SubjectToClimate

Currently, we are launching our MVP for educators in June to receive feedback and refine our platform in preparation for back-to-school in August. This MVP is composed of climate related teaching resources and lesson plans related to middle school environmental justice and climate sciences. Funding would enable us to roll our offering to the envisioned K-12 spectrum across multiple topics such as health, government policy, climate action, etc.

SOLVE’s network would also allow us to expand our contacts and prove enhancement of and further distribution of our offering. Specifically, we are looking to connect with school networks, educators, and teachers. Furthermore, for the educator network in SOLVE, we would love to provide our platform as a resource to help them integrate important global issues in their curriculum.

Lastly, the mentorship would help develop our team’s leadership to enhance our organization’s effectiveness.

SubjectToClimate’s vision is for every educator to teach climate change. Our goal is to enhance climate change knowledge and inspire action by making climate change resources accessible to all. 

Our founders met at Harvard with the shared interest in climate education. David Jaffe is a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative, and the retired CEO of a Fortune 500 company. He has started a nonprofit organization and served on the board of numerous charities. In addition to a Stanford MBA and BSE from Wharton, he received a BA in Environmental Studies at University of Pennsylvania.

Margaret Wang was a HS social studies teacher. She received her teaching certification from Princeton University and her MEd at Harvard where she worked with David Rhodes on a Climate Change Leadership Curriculum that is published by Springer. Her coursework focused on building organizations that address education challenges, and she currently teaches this topic at Harvard. 

David Rhodes was a MS social studies teacher. Furthermore, he facilitated leadership development programs for students and coordinated workshops related to civic engagement. He received his MEd at Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is currently the program associate at Facing History.

There are 3.7 million teachers in the US, and 86% of them believe that students should learn about climate change.  However, 58% of teachers do NOT teach about climate change and those who teach about climate change spend, on average, only 1.5 hours per school year covering this topic (National Center for Science Education). We talked to numerous teachers to identify the barriers they faced when trying to teach climate change: the lack of time to find appropriate resources, the complicated user interfaces that make it hard to find climate change resources, low teacher confidence, and packed curriculum that make it hard for teachers to integrate climate change. Through our research, we learned that there is a significant amount of quality teaching materials on climate change. The opportunity is to not reinvent the wheel, but to close the gap between the demand from educators and the supply of teaching resources.

Therefore, SubjectToClimate is an online connector for K-12 teachers of all subjects to find credible, unbiased, and engaging materials on climate change. In addition, we provide inquiry-based lesson plans that show teachers how to integrate climate change in their current curriculum. 

SubjectToClimate provides a marketplace of ideas that enables teachers to access great resources from many providers. Our value proposition includes the following:

• Saves educators time:

  • Our intuitive user interface provides an easy-to-use platform for all educators.

  • Useful search filters: we have tagged the resources in the way a teacher would search for them using our teacher taskforce (a team of teachers on our team). 

  • Our lesson plans model how to integrate these resources into curriculum that teachers are already teaching.

• Curates credible and engaging materials:

  • There is a two-step process. For scientific credibility, we have our internal team of climate scientists. For teacher approved usability, we have our teacher taskforce review a resource and assess its feasibility of implementation in the classroom.

• Provides educators a community.

The innovative approach is automating a process that teachers expend a lot of effort doing already through our online platform to save them time and encourage them to teach about climate change.

The Earth is facing a climate crisis where climate change is already affecting the lives of many individuals and disproportionately impacting marginalized communities. The IPCC has identified education as one of the powerful tools that can be used to combat climate change. In fact, research shows that even providing 16% of high school students climate change education could lead to nearly 19 gigaton reduction of carbon dioxide by 2050 (Cordero, Centeno, & Todd, 2020).  As such, this is our theory of change.

1. If we develop a thorough repository of credible educational resources on all subjects related to climate change, then we can provide educators easy access to curated materials that fit their needs.

2. If we provide educators with curated materials and example lesson plans, along with teaching tips, Q&A board, and reviews from other educators to support their implementation, then they can teach their students more effectively and engage them more directly on climate change. 

3. If students learn about the impacts of climate change and the opportunity they have to address this problem, then students will share this knowledge with friends & family and take constructive action to address climate change.