What I have gained from the Environmental Leadership Program:
My experience in Canopy Connections has taught me numerous transferable skills that I am excited to share with communities I will work with in the future. This project helped me quickly learn my capabilities in organizing, teaching, facilitating, writing, and how to adapt. Adaptation was key as I learned to improve my abilities and work efficiently. The list I have below exhibits few of many ideas I learned as a member of the Environmental Leadership Program.
- Working with multiple schools, partners, and students has trained me to be more adaptable. A key example of this is that our lessons were designed for 75-minutes, however schools would show up anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour late. This helped me determine which parts of the lessons are important to keep and what to leave behind.
- How to facilitate, be a team member, a leader. Working in a team of 8 on multiple projects (from presenting at the Undergrad symposium to developing curriculum) has taught me how to step up and step back.
- How to evaluate in new, creative ways. Designing games that evaluated middle school students' knowledge so that they are able to have fun while being tested.
- Learning how to categorize outputs and learning outcomes. More specifically, going through roughly 300 field notebooks that our students wrote in on their field trip and determining what they learned and how this reflected our ability to get information across.
- The word for the smell of rain: petrichor. Through our Stop, Sit, Scribble lesson I discovered the word petrichor from one of the students.
- Staying focused in chaotic times. For example, having to swift through waiver forms in about 8 minutes to decide who can climb the tree and who can/can't have their pictures taken while the kids are playing a game was at first overwhelming. By the end of the trips though I was efficient and had a system created so that I didn't have to be so stressed.
- Being able to articulate mission of projects to an audience or community partners as well as knowledge of who are community partners are and their history.
- Species identification: Pacific yew, Huckleberry, Maidenhair fern, Lobaria lichen, Twinflower.
- Everyone has a different learning style. From studying Howard Gardner's multiple intelligence, I became aware of and acted upon different learning styles such as written vs. visual.