class environment  
* Assessing and documenting learning
* Helping students form mental connections among and between their ideas
* Coordinating class human relations

Conclusion
As science educators, we know that our future teachers will be responsible for planning and delivering student-centered, standards-based, science lessons. We know we only have so much time during a university semester or quarter to share all of the standards, resources, and strategies necessary to make this possible. It just makes good sense to use a resource which can effectively model many good teaching strategies and learning theories for science teaching. Project Learning Tree is that resource!

A portion of the funding required to reach and work with preservice educators in Ohio was provided by the United States Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Environmental Education through a grant to the Environmental Education Training and Partnership (EETAP). Project Learning Tree is a partner in this project.

About the Authors     
Sue Wintering is the state director for PLT and has led the charge of aligning the PLT resources to the state standards.  Colleen Sexton is associated with the Governors State University in the Chicago area.