Greening School Behaviour

Greening school behaviour and attitudes means applying an environmental / sustainability ethic to all decisions we make and actions we take within our school community.

Research studies suggest that attitudes and behaviors of individuals are frequently modeled after the attitudes and behavior of others. Since most youth spend six to seven hours a day in school buildings, a coordinated school environmental program that focuses on preventing and solving environmental problems at the school site can provide an excellent model of attitudes and behaviors for young people to emulate.
— Robert W. Howe and John F. Disinger

In even fewer words, we must walk our talk. We must be aware of the lessons our actions and behaviours as an organization — a community of learners with numerous stakeholders — are teaching.

Below are the ethics, attitudes, decisions, behaviours and actions I have witnessed or helped implement in schools going green.

Getting Started in Greening Your School's Organizational Behaviour

• always consider the impact of a behaviour or a decision on the Earth, the future, and the children of all species


• be sure the 3 Rs are in place and actively promoted (reduce whenever possible, reuse as often as possible, recycle as much as possible)


• conduct a waste/energy/water/paper audit and measure the school's ecological footprint, in order to have baseline data and a starting point (your Green School committee can do the audit, you can assign it to students, or you can hire a firm to do it)


• write and then follow green school policies
• a green purchasing policy (for example, buy only toilet paper made from recycled paper, ensure that new photocopiers make double-sided printing easy)
• a green event policy
• a policy for greening school hiring (for example, ensuring that all interviews for hiring new staff, contractors and suppliers include an environmental education / sustainability learning related question)
• a policy to ensure that fundraising campaigns are environmentally friendly


• green your language choices and metaphors


• adopt sustainable development principles as the school's discussion, planning and decision making framework


• put a sustainability representative on all school decision-making teams (include older students on these teams, as well, to model sustainable development principles such as intergenerational equity and multi-stakeholder consultation)


• suggest that your student council or student government include a sustainability representative

Grade 3 students (8 and 9 year olds) realized that sustainable development means fairness

Around the School

• look at your classrooms, hallways and other school spaces through green-coloured glasses; ensure that they help connect students with the rest of Nature, rather than disconnecting them


• put plants in every classroom and sunny hallway, and make an ethic of caring for those plants part of your school's ethos and one of your class routines


• bring nature inside (terraria, aquarium, through artwork, in special showcases, and during special events)


• honour the daylight; turn lights out when you don't need them due to sunlight

Greening School Behaviour Can Save You Money

• insist that staff and students bring their own mugs and water bottles; no more paper/styrofoam/plastic cups or bottles in the staffroom or at special events (and the ensuing waste management costs)


• minimize paper usage in school publications

• set up a friendly competition to see which teacher can use the least paper per month and per year
• hold a Paperless Prof Day each month and share the most creative ways that teachers teach without paper (remember individual slates?)
• be sure that all school printing is done double sided
• train teachers — especially old ones and new ones! — in how to print double-sided copies, on both the photocopier and the computer printers
• only allow memos and draft assignments to be written on scrap paper
• email newsletters to all parents who do not specifically request a paper version


• turn off computers and computer labs at night and on weekends (to save money on electricity)


• turn classroom, staffroom and other lights out if the room is going to be empty for more than a few minutes


• as green design guru William McDonough explains, in Nature
  waste = food; aim to become a zero waste school


• start a garbage free/litterless lunch campaign and a composting program; both will save the school money in waste management costs


• droughts are affecting more and more communities, and water will soon cost a lot more; look for every opportunity to conserve water
• determine whether a highly efficient dishwasher would save water in the school kitchen or staffroom
• fix drips and leaks and running water fountains

• only water essential plantings and only at night
• install waterless urinals and/or composting toilets
• have some fun getting the whole school community over the "ick factor" when it comes to the increasingly necessary toilet flushing rule: "If it's yellow, let it mellow. If it's brown, flush it down"

Celebrate in Green Ways

• participate in environmental celebrations (Earth Day is always
  April 22; World Environment Day is June 5)


• serve locally grown (support local farmers), organic (safeguard your students' health), vegetarian (the meat industry is responsible for a large proportion of greenhouse gases worldwide) foods at school events (I've never met anyone who died because they didn't get meat at a school function!)


• practise gratitude as a way to help instill the habit of appreciation for Nature's gifts in students (see Saying Grace Together and Prayers for the Earth)


• let special natural events become teachable moments, no matter what you teach (I used to stop my French lessons when the pileated woodpecker came to the tree outside my classroom window)


• take part in fund- and friend-raising for environmental groups, for example
• Audubon's Pennies for the Planet campaign in the United States

See Campus and Community as Classroom

• take weekly walkabouts with your class around the school yard and the neighbourhood


• go outside to learn more often; create an outdoor "classroom" if possible (this can be as simple as stumps under a shade tree)


• create a school garden, or naturalized areas with landscaping to attract butterflies and birds


• ensure that the area around your school is an idle-free zone


• encourage carpooling or walking school buses


• think about the radius around your school and consider how far students should travel on field trips (no more than one hundred miles? or maybe just one hundred steps outside the classroom?)

Howe and Disinger, in Teaching Desirable Environmental Ethics and Action through School Activities, suggest five elements that will help in the process of greening school behaviour:

1. a set of policies
2. procedures for identification of problems
3. action plans to prevent and alleviate problems
4. plans for monitoring actions, and
5. evaluation policies, identification activities, action activities, and monitoring activities.

Good luck with all your (ad)ventures in greening school behaviour, and be sure to have fun. You know what they say ...
if it ain't fun, it ain't sustainable!


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