No one person--or one teacher--can hope to address the Climate Crisis alone. Thankfully, not only are students a crucial asset in this work, they are eager to do it. Time and again, when students are first introduced to the stark truth of the Climate Crisis, they have 2 questions:

1. Why didn’t anybody ever tell me? 

2. What can I do? 

TEA’s founders have over 15 years of experience with integrating Student Action teams into the fabric of the classroom, campus, and community. We have a host of examples of student action teams addressing the climate crisis. Below we offer practical advice for building and leveraging Student Action teams. These teams can be created as a part of an Action Learning opportunity inside a classroom, or as stand alone teams that support a classroom, or that create initiatives around  the campus, or that work out in the wider community. 

Choosing Your Student Action Teams

Pick your team for a mix of skills. It is crucial that at least one member of your student team have technical skills—esp. video editing, graphic design, web design—as well as general technical savvy. The work habits you will want to look for in your student workers are the same kinds of traits you might seek in any job that involves working in teams.  You will expect your student workers to: take responsibility, take initiative, show some maturity, keep drama to a minimum, etc.  

We all have had the experience of a student in our class that we think would make a great teacher, and we may have even told her so. That kind of student is what you are looking for here. They have “court vision”—to use a basketball metaphor--about the goings-on in a classroom—in other words, they have an awareness that is broader than simply their own place and actions in the class. They often offer insights about fellow students in the class. They are often the main person keeping a group activity moving in the right direction. They have insights about education or the Climate Crisis. They seem empathetic. Don’t despair about finding this kind of student; they aren’t that rare. After all, you yourself were just such a student! 

Build for Success

Getting a Student Action team rolling is a bit like getting a class rolling. You will want to build in activities that lead to early success. You should consider facilitating activities that lead to group bonding among the student team: take them to lunch; have them come up with a group name; create activities that take you out of the center, and that instead have their interactions with each other be at the center of the experience. Their team chemistry is vital, but just as in a classroom, you are ultimately in charge. That is to say, you reserve the right to put out any fires that may arise around student worker tensions, gossip, etc.

Training

There are a number of different ways your Student Action team can gain experience and training to do the work of responding to the Climate Crisis:

1. Hands on—where they are working on some issue side by side with you. The “theory” or big picture might not be totally clear to them as they work with you, but the idea here is that through immersion they will begin to understand more deeply.

2. Stand-alone training—where they get introduced to some important aspect of their work in a more formal training setting. For example, this approach would be appropriate for offering technical training.

3. Background research—where they are given access to materials, often supplied by you,that offer them some grounding in the Climate Crisis issues at hand. We have had success in having students engage with essays, websites, books, movies that delve into the topics they will be investigating as the work moves forward.

4. “Practice” activities—where they engage in the kind of activity and thinking that the later Action Learning project will require of them, but they do so under conditions where the stakes aren’t so high, and where the task at hand can be done under a short time frame.

5. They can train each other—let’s say one of your students has a skill that the others will need; that student can be put in charge of getting the others up to speed. They will often do this quite naturally, but it never hurts for you to facilitate this.

It Is a Bit Like Running a Business

Although you are in an academic setting, you may feel that working with a Student Action team is a bit like running a small business. You will be scheduling them, dealing with their time cards if they are being paid, facilitating training, helping them prioritize projects, etc. Personnel issues may arise: tardiness, unprofessionalism, lack of initiative, etc. And you may feel like you are a manager in dealing with such issues. How you handle all this will be a function of your interpersonal style, your school’s culture, and the guidelines you establish for the student workers.

Don’t Be Afraid To Turn Them Loose

On the one hand you may feel a real need to keep close reins on their work, but on the other hand, part of the real power of using Student Action teams is that if you give them some freedom, they will surprise you with their creativity and initiative. Sometimes they will suggest something that on the face of it seems silly or off-target or not workable etc...resist the urge to squash it too soon;  they sometimes come up with something great out of the earlier morass. Sometimes, however, their idea ends up half-baked or they can’t deliver at the execution level. This is where you may pick up the pieces and finish it for them. This is not a bad thing; they got the ball rolling in a direction you might never have considered and now—with your greater experience and vision of the bigger picture of the work—you can finish the job. Of course sometimes they won’t have an answer or any insight, and they just sit there seemingly stupefied, like can happen in the classroom. If this happens, you may decide to simply move on to something else, realizing they aren’t yet able to help with this particular moment. Don’t be surprised if a week later they offer a cool insight; they have had time to think about it, and also, we have seen that they begin to develop a pride in what they bring to the proceedings and they don’t want to let you down.