Before students can take informed, meaningful action, educators need time and space to explore, imagine, and design. This section offers two tools to help you build your AOP runway—the essential groundwork that supports action-oriented teaching rooted in your passions, your students' lives, and your local context.

• Use the Creating An AOP Runway Reflection Prompts below to spark ideas, clarify direction, and think systemically about what you want to create.

• Use the Personalized Climate Learning Plan below to focus your own learning, identify key resources, and connect climate content with your teaching goals.

Together, these tools are designed to help you prepare for real work with real consequences—starting from where you are.

This set of Creating an AOP Runway Reflection Prompts, along with the Personalized Climate Learning Project below, are designed to help you build that runway with thought-provoking questions across key areas—such as student passions, interdisciplinary links, standards alignment, systems thinking, and sustainability themes—to help you plan with intention, creativity, and responsiveness. 

Whether you're brainstorming a new unit, adapting an existing idea, or building a plan from curiosity and care, this tool is here to support you. Use it solo, with colleagues, or even with students as co-designers. Let it help you prepare for action that is not only meaningful—but also informed, situated, and capable of leaving a lasting legacy!

As educators, you bring invaluable experience, insight, and deep care for your students and communities. We developed the Personalized Climate Learning Project template as part of an intentional design process to support educators in meaningfully enacting the Action-Oriented Pedagogies (AOP) framework in their own contexts.

This Personalized Climate Learning Plan is designed to honor and build upon what you already know and do, while supporting you to chart a meaningful path into climate and sustainability education.

This is not about starting from scratch. It's about recognizing your strengths, drawing on your lived experiences, and connecting your interests with your students' realities to foster impactful learning. It’s also about preparing to teach in ways that position students not only as learners, but as change-makers—capable of shaping their own futures and acting in their communities.

This Personalized Climate Learning Project resource help educators move beyond abstract ideas and offer a concrete, affirming, and flexible tool that helps educators prepare not just to teach climate issues—but to do so in a way that fosters optimism, agency, and transformative learning for themselves and their students.

This is your learning project. It’s an opportunity to reflect, be curious, take risks, and feel supported by a community of educators who share your commitment to climate justice and transformative education.

We’re glad you’re here!

• Brokering to Disrupt Power: How to Leverage Brokering Practices to Support Equity Outcomes (Calabrese Barton, A., Ching, D., Santo, R., Hoadley, C., & Peppler, K. (2019). This brief explains how “brokering” — connecting youth to meaningful learning opportunities — can be a powerful equity-oriented practice when done intentionally. It highlights how brokers (educators, mentors, program leaders) can help young people, especially those from marginalized groups, deepen their interests, expand their social networks, and challenge dominant narratives about who can participate in STEM. The brief emphasizes that brokering can either reinforce or disrupt inequities depending on how power is negotiated, urging educators to reflect critically on their choices, value youth competencies, and create pathways that challenge traditional power structures in education and STEM fields

• When Doing Good Is Good for You: Brokering Future Learning Opportunities to Youth as a Bi-Directional Co-Learning Practice (Calabrese Barton, A., Ching, D., Santo, R., Hoadley, C., & Peppler, K., 2016). This brief emphasizes that effective brokering is not a one-way process of adults connecting youth to opportunities, but a bi-directional, co-learning practice. When educators act as brokers, they not only help young people access future learning pathways but also learn from youth about their interests, assets, and desired contexts. This shift resists deficit-based views of marginalized youth and instead values the knowledge, humor, relationships, and creativity they bring. The brief urges educators to approach brokering as relationship-building, centering youth assets, and creating opportunities that reshape how young people are recognized in school and community spaces.