Participants discuss and identify what coordination is needed across DR K–12 efforts to enable sustained collective impact on the issues presented by climate, global, and environmental change.
DR K–12 projects have been funded to conduct (1) activities and develop materials that are beneficial to the STEM education community (teachers and students) and (2) education research to ensure continuous improvement of these activities and materials. These efforts often have a limited reach and duration. However, understanding the causes, effects, risks, and responses to global change by teachers, students, and citizens is a major challenge of the 21st century and beyond, and requires a sustained effort with greater coordination and leveraging of materials and expertise.
The collective impact model described by Kania and Kramer (2011, Collective Impact, Stanford Social Innovation Review, 9(1), 36-41, http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/collective_impact) has provided a framework for discussions over the past couple of years to gather input from the community on how we can effectively increase our collective impact. Successful collective impact requires five elements: a common agenda, shared system of measures, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communication, and a backbone support organization to coordinate the effort.
In this session, the presenters and attendees review a Google document (http://tinyurl.com/mgwndtr) that has evolved based on input from six previous meetings (listed at the bottom of the Google document) and discuss specifically what a backbone support organization can do to coordinate, leverage, and support individual efforts to extend and sustain reach. Input from this session will be integrated into the Google document, which will be used to identify and put in place elements to increase the projects’ collective impact on climate and global change education.