05/30/2026
NCSE: The National Center for Science Education will be at the Earth Educators' Rendezvous! Please join us!
Will you be at the 2026 Earth Educators' Rendezvous coming up July 20-23 in South Carolina? NCSE staff will be there hosting two sessions. Come join us!
Conference details and registration: https://serc.carleton.edu/earth_rendezvous/2026/index.html
Earth Educators' Rendezvous is a national geoscience education meeting hosted by the National Association of Geoscience Teachers and the Science Education Resource Center (SERC) at Carleton College. The Rendezvous is designed to be hands-on, interactive professional learning. The program is built around half-day and multi-day interactive workshops, along with Share-a-thons, posters, and short research talks. NCSE will lead two sessions on Wednesday and Thursday: Climate in Your Own Backyard and DataWISE. In both sessions, participants will learn and engage with practical strategies and leave with free, classroom-ready resources, including lesson plans, slides, and student materials
Wednesday: Climate in Your Own Backyard
The National Center for Science Education has created lessons that are aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) to teach about evolution, climate change, and the nature of science. In this session, teachers will be introduced to five Climate Change Story Shorts, which is a new and innovative method for creating three-dimensional storylines. This approach was developed after conducting a two-year curriculum field study with middle and high school science teachers. The Story Short format is a concise storyline that can be completed in as little as five class periods, or expanded with optional Side Quest activities. All the materials, including detailed lesson plans, student handouts, slides, and resources, are freely available to teachers online. During this session, teachers will get hands-on experience with one or two selected activities and will learn how to access all the resources online for future use.
Thursday: DataWISE
The DataWISE tool combines key principles and practices gathered from research-based strategies in media literacy and data analysis into one easy-to-use tool with added attention given to the ways that data can be co-opted or misrepresented. When considering a claim presented with accompanying data, students will ask themselves a series of questions to judge the authority, purpose, presentation, and sensibility of the claim and evidence using the WISE acronym. They start with questions that allow them to determine whether the claim is Worthy of their attention, Inspect the data, ask if the interpretation of the data and the conclusions make Sense, and pay close attention to the Emotions elicited by the claim and data presented. With continued practice, students should eventually be able to internalize these questions and use this method to critically evaluate any data-based claim presented to them in person, print, or digital formats.
