Self Assessment for Teaching Environmental Education

Prompt?: Write a self-assessment of your content knowledge, confidence, and abilities to teach the EE standards for the grade that you plan to teach.

In the future I will be teaching special education. I am fairly confident in my ability, and am sure that I will succeed in this field. Regarding this specific topic, however, I am less confident about. While I have always had a passion for nature and a concern for environmental issues, I don't feel that I currently have the knowledge to teach it successfully at this point in time. That being said, I am also confident that I will learn the necessary  information relatively easily. I am also unsure of how I will teach the information appropriately. In my field, I will be working with a variety of students, with and even larger variety of abilities and disabilities, so I will have to differentiate quite a bit. Furthermore, there will be other students that I have contact with that I will not be the primary teacher of, so there environmental education will be the responsibility of someone else. This is mainly what I am worried about. How will I convey my passion and knowledge  to my students in a way that they will understand. Also, what do I do if I encounter students that really do not care about the environment, and no matter what I say or do, will never care? Of course, these concerns of mine will probably go away as I learn more in not only my specific field, but the field of environmental education.

Another specific concern that I have is more directly related to the class itself, and the information we will learn in the class. It is not that I fear that it will be too difficult, but more that I do not know what is coming. Environmental Education seems rather vague to me, and I am also not sure how to transfer my knowledge to a way that is easy for students to understand.

Oh well. So far the class is going well, and I have done well in all of my classes so far, so this is probably another one of my un-warranted stress-freakout episodes. All will be fine.