School-Wide Environmental Behavior Change
Green Team Meetings
Commodore's Green Team is a school community based organization that meets once a month to discuss all things green at Commodore and to attempt to promote Environmental literacy throughout Commodore's community. The team is comprised of teachers, community members, community partners, volunteers, administrators and most importantly student volunteers from 4th-8th grade (also two 4th grade prospects who shadow the recycling process). Most of these students attend the interest meeting in September and during that meeting they are asked to spread the word to their friends.
2017's Green Team Roster is as follows:
4th Grade: Jeffery Kophenavong and Jumiyah Willams
5th Grade team members: Cynthia Cardona, Shyan Lockler, Alexandra Diaz-Franco, Lariyah Bartley, DiCaprio Bynum, Hozay West
6th Grade team members: Arly Benscome, Maria Aguina, Bryant Aguilar, Perla Rodriguez, Evelyn Cano
7th Grade team members: Katherine Banegas, Kim Cardona, Karla Nolasco, Johana Rodriguez, Jacquiline Villano, Odalys Garcia, Justice Smith
8th Grade team members: Nick Kophenavong, John Johnson, Miguel Aguilar
23 Students, woohoo!! This is an amazing growth from years past when we struggled to get more than 10 students to volunteer. It goes to show the quality effort the Green Team at Commodore has done to instill the drive to strive for environmental prosperity within the student body.
2017's Green Team Roster is as follows:
4th Grade: Jeffery Kophenavong and Jumiyah Willams
5th Grade team members: Cynthia Cardona, Shyan Lockler, Alexandra Diaz-Franco, Lariyah Bartley, DiCaprio Bynum, Hozay West
6th Grade team members: Arly Benscome, Maria Aguina, Bryant Aguilar, Perla Rodriguez, Evelyn Cano
7th Grade team members: Katherine Banegas, Kim Cardona, Karla Nolasco, Johana Rodriguez, Jacquiline Villano, Odalys Garcia, Justice Smith
8th Grade team members: Nick Kophenavong, John Johnson, Miguel Aguilar
23 Students, woohoo!! This is an amazing growth from years past when we struggled to get more than 10 students to volunteer. It goes to show the quality effort the Green Team at Commodore has done to instill the drive to strive for environmental prosperity within the student body.
Electronic Resources for Staff
Paperless communication has become the norm at Commodore John Rodgers. Aside from important information that parents need to see nearly all of our communication amongst the staff is electronically. Through tools such as Google Drive, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Classroom, Common Curriculum, and TeachBoost we have transitioned from paper-based communication and collaboration to web/electronic communication for nearly every aspect of school-wide information dissemination. Instead of printing daily notes and placing in staff mailboxes, the bulletin is emailed to teacher each evening. Additionally professional development resources are posted on the school website "For Staff" section and google drive. Teachers use their laptops or iPads to reference these documents instead of printing hard copies of these materials. Students and teacher communicate through various postings on Google Classroom. Teacher Collaboration is done through the web-based Common Curriculum and teacher evaluations through the web-based TeachBoost. We are also present on Social Media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. On these sites we can easily share important information about our Green School activity to the community.
Green School announcement to the Whole Staff
In the Fall of 2015, Mr. Ariosa, the Green Leader at Commodore, with the assistance of Abby Cocke from the Department of Sustainability, announced to the whole staff what being part of a Green School entails and how to best represent the distinction of being a Green School. A question and answer session ensued and the staff left the meeting excited about the opportunity.
Reusing Materials
REUSE, REUSE, REUSE!!! Supplies are rarely an issue at Commodore John Rodgers because of the tremendous help of our various school volunteers and their drive to reuse materials as much as possible. Composition books, folders, markers, pencils, crayons, construction paper, you name it we have a supply of reusable materials. We had such a surplus this past year that we donated numerous supplies to schools in the district that were in need.
Staff Professional Development
100% of our staff members have participated in environmental education through staff-wide professional development opportunities at NorthBay and a presentation by the Office of Sustainability. All staff members are engaged with environmental education through teaching in the classroom, supporting school-wide recycling efforts, and enhancing our building and outdoor space to make it friendly for environmental education. More than 10% of our staff (11 teachers) have been involved in more in-depth professional development activities that were focused on the environment through conferences, classes, and partnerships.
Sustainable School: Systemic Partnership
Attached below, is a letter from Joanna Pi-Sunyer (Green School Coordinator for BCPSS) to the principal Commodore (Marc Martin) discussing the Systemic Partnership between Commodore John Rodgers EMS and Baltimore City Public Schools.
commodore_john_rodgers_maeoe_systemic_partnership_letter_20180308.pdf | |
File Size: | 165 kb |
File Type: |
Staff-wide PD at NorthBay
Before the 2016 school year began, the Commodore Staff began a week of professional development to help us prepare for the school year. The first two days of this weeklong professional development were held at NorthBay so that the full staff could see the importance of outdoor education by participating in professional development in a different environment. Being outdoors is a refreshing change for staff members and students. This time spent away from our school building was an important reminder to staff of how taking students outside offer important opportunities for team building, learning about the environment, and creativity. Staff members participated in team building activities that revolved around inclusion and trust. These two things are very important to Commodore John Rodgers because we are an Inclusive school and without the trust of your co-teachers/co-workers, the job would extremely difficult to accomplish. This commitment to quality in the area of collaboration will prove vital for our work with students in the inclusive classroom as well. The ideal of teamwork to ensure there is no one that is being left behind is something that is evident within all of the classrooms in Commodore John Rodgers and was strengthened by the trainings received at NorthBay. NorthBay uses outdoor team building activities along with new experiences in new environments to do this, but our facilitators emphasized that the activities that we learned could be done in any outdoor space. The trainings consisted of two 8-hour professional development days.
MAEOE Conference
ESOL teacher and Green Leader, Mr. Ariosa, received a grant from the Department of Sustainability to attend the 2018 MAEOE conference in Ocean City, Maryland from October 9-11, 2018. While he was there he gained many different environmental community activism ideas from the keynote speaker and his Q&A session. He also learned about various environmental educational ideas from various colleagues found throughout Maryland and was able to network with those individuals as well. Along with the information learned at the conference, he also assisted with the student-led presentation by Baltimore Beyond Plastic. One of the alumni of Commodore's Green Team is a member of this student group and it was an amazing moment seeing them present to a standing-room only crowd!
Healthy Plate Sabbatical
One of our second grade teachers, Linn Thorburn, took a sabbatical for the whole 2015-2016 school year to study the methods behind how California schools are changing what and how students eat. These changes have shown to produce a marked change in students' behavior and nutrition. Some things we have implemented based on her results are an everyday salad/fruit bar and a wider variety of choices for school lunch. School lunch is very important at Commodore because 99% of our students depend on the free/reduced cost lunch provided at school.
Project Wet and Wild Certifications
7 of the Commodore teachers are both Project Wet and Project Wild certified. During the summer of 2013, Mr. Watson, Ms. Brade, Ms. Petruziello, Ms. Venuti, Mr. Ariosa, Ms. Cassermere, and Ms. Schwartz attended environmental training in collaboration with our Arts Integration Partners. Project Wet focuses on how issues related to water impact students and communities while Project Wild focuses on conservation. This was a total of 12 hours of training-- 6 hours for each certification.
Learning in the Garden
6th grade special educator, Dave Dallas, attended this workshop on Saturday, March 29, 2014 from 1:00-4:00 to learn how we can best incorporate our garden space into the classroom. Jason Reed, a garden educator at Living Classrooms worked with Real Food Farms and Cool Green Schools to present this workshop.
Climate Change Teacher
6th grade science teacher, Ms. Walker, is part of the Climate Change Partnership Teacher program at the Maryland Zoo. She attends teacher training at the zoo and the 6th grade students are able to take a field trip and participate in one of the Conservation Conundrum ZOOlabs during their trip.
Sustainability for Teacher Grade K-8
2nd grade teacher, Mr. Myer, took a class during the fall semester of 2013 at the Notre Dame of Maryland. It was a 3 credit hour course during which he was able to network with other teacher who wanted to improve their teaching as related to sustainability. He was able to practice taking water samples of local streams and keeping a field notebook so that he could teach these skills to his students.
|
|
|