Project Learning Tree (PLT) is an environmental education program for teaching children about trees and forests using hands-on activities. It was created in 1976, after passage of the first National Environmental Education Act in 1970 and celebration of the first Earth Day in 1970, raised the profile of environmental education in the United States.
It was the first of several "Project" environmental education programs developed around that time, and still in use in the 21st century, that use aspects of the environment to teach broader subjects and skills. Project Wild, which uses wildlife as its focus, was conceived in 1979 and launched in 1983. Project Wet began in 1984 with a focus on water. PLT's curricula and programs "use the forest as a window on the world to increase students understanding of our environment; stimulate students' critical and creative thinking [skills]; develop students ability to make informed decisions on environmental issues; and instill in students the commitment to take responsible action on behalf of the environment." PLT provides professional development to educators. More than half a million educators have attended workshops to learn how to use PLT materials since 1976 in the U.S. and U.S. Territories, Japan, Mexico, El Salvador, Sweden, Slovakia, Ukraine, China, Finland, Brazil, Jordan, and the Philippines. State agencies, like Ohio's Department of Natural Resources and Peace Corps volunteers also use PLT activities with youth around the world.
History
In 1970, Rudy Schafer, an environmental education specialist in the California Department of Education in Sacramento, received funding from the Office of Environmental Education in the then-U.S. Office of Education to hold a meeting to enable state-level education and resource management professionals to share information about how to teach about the environment. Shafer invited two representatives each from 13 western states to a meeting in Seattle in 1970—one who worked in a state-level education agency and one who worked in a state-level natural resource agency. The group called itself the Western Regional Environmental Education Council. At WREEC's third meeting in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1973, two staff members from the American Forest Institute, a national association funded by forest products companies and since organized as the American Forest Foundation, attended and proposed that WREEC develop a forest-based, environmental education curriculum that AFI would fund. After some discussion, WREEC members agreed "but only if we could build a credible, bias-free program based on strong pedagogical principles." A small PLT staff coordinated writing workshops where teachers and resource professionals drafted and pre-tested what became an activity guide with 75 activities, entitled Project Learning Tree: Supplementary Curriculum Guide for Kindergarten through Grade 6. The guide has been continually revised and updated since the mid-1970s, most recently in 2006, but it still has many of the same elements from the original publication.
Content and evaluations
Each activity includes suggested grade levels, subjects addressed, materials and time considerations, learning objectives, and assessment opportunities. The guides now include Early Childhood, PreK-8, an Energy & Society kit (grades 4–8), and Secondary (grades 9–12) versions and have been correlated to most states' standards, and to national standards in science and social studies. The North American Association for Environmental Education found that PLT complies with its six guidelines for excellence in environmental education, developed in 1996 and revised in 2004 and 2009. PLT's curriculum materials are arranged under five major science themes (diversity, interrelationships, systems, structure and scale, and patterns of change) and employ storylines to connect concepts and transcend traditional subject areas. PLT activities use experiential learning methods and inquiry-based investigations of environmental issues for teaching science and other core subjects. PLT has been cited as a best practices resource for pre-service teachers learning to plan and teach effective science lessons. The State Education and Environment Roundtable studied the impact on student achievement from using the "environment as an integrating concept (EIC)." In studies in 2000 and 2005 that compared schools in California where EIC was and was not used, treatment students performed better on a number of standardized tests than control students. These studies did not specifically look at the PLT curriculum, but they do confirm the validity of using the environment as a focus for the teaching of traditional school subjects.