Climate Circle (2021-2022) Q&A with co-founders David Jaffe, David Rhodes, and Margaret Wang
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David Jaffe: This venture began as a result of my capstone project at the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative, where I am a Senior Fellow. Previously, I was a business executive, but I was always passionate about climate change and education. I was working on a way to combine my passions when I met David Rhodes and Margaret Wang at a webinar about climate change education through the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Margaret Wang: David Rhodes and I actually created a climate change leadership curriculum for a class project at Harvard Graduate School of Education. But we were both inspired to do work in climate change education way before, as educators. I was a high school teacher in the Middle East, teaching economics, business management, history, and entrepreneurship. I was always trying to make it more relevant for my students. Climate change was one of the topics my students really cared about; it made my students actually want to learn about supply and demand graphs as well as negative externalities! More personally, I am an avid outdoors person as well as a triathlete and ultra-marathon runner, which makes me naturally interested in the environment and climate change.
David Rhodes: As an 8th grade social studies teacher, I developed a capstone civic action project in which students chose a topic to research. Ultimately, the project encouraged them to think through how their voice could contribute to the way forward. Many of my students chose to focus on climate change, and their dedication to learning and action inspired me. Before HGSE, I helped run a pilot program focused on leadership skills, civic agency, and climate change in collaboration with the Paleontological Research Institution. The opportunity to work with Margaret on a climate change leadership curriculum opened the door to reach a broader audience, and now, working together with David Jaffe, we’re taking the impact to a whole new level.
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David Jaffe: Initially, I was thinking of creating curricula for schools on climate change, but we discovered that it’s expensive to create and difficult to get schools to adopt. In researching what was out there, I discovered that there are already a lot of great educational materials about climate change. We just needed to help teachers access them. That’s why we have developed a “Yelp” model for SubjectToClimate, with many other features to support educators. We are continually testing new ideas with teachers.
David Rhodes: From interviews and surveys, there’s a sense that teachers feel isolated in education related to climate change. They often share how much they’d appreciate the opportunity to connect with other educators navigating similar challenges in the classroom. SubjectToClimate will have a community board that opens possibilities for teachers to network, ask each other questions, and exchange ideas.
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Margaret Wang: Leadership is about building curious inquirers and empathetic problem-solvers that can work with others. Leadership is already tied to competencies that are taught in the classroom across disciplines such as English, Economics, Science, and Math. While SubjectToClimate includes a collection of teaching resources, teachers sometimes say that they don’t know what to do with a particular teaching resource. So we’ve developed SubjectToClimate lesson plans. We’ve taken some of our climate-related resources and put them into an engaging lesson plan. Students inquire, investigate, and inspire. They’re the ones being curious and asking questions, looking at different disciplines. Then, they learn to take action. I think that’s a very important aspect of leadership! And that’s based on frameworks that already exist such as IB Circle of Inquiry, C3 Framework, NGSS Science Standards.
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Margaret Wang: We will officially launch on August 1st with our initial offering focused on middle school climate change sciences and environmental justice resources. After testing a beta version throughout June and July, we have been refining our site to better meet the needs of teachers, especially in time for back-to-school.
David Jaffe: Once we can demonstrate the impact our site has on educators’ abilities to teach climate change, we will then go out for funding to enable us to expand from middle school to K-12, across all disciplines.
