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When was the last time you were in a school classroom? Some of us may conjure images of our most recent in-service training or the college lecture hall we once occupied for a semester. For many of us though, schools and teachers are a distant memory or a point of dinner conversation with our children. However, the structured learning environment of the classroom is where much of our fundamental knowledge was gained and many of our basic views were shaped. Through schools and teachers, information reaches our society in one of the most accepted and positively reinforced venues.
Education of the public on the natural role of fire and the prevention of unwanted wildland fires is becoming increasingly important as communities encroach on wildland areas. Arson and debris burning are the leading causes of escaped wildland fires in intermix areas. Education is the key to prevention of these types of fires. It is also key to a better public understanding of the benefits of prescribed and natural fire.
Why Reach Schools?
Reaching teachers means reaching students. Students are still in the process of developing their knowledge and belief structure, and contacting them through the school system is a good opportunity to communicate with them and their parents. Another benefit of reaching out to school audiences with your fire ecology message is that it allows you to tailor your message to a uniform audience. Such focus in content and approach can result in more effective communication and potential shifts in attitude and behavior. In addition, developing relationships with communities and schools improves the public image of the agency or organization you represent.
Teachers are a direct conduit to students. They are the information facilitators
with whom our children spend a great deal of their structured learning time.
Working with teachers will enable you to access their expertise in child behavior
and development as well as their knowledge of curriculum needs and requirements.
With the aid of teachers, your message can be shaped into an age appropriate
and contextually grounded part of the students' experience.
Professional educators have a wealth of information that can assist in the development of your school program. They can also guide you to more adequately address the needs of schools and teachers, which will result in much wider success for your program efforts. Also, teachers are ultimately the best source of advertising for your program once it is implemented. Teachers in schools around the country are under immense pressure to meet education standards for curriculum development. Teachers are charged with meeting increasing requirements within the limited time frame of the academic year. For the most part, teachers are seeking innovative ways in which to access information relevant to their curriculum guidelines. Sharing wildland fire managers' expertise and professional knowledge within a classroom allows teachers to connect their students with information that is not always readily available to them. Building relationships of mutual respect among teachers and wildland management professionals benefits the professional development of the educators and enhances their ability to most effectively teach students.
One of the most time-consuming tasks in the education process is putting vast amounts of information into an understandable and appropriate format for instruction. Lesson plans and subject units are carefully constructed by every teacher. Teachers will benefit from your efforts to present your fire ecology message in a manner that addresses their needs and is readily adaptable to their framework. Students, too, have much to gain from your message. An effective school program will reinforce the materials students have encountered in their studies and provide a tangible experience with "real life" people and issues. Contact with professionals from outside the traditional school environment lends a certain credibility to academic concepts and allows students to make connections within their growing knowledge base. It also benefits students by exposing them to a diversity of teaching influences and styles.
Reaching out to teachers and students with information on wildland fire and fire ecology concepts can be a daunting task. Teachers, students, and you, the manager/scientist/communicator, all stand to benefit greatly from the development and implementation of a school program; however, this requires significant planning and a unique understanding of the needs and expectations of all parties involved. Among other things, communicators are looking for effective transmission and understanding of their messages. Teachers are looking for a quality learning experience that meets standardized criteria and is relatively free of logistical hassles. Students, too, have expectations that are directly related to their developmental age and prior experience with the topic and nontraditional educators. As you embark on this often lengthy process, remember the three elements–students, teachers, and the communicator–that are involved. Keep your goals balanced with those of teachers and students.
Making Contacts
There are three main steps to developing and implementing a school program. First, you must contact schools and gather input from educators. Then you will be able to work with teachers to develop appropriate materials to be infused into the existing curriculum. Finally, you will be ready to market your product and begin programming.
When you begin reaching out to a school or district with your ideas for wildland fire education, it is helpful to research your agency's history of involvement with educational outreach and the reputation schools may associate with your program. Building on bridges already constructed can be a great way to jump-start your project and may enable more open communication with schools and communities. Talking with other communicators about program development strategies and ideas is another important starting point. Park rangers, media specialists, public affairs officers, interpreters, or other members of your field may have important tips on working with schools in your area. Check with local park districts to see what has been done and what is being done in related areas of conservation/environmental education outreach to schools.
While gathering this general information, it is most important to establish contacts with a target school or district. You may use personal contacts if you are familiar with a school in your area. Contacting a science teacher is a logical first step in gaining access to a school; however, you will soon realize the benefit of navigating the bureaucratic chain of command within the schools. In this planning process, always include the school principal and any other administrators who work with curricular issues. In some areas, this includes parents, subject coordinators, or other teachers and schools from the same district. Forming a team to address program development can be an effective way to invite participation with your project. Whether you limit your sources to the principal and a teacher or two, or you call an open meeting for all interested parties, you will want to distribute a letter of introduction outlining your background and proposals. Be sure to include both personal and agency information and the goals of the project you are interested in developing.
Working with a stakeholder group of interested parties can be a valuable and transformative experience. The program almost always benefits from the meeting of minds that can occur in a collaborative atmosphere. Again, no matter how many people you include or whether you are able to even meet in person, the process of giving a voice to all parties interested in your programming will help to ensure your program's success. If planning field trips to your site are what you had in mind, it could be worthwhile, for instance, to know in the early stages of program development that schedules only permit three hours away from school during the day. Your partners can meet (electronically or otherwise) a couple of times to check in on the program's development or work can be shared among the stakeholders to tap into various skills within the group. The nature of the partnership can grow from the interest level and time commitments of those involved.
Once you have made initial contacts within the school system, you are ready to garner advice on program development. Utilize your contacts to determine the school programming needs. At this point you may be thinking of accessing students by visiting classrooms once or several times during the course of a school year. Maybe you are interested in sponsoring a field trip and then providing supplemental wildland fire activities for teachers to conduct with their classes. Another option you may consider is developing materials for teachers to incorporate directly into their classrooms.
Often, teachers receive only a packet of information with which they are expected to create a comprehensive lesson or unit of study for their students. Your efforts should make the next step– connect teachers and students with wildland fire materials and ensure that they are readily implemented and accessed to their fullest potential.
Developing the curriculum (the complete set of activities, materials, and background information for your school program) is the next step. However this process relies heavily on gathering information and advice from a variety of sources. You may want to contact the State Board of Education to get copies of the education standards publications for your state. Schools and teachers are required to organize their curriculum around the achievement of these goals. Most states' guidelines are similar to the National Education Standards; however, it is often the state standards (and sometimes local district or even school level standards) that directly guide the curriculum development. These documents will outline to a greater or lesser extent which concepts are expected to be covered at each grade level from kindergarten through high school. Eventually, your wildland fire message may be organized into a series of programs to meet the standards of several grade levels–emphasizing different aspects of wildland fire with each grade. Therefore, knowing which standards your program meets will help teachers place it in their lesson plans; it is also a great marketing advantage. Several environmental and fire education materials are already organized to meet some of the goals outlined by existing wildland education guidelines.
The education standards are typically organized by academic subject, so reviewing the science publication may be most appropriate. However, do not limit your programming aims to the subject of science. Often, programs can meet requirements in several subjects with just a little ingenuity. Increasing the interdisciplinary appeal of your program by meeting requirements in English, mathematics, or social studies as well as science will make it more marketable to teachers working in groups or teaching multiple subjects. Schools in which students move between classes often find it difficult to accommodate a program that disrupts the schedule. Marketing the multi/interdisciplinary aspects of your program can overcome such barriers.
Translating your message to fit into standardized education guidelines is not a difficult process. You will find, in fact, that wildland fire concepts fall neatly into the generalized language of the education standards. However, as mentioned previously, the standards are often written for each grade level and compliance is mandatory. Your program development, too, should follow these guidelines. Avoid designing a universal set of materials and attempting to adapt it to various grade levels. The differences in physical, mental, and emotional maturity, and in vocabulary level between a primary student and a middle school student are vast, to say the least. Your presentation and/or materials are your chance to tell your story to a relatively homogeneous audience. Choose a grade level (or a cluster of grades) and develop a program specifically for that age range. Then, when utilizing your materials, teachers will identify which age range addresses the needs of their students.
For the most effective message, use any information you can find on child development. Students have world views that are often different from those of adults. Therefore, you must have unique content, methods, and expectations for younger audiences. This is true for all school groups, but not the same for each group. Development in children implies an ongoing process. Preschool and primary grade students are more egocentric. Animate and inanimate objects merge, and time and sequence concepts are difficult to comprehend (Tevyaw and Reilly, 1991). In programming for this audience, the focus must therefore be on the experience. Alternative perspectives are hard for these students to grasp, and relating your story to that which is already familiar to your audience is fundamental.
Students in secondary classrooms (nine- to twelve-year-olds) have a much greater ability to understand intangible concepts, but still benefit greatly from constructing meaning through interaction with physical objects or social activity. That is, demonstration is much more effective than narration. Adolescent audiences are unique as well. An excellent resource for programming for each of the above age groups is the National Park Service's "Programming for School Groups: An Interpreter's Guide" (Tevyaw and Reilly, 1991).
Generally, for most school groups, some basic guidelines for environmental education do exist. Anytime your message can be tied to students' life experiences and place in time, the program is more successful. Students should be able to interact with the resource as well. If your agency has easily accessible land under a fire management program, field trips that bring the students to the resource are an option. Field trips often require a bit more logistical navigation – permission slips, transportation costs, extended time away from classes – but a well designed and marketed program can draw teachers and administrators past these barriers. Another environmental education guideline for the classroom or the field is making the learning experience multisensory. Hands-on, minds-on learning through activities that draw on all senses and a variety of learning styles will be more effective for more students.
When planning to visit a classroom or to meet with students directly, keep in mind another useful concept in environmental programming: creating a sense of companionship rather than direct instruction. Sharing in an exploration and guiding discovery can be much more rewarding, especially when working with students who have few disciplinary problems.
Once you have an idea of the content of your program, it is important to develop
pre- and post-visit activities – those sequential activities that can be
administered by wildland fire personnel or teachers. Insuring that students
are prepared for your message allows you to make the most of your time with
the class. Providing activities and plans for study prior to your visit (pre-visit
or advance organizers) will allow teachers not only to ready their students
for concepts you will present, but it will give teachers a framework, or lesson
plan, in which to place your program contextually. This step is important whether
or not you are actually visiting the class.
All activities convey messages more effectively if placed in a context and processed by the learner. Preparatory activities can be as simple as a vocabulary list or detailed experiments and projects for students to complete. (See Discovery Pictures Study Guide in this Guide.)
Follow-up activities allow students time to process or apply their knowledge as well as to complete the lesson or unit for the teacher. These can include writing assignments (multi/interdisciplinary appeal) for individual processing or group projects or other opportunities for evaluation.
There are numerous sources for age-appropriate activities to include in your program or to offer as pre- or post-visit material. Activities can range from the discussion oriented, with few materials, to craft and creativity focused, involving many supplies and equipment. By researching the sources available, you can develop programs that blend more costly supply-laden activities with easy activities requiring little preparation. Because classroom budgets vary from school to school, be sure to include a variety of activities in your information for teachers.
Materials appropriate to the audience you are targeting and the localized ecosystems you are discussing may already be developed. A variety of fire education activities and resources are included in the resources section of this guide. These resources are a starting point and will lead you to other useful materials.
A final piece to your curriculum development is the opportunity for evaluation. Allowing a formal mode of response to your program will give teachers the opportunity to continue input in your programming. A brief questionnaire with room for suggestions will affirm the teachers' roles in your outreach efforts as well as give an opportunity for feedback. Be sure to provide the evaluation form to teachers with the initial packet of materials, and prior to your contact with the students (with pre- and post-activities or materials) if you are visiting the school. This will improve the teachers' abilities to thoughtfully reflect on your program. Some educational resources offer sample forms for you to adapt to your curriculum, but often the most useful evaluations are ones that you create based on questions you have and decisions you need to make. Don't be afraid to put some thought into the evaluation forms for your program. They are a valuable source of program development information. You may want feedback, either formally or informally, from students as well. Be sure to work with teachers on the wildland fire program evaluation. Often they appreciate the assurance that the evaluative information will be used only for your own program development.
Once you have one or more educational programs or activities developed with the input of your school contacts, your are ready to market the results of your wildland fire efforts. Creating a situation in which teachers seek your program materials for their classrooms takes a bit of proactive outreach on your part. County or local government can provide you with the names of school districts in your region. Marketing your program can be modeled after the media kits described (see "The Role of Media Packets in Public Information and Education" in this guide). Including several one-page fact sheets for teachers in a packet mailed to the school principal will allow easy dissemination of the basic information to many teachers with one mailing. Be sure to include detailed contact information with directions for leaving a message for you – teachers often have little time near a telephone during the day.
Improving the efficiency of your marketing strategy will allow you to spend more time on programming. Some things to consider: target schools and districts in which your program fits the established curriculum goals or develop the multi/interdisciplinary aspects of your programs to broaden their appeal. In other words, once your programs are ready for presentation, begin working with the schools that will most easily adopt your program. After you begin distributing your materials and/or visiting classrooms, constant program improvement based on the feedback you receive from evaluation material will be important to maintaining school relationships and creating new ones.
Mailing literature on your program in the form of a newsletter or a brochure is the fastest way to get the word out. As mentioned earlier, teachers will spread the word among other schools and classrooms. Other strategies for broadening your program base include presenting or displaying information at academic conferences teachers attend. Just as with other professions, teachers can be reached by advertising in professional journals as well. Your early contacts can help you determine appropriate avenues of this nature for the educators you are trying to reach.
Inviting local press coverage of your early program efforts will help reach other teachers and parents as well. Contact the local public affairs officer in your agency to have a press release distributed. Remember to consider the needs of the teachers and students involved – it may be most appropriate to invite press coverage of your "behind the scenes" efforts and your general message rather than intruding on the classroom experience itself.
You may offer to present a teacher's workshop or in-service at individual schools whose faculty show particular interest in your message. Giving teachers an idea of what to expect in your programming and the messages you will bring to their students will enable them to more easily incorporate a program into their lesson plans. It also will help them help you during your programming, either by assisting in activities or relating your activities to their classroom experiences.
If you are visiting the classrooms to present your message personally, there is no need to walk teachers through the activities you have compiled for presentation. However, the workshop could be an appropriate place at which to offer some of your pre-visit materials in order to generate a sense of cooperation and enthusiasm. If you are supplying a packet of materials for teachers to implement on their own, the workshop is the time to teach the teachers how to use the materials you are sharing. In this case, conducting the activities with the teachers can allow an opportunity for teachers to thoroughly understand the wildland fire message and the value of its place in their curriculum. Contact administrators as well as teachers in order to identify and prevent roadblocks to your effort. Schools should see wildland fire program development as a collaborative effort to broaden their students' experience and benefit the curricular goals in place.
At this point, you have worked with teachers, communicators, content specialists, and administrators to develop your wildland fire program, and you have advertised it to schools and teachers. Implementing and personalizing your programs require significant attention to detail. Whether you are distributing a wildland fire packet or preparing to visit a classroom, logistical matters involving time and budget constraints, and administrative requirements must be considered. Each school operates uniquely and will require personalized attention. Your peace of mind and the quality of the program experience will be vastly improved by addressing these issues with each class that expresses interest in your message and materials.
When a teacher makes contact with you about your wildland fire materials, get to know his or her expectations and needs, as well as the class profile. If you will be visiting the classroom to conduct activities with the students, determine whether there are any students with special needs who require specific accommodation. Ask the teacher about supervision and chaperones during your program. On a field trip, one adult for every ten students is a minimum. When visiting a classroom, ensure that the teacher will be present during your program. No one wants your message to be disrupted because of disciplinary problems. If you will need any audiovisual equipment, or even if your are bringing your own, communicate this with the teacher as well. Find out if there are any time or spatial constraints for the class – you do not want students to leave for lunch halfway through your visit.
Understanding the class's profile, or readiness to learn, is also beneficial.
If time allows, this can be ascertained via mail with a stamped, self-addressed
simple questionnaire included in your pre-and post-program materials. Knowing
the students' current understanding of fire and prevention, as well as what
has already been covered in class, will allow you to supplement rather than
duplicate the learning experience. Ask about the particular class curriculum
objectives that your material or presentation can meet.
If you are conducting an in-class presentation or field trip, you are embarking on a personalized communication experience. Practice beforehand and have all of your props and visual aids organized and at hand. While interacting with students, an important aspect to your program is the creation of a sense of companionship rather than direct instruction. This is a special event for the class as well as for you. Seeing it as a shared adventure exploring new concepts can build on the students' anticipation and sense of excitement.
The following are some selected examples of the wide variety of curriculum materials available for wildland fire programming. These resources can be used as inspiration for creating your own activities and programs, particularly when they focus on an ecosystem different from your own; or when the activities are more general or oriented toward your region, they can be included as modules in your program. Remember when drawing from these and other educational resources that individual activities do little to affect student learning. Your successful fire program will consist of an integrated series of learning experiences that can be embedded in the teachers' existing curricula across academic subjects. Each of these sources is listed with a contact, ordering information, and a brief description of its contents. Also included is a sample activity representative of each publication.
Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry. 1996. "FIRE! A Teacher's Guide to Fire Ecology in the Southeastern United States." Adapted from Yellowstone National Park, "Getting to Know Wildland Fire."
National Wildfire Coordinating Group. 1996. "Wildfire Prevention, Conducting School Programs Guide."
Smith, J., N. McMurray, L. Thomas, and J. Walsh. 2000. The Fireworks Educational Trunk: Hands-on learning about fire ecology. Restoration Ecology (in press).
Tevyaw, K. and P. Reilly (coordinators). 1991. "Programming for School Groups: An Interpreter's Guide." National Park Service, North Atlantic Region, Division of Interpretation.
Author: L. Kate Wiltz