Greening the Schools Featuring Elementary Teacher Lisa Lawson

Lisa Lawson is an elementary teacher, who co-teaches gifted students in grades 2 through 5, with Diane Dunlap at Claywell Elementary in Tampa, Florida. Lisa attends many of our workshops at the USF Stavros Center. In fact, the project in her classroom originated from two of the Sustainability Superheroes workshops she attended recently.  
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For example, Lisa used the “It's Broken Lesson” from the Design Thinking workshop. Students went for a walk around the school to identify a sustainability problem.

Next, they used the Question Formulation Technique from the Ask the Right Questions workshop. 

The Question Formulation Technique (QFT) is an effective strategy to teach students how to ask their own questions. It was created by the Right Question Institute and is now used by over 250,000 educators to spark curiosity and engagement from students of all subjects and grade levels.

​So far, she has increased awareness of sustainability by doing the "What is Broken?" lesson. Lisa used the Question Formulation Technique to come up with lists of questions about problems the students found in the school and then categorized them. Each grade level chose a focus area based on their consolidated lists of questions.

The students created research questions and decided on a topic. 

Lisa described the students’ projects:

• ​"Third grade is focusing on reducing usage of paper on the school campus." 
  

• “Fourth grade is learning ways we are wasting electricity and finding solutions to these waste problems. "
  
• "Fifth grade is tackling the cafeteria waste. Most of the problems in the cafeteria are based on recycling materials and initiating an effort to compost food waste.”​

She also taught all three grade levels about surveys and how to build them. They talked about survey etiquette, types of survey questions, slant or bias, and ways to both administer surveys and process results. They created a Survey Monkey after consolidating individual surveys made by students. Then the school principal sent a link to families to document their current habits related to the problems they were measuring. 

In addition, students participated in a number of activities. 

1.) Students created posters.

In this poster, fourth grade students asked the question, “What would happen if there was no plastic wrap?” They discussed the costs and benefits of having no plastic wrap and even proposed solutions by using substitute goods in place of plastic wrap. ​

Fifth grade students created a poster discussing the solutions to the waste problems they saw in the school. These were the first steps in their research project. ​

2.) Students also created board games that used coding mice.

The students made their own game rules, and some students created cards that went with their games. The cards included sustainability facts or questions. After they created the games, they brought them to classrooms to play with other students.

Stay tuned to find out the results of greening the schools research!