Targeted at the middle-school level, the program's objectives are to: -Increase middle-school teachers' awareness and technical understanding of NASA products and materials that are relevant to climate change -Engage teachers in developing and implementing effective ways to incorporate NASA materials into science curricula -Engage middle-school students, particularly those who are members of groups traditionally underrepresented and underserved, in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) areas -Increase teacher and student awareness of how local issues, which tend to be much more interesting to students than distant ones, can be related to climate changes and observations on local, regional, and global scales.

We propose to provide Earth-Space Science middle-school teachers with the resources available through NASA to incorporate global climate change education into the classroom. The program will be ongoing throughout the school year to maximize teachers' ability to apply their new learning in the classroom. Teachers will participate in workshops, ongoing coaching, and online interactive training and communication throughout the academic year. Climate change scientists and science education faculty members will provide the training and coaching. The overall goal is to increase teacher content knowledge in global climate change and to provide pedagogical training to enable teachers to stimulate students' interest in and learning about climate change.

We propose a three-year timeline. Year one of the project will include curriculum development by project staff. We will also organize a panel of experts in climate change education and a panel of middle-school students to serve as advisors. The advisory panel will be presented with current topics in climate change and will be asked to suggest specific content of interest to be presented during the teacher workshops. The climate change curriculum will include local and regional topics to stimulate interest in climate change topics for both the teachers and students. The first cohort of teachers will meet in the second funding year and a second cohort of teachers will meet during the third year. Those teachers will be selected from rural, urban, and suburban Florida schools with a majority of students from groups underrepresented in science and technology career fields. Plans will be prepared for continuing the program in school districts through a teach-the-teacher and coaching model. The evaluation will assess the degree to which the primary objectives of the project are attained and the degree of value added by the project. It will also provide formative information for enhancing program effectiveness during the life of the project and alert project staff to any issues that need resolution early in its design and throughout implementation.