This short training takes you on a journey to explore the free teaching resources offered on the CLEAN (Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network) climate education portal. This course provides a step-by-step guide through the free online teaching resources and materials, designed to easily integrate climate and energy concepts into your existing curriculum, or design new curriculum for courses from Biology, Physics, Chemistry to Social Science, Math and ELA. CLEAN has materials for everyone and every context. K-12 classroom teachers, college professors, and informal educators will all benefit from this training and find useful materials to teach about climate. 

CLEAN is the national leader in climate education and an award winning climate education webportal. Created for educators by educators and climate scientists and funded by NOAA, NSF, NASA and the Department of Energy.   

Climate Change is a societal challenge that is impacting everyone’s lives. Newspapers report daily on natural hazards that are attributed to climate change and youth demand a response. Education is one important avenue to build a strong foundational understanding of the topic and point towards solutions.  

Learn to use CLEAN’s climate educational resource collection and how to access the wealth of supporting materials and short background readings around climate topics that the portal offers. The CLEAN portal is your trusted source to find everything you need to effectively and accurately teach about climate and energy topics. In this course, you will explore what CLEAN’s portal offers: 

• Curated Educational Resources: A collection of rigorously reviewed ~800 teaching resources, such as lesson plans, activities, videos, and interactive tools, tailored for K-12 and higher education levels.
• Professional Development Support: Access to webinars, workshops, and newsletters that keep educators informed about the latest developments in climate education and provide brief overviews of the basic science and effective instructional strategies.
• Instructional Guides: Detailed guidance on integrating climate and energy topics into curricula, aligning with standards like the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), and addressing how to teach climate across the curriculum.
• Classroom Management Strategies: Resources to help educators navigate controversial topics, manage classroom discussions on climate change, and support students' climate mental health.
• Community Engagement Opportunities: Information on joining the CLEAN Network, a vibrant community of professionals dedicated to enhancing climate and energy literacy, and how to join the CLEAN Ambassador Program.  

“I have enjoyed many facets of the CLEAN network over the years.  Whenever I run professional development for science teachers about climate change, I share CLEAN's set of vetted resources.”

-Climate Educator 

CLEAN has been funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of Energy (DOE), and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and was launched in 2010. CLEAN is led by climate education experts at the Center for Education, Engagement, and Evaluation (CEEE) at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science (CIRES) at the University of Colorado Boulder and the Science Education Resource Center (SERC) at Carleton College. CLEAN was funded as the official content provider for NOAA’s climate.gov/teaching climate webpages. 

Skip the overwhelming Google searches that yield millions of results to sift through. Our team of educators and climate scientists has reviewed and curated the best free teaching resources for bringing climate topics into grades K-12 through college. The CLEAN team follows a rigorous review process to ensure that only scientifically accurate and pedagogically effective resources are featured (Learn more here). The CLEAN review criteria are used to select the resources in the CLEAN collection, and you can trust that the materials are of the highest quality. Resources accepted into CLEAN are:  

• Peer-reviewed by 7 experts such as climate scientists and classroom teachers
• Classroom-ready; curated; online and freely accessible
• Aligned with NGSS and Climate and Energy Literacy Frameworks
• Searchable through filters for quick and relevant results 

Only resources that pass CLEAN’s rigorous review process receive CLEAN's seal of approval and are entered in the collection. CLEAN’s review process has built trust and a reputation of high quality among educators and scientists and is what sets our resources apart.  

Official Content Provider for Climate.gov Teaching Climate Webportal 

CLEAN was funded to provide content for NOAA's Climate.gov teaching climate portal and thus is a trusted source by the leading climate government agency and its scientists. CLEAN is also a content provider for the Open Educational Resources (OER) Commons climate education collections. 

The CLEAN collection provides a database of 800+ resources for teaching about climate and energy topics, including videos, data visualizations, simulations, lesson plans, and demonstrations. Resources in CLEAN are freely available, hand-picked, peer-reviewed, scientifically accurate, classroom-ready and individually tagged to make it easy what you are looking for in seconds. Each resource page includes a summary description of the resource and notes from the reviewers to provide additional information about the materials or teaching tips. 

The collection can be searched by a simple open text search either on the front page of CLEAN or on the main collection overview page, or by using filter options on the right side of the main collection search page. You can filter the resource collection by resource type (activity, video, visualization etc.), grade level, the big ideas in climate and energy education (also referred to as the climate literacy and the energy literacy principles), teaching subject, climate and energy topics, NGSS standards, regional focus, scientific dataset use, and online readiness.  

Are you interested in teaching climate across subject areas? CLEAN's Teaching Across the Curriculum collection offers activities, lesson plans, videos, and other resources for teaching climate in a variety of subjects such as English Language Arts (ELA), Social Studies, Math, and Art.   

CLEAN uses the Climate and Energy Literacy Frameworks as the organizational guide to identify which resources and materials to include to support learners to become climate literate. These literacy frameworks were developed by the US Global Change Research Program and the US Department of Energy and summarize the big ideas that a climate or energy-literate person needs to understand. These documents are endorsed by dozens of federal agencies and are used as a compass for all climate education nationally. To support educators to brush up on the background knowledge, the CLEAN portal includes a collection of brief summary pages for each of these big ideas and concepts.  

The "Teaching About" pages on the CLEAN webportal offer educators concise, accurate and easily digestible background information to understand the complex climate system and connections between climate, humans, and energy and to effectively teach climate and energy topics. These pages provide easy-to-read explanations of science and policy, designed to guide learners through the key principles of climate and energy. They include suggested teaching approaches tailored for various grade levels, Spanish-language versions, and highlights exemplar materials from the CLEAN reviewed collection and explanatory videos for each big idea. Follow along in the next video to learn more about CLEAN’s “Teaching Guidance” Pages. 

Understanding the Climate Literacy Principles and Energy Literacy Principles provides the knowledge and skills needed to understand Earth’s climate system and address the complex challenges related to it. These principles empower learners to make informed decisions about critical issues like climate change, energy use, and sustainability, fostering a deeper connection between science, society, and the environment. When using these frameworks for teaching, we prepare learners to think critically, engage in solutions, and contribute to building a more equitable and resilient future.  

 The US Global Change Research Program led the effort to develop the climate literacy frameworks and all subsequent updates and guides. The Department of Energy directed the development and endorsement process for the Energy Science Literacy Principles. These two frameworks complement each other. Systems thinking is integrated into these frameworks to help make sense of the complexity of the energy and climate cycles by looking at them in terms of wholes and relationships rather than by splitting them into their parts. An understanding of the nature and role of energy in the universe, our lives, and the climate system offers the key to solutions to mitigating climate change – the reduction in use of fossil fuels and therefore greenhouse gas emissions.  

CLEAN’s web pages on the Climate Literacy Principles introduce each principle in a sequence that illustrates different aspects of the human-climate system. Each page includes a summary of the current understanding of the science or policy that underlies the principles such as how human actions influence the climate and how the climate influences people and other parts of the Earth system. A climate literate person understands the processes, causes, and effects of climate change. They are better able to assess evidence and claims about evidence, discuss options to manage risks, and take well-informed actions. A climate-literate society is better able to develop and implement effective climate solutions that benefit all. 

CLEAN’s web pages on the Energy Literacy Principles begins with the physics of energy and proceeds through a discussion of energy in biological systems and throughout the earth system. Energy's influence on human society is explored from the point of view of different sources of energy, how we use energy, how we make decisions about energy, and the society-wide impacts of energy use. Taken together, these concepts describe energy literacy. 

But you can also find strategies for introducing climate at elementary grade levels, a framework for teaching climate in across subjects, NGSS climate-related standards, resources for teaching about the National Climate Assessment report, support materials for addressing controversies that may come up when teaching about climate topics, strategies for addressing mental health aspects of climate, and ideas for teaching climate virtually.. Many of these pages are translated into Spanish. CLEAN also provides professional development support through a regular webinar series that introduces participants to various topics in climate education and monthly newsletters that highlight relevant CLEAN resources to current issues. 

The educator support pages are the one-stop shop to access everything CLEAN has to offer. Here you find links to the Teaching about big ideas pages that you learned about in the previous section and the templates for building units using CLEAN resources. 

Explore our most popular Educator Support materials below. 

CLEAN is here to support all educators with climate and energy education, from the first-year teacher to the nature center field trip leader, to the veteran teacher wishing to stay up-to-date. Explore the many ways that CLEAN can support your teaching! 

Give to CLEAN: Join us by supporting the CLEAN project and be a part of the movement to create a better, scientifically informed world for generations to come. 

Newsletters:

CLEAN Educator Newsflash: Sharing Climate & Energy Resources- view past editions and subscribe here.

CLEAN Network Newsflash: Sharing Climate & Energy Current Events- view past editions and subscribe here.

Webinars: Take your teaching about climate and energy to the next level with the CLEAN Webinar Series.

CLEAN Teacher Ambassador Program: We support teachers who are familiar with CLEAN to present the project at regional teacher conferences and in local professional development workshops. We provide stipends and reimbursements to teachers who present about CLEAN, as well as providing conference abstracts and presentation templates. You can learn more here.

Join the CLEAN Network: A professionally diverse community of over 800 members committed to improving climate and energy literacy locally, regionally, nationally, and globally, to enable responsible decisions and actions. Join the Network to get access to a vibrant email list where members share ideas and resources related to climate and energy literacy and coordinate events. You'll also get the details on our weekly video conference calls right to your inbox. Learn more and join here.