It’s no secret that many schools are not equipped to handle the increasing number of hot days that students and staff experience during the school year due to global climate change. Some 36,000 U.S. schools lack adequate HVAC systems, according to one estimate.

Beyond causing extreme discomfort and negative health impacts, all this heat is decreasing student achievement, say researchers.

Travis Roach, an economics professor at the University of Central Oklahoma, and Joshua Goodman, an education and economics professor at Boston University, have researched the link between heat and student learning separately. Their research, and that of others, reveals a compelling link between more hot days in the school year and poor educational outcomes for students.

Fixing this problem is beyond educators alone and requires more action from policymakers, both say. However, they do offer small steps educators can take right now to mitigate the impact of heat on their students.

The Negative Impact of Hot Schools

To study the impact of heat on schools, Goodman looked at 10 million students who retook the PSATs. Goodman and the study’s co-authors found “that hotter school days in the years before the test was taken reduce scores, with extreme heat being particularly damaging.” The authors were confident in their findings in part because weekend and summer temperatures had little impact on test scores and the presence of air conditioning seemed to mitigate much of the negative effect.

“Heat not only affects learning in the short run but in the long run, too,” Goodman says. “Hot classrooms during the school year make students appear to have less knowledge a year or even more later.”

Also, lower-income students see a bigger negative impact from heat. “[They] tend to be in schools and homes that have fewer resources to mitigate the effects of heat such as AC,” Goodman says.

Finally, the problem is not limited to American schools. “These patterns show up in the U.S. and across the globe, so it's a universal phenomenon,” Goodman says.

In a 2020 study looking at students in grades 3-8, Roach found that each additional day over 100 degrees in the school year decreases student achievement. and the link between heat and decreased success was higher in areas with lower average maximum temperatures.

Roach says that many teachers have seen the impact heat can have on learning without necessarily being aware of it. "I've been in the front of a classroom where it just feels like things aren't quite jiving, they're not going well. And some of that could just be purely environmental,” he says.

What Teachers Can Do

Goodman and Roach both stress that improving school infrastructure is the main way we should address this problem, and that is the responsibility of policymakers who control school budgets, not educators. That said, there are some steps educators can take to mitigate the impact of heat.

“Rearranging annual and daily schedules to attempt to avoid the hottest times of year or times of day may be helpful. Small interventions like electric fans and ice water can be helpful too,” Goodman says.

Roach says teachers should try to be as flexible as their teaching situations permit with important tests. “Maybe if you're planning on having a test on a Wednesday, and it's an especially hot day, but you know it's going to cool off the next day, if you can, have a little flexibility. Your students might do better the next day, for no other reason than it's a little bit cooler that day and their bodies are under a little bit less stress,” he says.

Scheduling breaks for students to cool off can also help, Roach adds. As can teachers simply being aware that heat might be the reason a given lesson isn’t resonating with students.

Finally, teachers can understand that the impact heat may already be having on their classrooms is an important part of the ongoing conversation around climate change. “These climate change impacts are not so far off into the distance anymore,” Roach says. “We're feeling them now, and we're starting to see them show up in outcomes like test scores and learning.”

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Climate change has become a hot-button issue in America, and addressing it can become politicized. However, Edward Cohen, assistant director for Rutgers University’s Center for Mathematics, Science, and Computer Education, has advice for educational professionals looking to broach the subject as his office has incorporated it into its professional development program. 

For his efforts to help educators at all levels lead classroom discussion on climate change, Cohen was awarded Best Example of Professional Development in Higher Education, one of Tech & Learning Innovative Leader Awards, at the recent Northeast Regional Leadership Summit in New Jersey.

Cohen’s work on climate change at Rutgers meshes with New Jersey’s proactive climate change stance. “New Jersey has the strongest climate change standards in the U.S. right now,” Cohen says. In fact, it’s the first state to introduce climate-change education into all of its K-12 curricula. 

The state developed an interdisciplinary approach to problem-based learning when the need arose for every subject area being able to support climate instruction across their content, Cohen says. This allowed for novel approaches and collaborative efforts for teachers in different disciplines to create integrated units for students, which can serve as a model for other education institutions. 

Using Driving Questions To Teach Climate Change 

Cohen has the benefit of working with a state climatologist group at Rutgers, using some of the resources they have and sharing their data, which is used to develop driving questions. For example, one recent question concerned annual water level rises in the Garden State. The state sees twice the average annual sea level rise.

“It’s a phenomenon that's thought-provoking, especially for a state with such a large coastline in such a large industry with tourism and fisheries and with people living so close to the coast,” Cohen says. 

Researchers and educators are curious why New Jersey has an annual sea level rise of 40 centimeters compared to its neighbor New York, which has an annual rise of 30 centimeters. “Having that driving question gets people interested and excited about looking at data and explaining why this is actually happening,” Cohen says. 

Climate Change PD and Discussion with Teachers 

Cohen recently welcomed K-12 teachers to a conference during which they were paired with university faculty. The teams collaborated and devised best practices for teaching climate change at the K-12 level and at the college level. They also explored data analysis about historic redlining and climate disparities. 

All of this work prepared them to go back to the communities they serve with new insights. “Framing the problem in multiple ways for people helps all learners,” Cohen says. 

Introducing climate change discussions into PD poses a different challenge. When working with educators, Cohen makes them comfortable by creating a safe environment so they can raise their concerns, making sure they feel free to be open, and ask questions. “People are individual experts in their own content areas, but for this one global, real challenge, we don't have a solution that will work currently,” he says. This is how creative thinking comes into play. 

Thoughts about climate change can be stressful, and cause anxiety for educators and students. “For some of our workshops, we bring in social workers,” Cohen says. The main focus is to provide the necessary resources for educators so they are empowered and comfortable to work with students. 

Inspiring Students

Enlisting students’ support or galvanizing them is not difficult as studies show climate change is important to them. “Thinking about it from students’ standpoint, these kids are inheriting a world that is changed by climate,” Cohen says. The younger generations are the most active when it comes to raising awareness about this issue and demanding changes to resolve it. 

Cohen recounts an experience working with high schoolers in which there was discussion about purchasing a first vehicle that has less of an impact on greenhouse emissions as a way to mitigate the effects of climate change. They talked about choices the people can make as consumers and the conversations had real-world impact. Afterward, one student decided his first car should not be an SUV. 

“We have to encourage kids to be individually, community, and nationally focused,” Cohen says. 

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Many students are facing eco-anxiety in regard to their future as severe weather events continue to make headlines and discussion about climate change intensifies.

In a 2021 Lancet survey, 56 percent of young people said they agree with the statement “humanity is doomed.”

“Forty percent of those kids also believe that they may not have children due to the state of the planet, by choice,” said journalist Diana Kapp, author of Girls Who Green the World, in a session during the recent New York City Department of Education Beyond Access Forum. “Academics who study climate anxiety have been warning of intense feelings of doom among young people leading to a sense of paralysis and inaction. And when you feel the sense of paralysis, you kind of give in to an idea that what is happening in the future is inevitable, and then that means you sit out rather than get active.” 

Addressing Eco-Anxiety: Sharing Success Stories 

In Kapp’s book Girls Who Green the World, she profiles women who are change makers in the green space, including those who are inventing plastic alternatives and clean energy technologies, combating food waste and fast fashion, and addressing ocean distress and environmental injustice. By showcasing a diverse array of individuals and initiatives, she said she hoped students could find someone to relate to and inspire them. 

“We need to provide young people with a different vantage point, to step them through a magic doorway into an alternate universe of possibility, buzzing and worrying with mad scientists and doers,” Kapp said. “Every single one in the book is racing to head off planetary disaster.” 

Her book’s theme is ‘You can't be what you can't see.’ “I truly believe that women in STEM science, business, and environmental work are not getting enough air time,” she said. “So stories of power and stories are powerful motivators, particularly when they help young people see themselves in the role models that they really need. And importantly, they'll learn that many of these women knew little about the field that they are in.”

Turning Eco-Anxiety Into Action 

Joining Kapp during the presentation were two subjects she profiled in her book, Nicole Poindexter, CEO of Energicity Corp, and Sarah Paiji Yoo, CEO and Co-Founder of Blueland. Both shared their stories of how they dealt with eco-anxiety by just starting with small, personal initiatives that grew into full-fledged green companies.

Based in Sierra Leone, Poindexter’s business provides solar mini grids to provide a source of power for some of the more than 600 million people in Africa who do not have access to electricity. “We go to rural communities that don't have electricity, and we say, ‘Would you like light?’ and bizarrely everyone says, ‘Yes,’” said Poindexter. “And then in those communities we build a solar farm, we put up polls and wires just like Con Edison, and a meter on every house, and we provide reliable electricity in these communities that is affordable, and it is fully sustainable, being 90 plus percent generated by solar.”

Poindexter was reading a sci-fi book when her eco-anxiety was awakened. “It was about the future of the planet and economic devastation, and it referred to the period of 2006 to 2052 as ‘The Great Dithering.’ It's the period of time during which we knew that climate change was a problem, but we did nothing about it,” she said. “And I read that line, and I was just struck like, ‘I can't be part of that dithering. I need to do something. I want to do something!’”

Poindexter became very interested in this idea of going 100% solar on the grid, and connected with a few others who had similar goals, and knew of the need in Africa. “So I got on the plane and went to Ghana on my first trip and met these handful of small cocoa farming communities that didn't have electricity, and I said, ‘I'd like to bring you light.’ I expected they'd say, ‘Go away crazy lady!’ But what they said is, ‘Can you bring us light tomorrow?’” 

In one of the communities for which Poindexter’s company is providing electricity, the number of kids going to school increased by 50%, and the number of those achieving a passing grade increased by 70%. Plus, health and food services have improved dramatically. “Electricity actually underpins everything that we think is important,” she said. 

For Paiji Yoo, her eco-anxiety came about shortly after her first child was born and she was researching what kind of water to use for her son’s formula and discovering how microplastics have infiltrated everything. “Whether it's tap or bottled water, drinking water contains, per liter, over a 100 pieces of microplastics, and that just made my stomach turn,” Paiji You said. “So here I had a brand new baby, and I was just feeding him all this plastic with his baby formula and it wasn't until that point I started to really connect the dots between all the single-use plastic that we're consuming as a society.”

Paiji Yoo’s company, Blueland, is on a mission to eliminate single-use plastic packaging, starting with cleaning products and personal care products. For example, their refillable spray cleaners feature one forever bottle and refill tablets so when you need more multi-surface cleaner or hand soap, you simply refill a bottle with warm water and add the tablets.

“The beauty of our dry formats like our tablets or powders is that we can package those in paper instead of plastic,” she said. “And also because the tablets are typically 50 times smaller than a full bottle of liquid it also drastically reduces the carbon emissions related to shipping all these products around.”

More In-Depth Eco Exploration 

In addition to using stories of change makers to explore ethical and environmental issues, Kapp suggested exploring topics such as how recycling in some areas can be a marketing concept put forth by the plastic industry, that 40% of food around the world goes uneaten while millions are starving, or that the carbon footprint of U.S. food waste is greater than the airline industry and accounts for 8% of global greenhouse gasses.

“You might do a project with your class to dig in deeper, like tracing a fork or a straw from the factory to its resting spot,” she said.

Her website, dianakapp.com has graphs, charts, and teaching resources, and a list of 200 ways that young teens can get involved in the environmental movement. Students can also find sample letters for writing to a company to complain about their packaging as well as how to join climate-change prevention organizations such as the Sunrise Movement or participate in other activities to help reduce eco-anxiety. 

The National Science Teaching Association also provides resources on climate change for educators, parents, and students at nsta.org.

When it comes to eco-anxiety, students need to remember that change is not easy, said Paiji Yoo. “It's always gonna seem impossible,” she said. “But it has to start from good people with that vision, with good intentions, coming together and really driving forth that change.”

Researching and Reaching Out 

Sometimes students have reservations about addressing eco-anxiety and getting involved in the environmental movement because they think the problems and issues are so massive that they don’t know where to start, said Kapp. But just like anything else, the internet is often the best place to begin. 

Paiji Yoo started her efforts by Googling cleaning product manufacturers and then contacting them about developing products that use less plastic and more green formulas. “They looked at me like I had three heads,” she said, so she persisted in her online research looking for chemists who could create tablets. She went to LinkedIn and reached out to more than 50 different chemists, explaining what she was trying to do. Eventually she connected with who has become Blueland’s chief innovation officer. 

“So when you're doing something that doesn't exist or there is no roadmap, just use your intuition on sort of where the natural places to start are,” she said. 

Poindexter similarly discovered the person who became her co-founder via LinkedIn. “For young people there is so much power in joining together and connecting with organizations, connecting with other people who are passionate about causing change,” she said. “It's an opportunity to learn so much in terms of their own personal development, and that there's just a real opportunity to join a group that's moving in the direction that you find inspiring.”

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Teaching climate change isn’t easy. 

On the one hand, the scientific realities are grim and can terrify students. On the other, the issue has become so politicized recently that students often come to class with opinions on the topic that have nothing to do with science. 

Dr. Eric J. Pyle, president of the National Science Teaching Association (NSTA), is well aware of these challenges and is dedicated to providing teachers with strategies to overcome. Pyle, a professor of geoscience education at James Madison University in Virginia, discusses these approaches for teaching climate change with Tech & Learning. 

Q: How can teachers strike the right balance between informing rather than terrifying students when teaching climate change? 

A: I teach a lot of pre-service earth science teachers and elementary teachers, for that matter. And this is a frequent topic of discussion. It would be so easy to fall into doom and gloom, and just really scare people. But that's not what we do in a science classroom. One of the things that we can do as science teachers is give students something to do. If I just give you a lot of things that look frightening and whatnot, and don't give you any way of dealing with it, then I've not really advanced the cause of education. 

Q: What are some ways to do that?

A: You want to engage students with data, help them to see how to organize those data for analysis presentation, and then really discuss interpretations of those data. The science classroom is a place where we can come and think and talk rationally about these subjects. We can unpack them, we can take them apart in an analytic fashion. So even if there are projections that look scary, there are ways to deal with that. 

Q: Would you incorporate things such as the increase in wildfires? 

A: You can talk about the long-term causes of things like that. You can say, ‘Alright, here is an event. And this is a frightening event. And this is personally relevant to a lot of people. But let's take this from a different perspective. Let's see, really, how do we think about this rationally? How do we prepare for it?’ 

One of the interesting lines of thought here is not just whether climate change is happening or not, it becomes very hard to argue that it is not happening. What becomes the topic of discussion, though, is how do we deal with it? How are we resilient about it? So the notion of climate resilience comes into play. So it's ‘Let's be mindful, let's be rational,’ and also say, ‘Well, okay, there have always been forest fires, why are they worse now? And do they have more societal impact now because of where people are living as well?’

Q: How do you handle students who don’t believe in climate science?

A: I directed the position statement that we wrote about teaching climate science a couple of years ago. But it was getting very long, we had so much material that we were able to write a supplemental document. 

The starting point is what is science and what is not science. Within the scientific community, there is not a controversy of whether or not climate change is happening and humans have something to do with it. That's not a controversy, the controversies are social, they are political, they are economic, and in some cases, religious. But the fact of the matter is, we have to recognize that those beliefs do exist. You're always going to have perhaps one student who goes: 'Well, my mama says... ' 'My daddy says...' 'Someone I respect says....’ So educators have to be very sensitive to the fact that these beliefs exist. But discussing those deep-seated beliefs is not an indictment on who you are as a person. 

The thing that I always say in terms of pushback is, ‘Just because I'm saying something at odds with you doesn't mean I think you’re a bad person. You're not. That's not what I'm saying at all. We have different ideas. And let's take these apart, let's unpack them.’ 

Q: On the other end of the spectrum, what about students who get really upset as they learn about climate change? 

A: If somebody looks very upset about this, then, okay, let's say, ‘What is based on data, the current data that we have? What is an extrapolation of those data? Okay, what's the difference between [data and] a model that we have created, and we have some really good models.’ Examine the nature of probability, how probable are these things? These are all rational tools.

Q: So you dig into the science and get a better understanding of it? 

A: You start with, ‘Why are you upset? Okay, let's take this apart.’ It's not trying to downplay any projections that we might have. But it is about how do we put this into a more complex picture? And as I said at the very beginning, what can you personally do about it? 

I feel like the more we can give students responsibility for tasks, the better off we are overall, because now they feel like they can have an ownership of something, that they can have some impact on outcome. And I think that's really, really important for students that might be particularly upset about something. 

For resources on climate change for educators, parents, and students visit nsta.org.

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It’s one thing to learn about the impact of global climate change in general terms, it’s quite another thing to study how climate change will affect your neighborhood, community, and even your home. 

That’s what Caleb Rice’s physical science students at Lake Worth Community High School recently learned when the class participated in a pilot program utilizing hyper-local climate change data. The data sets are integrated with geographic information system (GIS) mapping and visualization programs, and were made available through a partnership between AT&T and EcoRise, a nonprofit dedicated to inspiring a new generation of green leaders by working with K-12 students. 

Students in Rice’s class were able to zoom in on their school and neighborhoods and then utilize flood projection data and wind data to evaluate areas most susceptible to flooding, using a 50-year projection. While doing this, they explored ways to create advocacy tools and support preparation strategies for climate resilience projects for areas most at risk.

“Once they started learning about climate resiliency, they got really connected to the subject, especially when we started talking about the social vulnerability index,” Rice says. “Our area has a high social vulnerability index, and they were able to discuss different facets of gentrification and what they have seen, and how that connects to the coastal flooding and people at risk when disasters happen.” 

“Analyzing the data, synthesizing all these topics, will help our students not only in the science content area, but also in math, social studies, and English,” says Venkata-Suseela Tadepalli, a science coach and department chair at Lake Worth High School. “I will definitely push to expand this program to other subject areas.” 

Finding And Using the Data 

The project came about after staff at EcoRise learned that AT&T had a new climate resilience project. “They were partnering with an organization to collect data that was extremely detailed in terms of forecasting climate risks, and there was a GIS mapping component,” says Gina LaMotte, founder and president of EcoRise. “This data for them was for business -- understanding what the climate risk level and vulnerability was for their customers and their infrastructure. But they were really forward thinking in understanding that this information could be utilized by the community at large.” 

Combining this new data with resources, EcoRise has created a powerful resource for educators and students to study climate change and much more. “It's about how we take this into our lives and stand up as a leader and take action right now,” she says. “Young people spend 14,000 hours in a classroom and there's an opportunity for them to be actively solving and supporting the solutions in our communities -- it's not just up to the adults, young people have the opportunity to also contribute their ideas and their actions.” 

How to Utilize It In Your Class 

Educators interested in learning more should visit the Climate Risk and Resilience Portal (ClimRR) as well as the EcoRise’s Gen: Thrive Tools site. 

The data AT&T has collected so far focuses on coastal concerns such as flooding and high winds, but plans are underway to collect more data about environmental concerns such as wildfire risks and urban heat islands (urban areas that experience heightened temperatures). 

In the meantime, Gen: Thrive already has other data layers embedded in its mapping tool. “Students can look at other environmental issues like polluted waterways and hazardous waste sites, and there's certainly a lot in terms of environmental justice issues and equity,” LaMotte says. 

Rice advises other teachers who plan on using these tools in the classroom to let students take the reins. “I've had a lot of success using a collaborative learning strategy with the students where they've been engaged together in small learning groups,” he says. “They've been bouncing ideas off each other while I'm more taking a backseat approach, facilitating.” 

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App of the Day picks are selected from the top edtech tools reviewed by Common Sense Education, which helps educators find the best ed-tech tools, learn best practices for teaching with tech, and equip students with the skills they need to use technology safely and responsibly.

NASA Global Climate Change - Vital Signs of the Planet

Tons of climate change info from expert sources in one easy place

Pros: Fantastic content, beautiful (and sobering) imagery, actionable resources, and clear citations, all on a site that's easy to navigate.
Cons: Overwhelming amounts of info not always easily searchable by topic, occasionally written with a disgruntled edge against climate change deniers.
Bottom Line: This is a one-stop shop for climate change info, from basic intro content to practical guides and raw data; good for middle schoolers and up.

Read more here.

By Common Sense Education