Utah Project for Excellence in EE Update

The Utah Project for Excellence in Environmental Education is going strong and headed toward completion. Jason and I just got back from Brigham City where we met with K-12 teachers from the Northern and Northeastern regions of Utah. The week before that we were down in Cedar City meeting with teachers in the Southern and Southeastern regions and before that we held a meeting with teachers in the Central region, here, at the USEE office.

The point of these meetings was to talk with teachers directly and get some of their feedback on what their needs are for teaching and using EE in the classroom as well as to get them thinking about ways these needs could be met. We received a lot of excellent feed back! The next step is to analyze this information and make a plan for involving all EE stakeholders to get EE into the school system.

Some background on the Project:

The first part of this project was to conduct a survey to uncover the capacity for EE in the state. This was done in two steps. The first step was a mass, blanket email sent to everyone on our lists to fill out a quick survey. This survey was basically used to list every EE organization participants could think of. For the second step, USEE contacted these organizations directly and asked them to fill out a more detailed survey that contained organization and program specific questions.

The second part was to conduct a Teacher Needs Assessment to find out who is using EE, where, why, or why not, etc. This step was very exciting as we had over 1,000 teachers complete the survey.

The third part was to hold several regional focus groups to talk directly with teachers. (Which we just completed on Friday.) Through this step we were able to brainstorm ways in which teachers thought that EE could be implemented into Utah classrooms more than it is now.

Two reports have been written. The first outlines the results of the organizational surveys. The second report outlines the results from the Teacher Needs Assessment. To learn more about this project and it's future or to view and download these reports, please visit the USEE website.