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Environmental Engagement - A Core Competency at Nichols School

    Three Summers ago, a group of faculty met to discuss curricular competencies for the 21st century.  The group, dubbed the August Colloquium, developed nine competencies we felt imperative for student success in this century.  At the conclusion of the session, we hoped to take the next step and assign skills to each competency.  We have now finished the curriculum data collection and it is now time to start assigning skills.  By using the data collected and assigning skills or themes to each competency we can measure what we are currently doing and further plan for what we will do in the future.
    Joe Bach and Susan Allen have already developed a theme for the Digital Age Fluency, we will now identify skills for the competencies Environmental Engagement, Cultural Competence & Global Awareness, and Thinking & Discerning in Complex Way.
    Each of these competencies has a page that includes materials pertaining to skills that might be included in a theme, useful websites, and model templates that will be used to create a theme for each of the mentioned competencies.
 

Environmental Curriculum from August Colloquium II

 

   

Faculty & Staff Feedback on the BGI

Sandy Cunningham, Chair of Middle School Science:                               

“We are currently evaluating insoluble pollutants and the environment (oil spill response and clean up) and removing soluble pollutants from water (desalination process and global, political and monetary repercussions). In the future, my class will evaluate water quality analysis at Scajaquada Creek studying the following nutrients: nitrogen and phosphorous monitoring; turbidity monitoring; dissolved oxygen monitoring; iron and chlorine monitoring; hardness: Mg2+ and Ca2+ monitoring; the Great Lakes: history of the lakes and discussion of the fishery, including glacial formation, hydrology, non-indigenous species and Niagara Falls and the Gorge.”

 

Josh Ring, Upper School Science teacher:

“For Environmental and Geology, I had the kids submit papers electronically. I grade in red and send back to them. You can actually write with the SMART Board™ in Word and send back corrections. In Geology, I currently teach a climate change section, that I did not teach in years previous. Environmental is doing a project to develop green ideas for the new building. Phil Coburn has an Energy Focus with the freshmen this year and I am following suit in my Physics class by teaching them about alternative energy. The freshmen class will hopefully take a field trip to the hydropower plant.”

 

Kate Olena, Middle School Theatre teacher:                                               

“For the first time this year, the Asian Theatre Acting Styles class substituted PowerPoint presentations on SMART Boards™ for paper handouts. We used to make over 180 photocopies for this exhibition. The recycled boxes used in the first seventh-grade play are being re-purposed for the props in this term’s eighth-grade play.”

 

Mary Sykes, Middle School Central Studies teacher:

“Fifth-graders have taken responsibility for carrying coffee grounds from the Middle School faculty room over to Josh Ring every week so they can be composted.”

 

 

Carol-Sue Stapleton, Middle School Library Media Specialist:                                            

“For the book fair this year, we will be putting all book lists online and limiting the number of Middle School booklets produced. The parents will be notified of this change.”

 

 

Nina Cimino, Director of Marketing and Communications:

“With our growing concern to be eco-friendly and cost-effective, we have adopted a smaller, more standard paper size (Toaxnoes) and moved to using environmental responsible recycled paper. Our printer, Sterling Sommer, is the first local printing company to go green by fully embracing environmental responsibility in all phases of the printing process – from paper origin to merchant to print process. The company earned the Forest Stewardship Council’s Chain of Custody Certification, and their FSC logo, with a tree and checkmark design, can now be found on our magazine.

In addition, our 2007-2008 Annual Report is included in this issue as yet another effort to be green. It still includes all the information you’ll be looking for, but allowed us to eliminate the expense of a separate large-scale print project. Most importantly, we thank each and every donor for your gifts this year.

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