Professional development tends to improve instruction on Planetary Health when it helps teachers practice and enact specific strategies with ongoing support. 

• A review of climate change teacher professional development identified two capacities teachers need. The first is knowledge of complex, interdisciplinary science, including atmospheric processes, system dynamics, mitigation, and adaptation. The second is the ability to teach a topic that students and communities perceive as controversial. These needs are likely greater for Planetary Health, which also draws on public health, social science, and ethics.
• Syntheses of the broader PD literature find that programs linked to changes in teaching and student outcomes share several features. They focus on specific content, engage teachers in active learning and collaboration, model effective practice, and provide coaching and feedback over time.
• A meta-analysis of STEM professional development found larger effects on student achievement when programs gave teachers curriculum materials, trained them in how to use those materials, and included follow-up meetings during implementation. Leveraging existing knowledge infrastructure systems through partnerships with universities and educator preparation programs can facilitate knowledge-sharing and add capacity by lowering the burden on districts.

Note: Below we illustrate how leaders might enact these practices. The examples follow logically from the researched practices above. They have not necessarily been evaluated for their effects on student outcomes, school operations, or costs. Accordingly, leaders can treat them as ideas to consider, adapt, and monitor in their own contexts.

When instruction makes Planetary Health content personally and locally relevant, students show greater understanding and engagement.

• A systematic review of 49 climate change education interventions found two features common to effective programs: they made information personally relevant and meaningful, and they used active, engaging teaching methods.
• Connecting content to students’ own lives can increase interest and achievement. In a randomized experiment in high school science classes, students who wrote about how course material related to their own lives reported more interest and earned higher grades, especially students who had low expectations of success. Research on public engagement with climate change similarly finds that abstract, distant framings tend to reduce engagement.
• Partnering with affected communities can change how students understand environmental harm. In a community-engaged environmental engineering course, students shifted from seeing environmental injustice as harm to the environment toward seeing it as structural harm to communities. The shift came as they connected infrastructure, structural racism, and environmental injustice.
• Analyzing real environmental data is associated with gains in knowledge and engagement. In one study of project-based climate literacy units, students who worked with real environmental data and models showed increases in climate knowledge and affective engagement, and older students also reported stronger intentions to act.
• In one experiment, pairing images with text strengthened students’ emotional response to biodiversity loss. Students who viewed photographs of biodiversity loss alongside informational text reported stronger negative emotions, placed higher value on biodiversity, and reported more pro-environmental actions and intentions than students who read the text alone.

Teaching that emphasizes real-world solutions, collective impact, and shared possibility is associated with increases in student motivation to act on climate issues.

• A meta-analysis of 46 studies found that greater hope is linked to greater climate engagement. The association was strongest for hope about personal action, compared with general hope about climate change. 
• Belief in a group’s capacity to act can raise individuals’ belief in their own. In an experiment on collective efficacy, participants who received messages about a group’s capacity to address environmental problems reported stronger pro-environmental intentions. The effect worked partly by increasing their confidence in their own ability to act. This suggests that presenting environmental challenges as requiring both individual and collective action may be more motivating than emphasizing either alone.
• Solution-oriented messages tend to support engagement more than messages of doom. Research on climate communication finds that messages emphasizing solutions encourage engagement, while messages emphasizing catastrophe can discourage it.
• Problem-focused instruction without attention to solutions may leave students unprepared. A study of undergraduate geography students in the UK and Ireland found that courses emphasizing climate change problems, without gradually building students’ ability to identify and evaluate solutions, left students unprepared to address real-world environmental challenges.

Classrooms that emphasize understanding others’ viewpoints, structured dialogue, and psychological safety better prepare students to productively engage with controversial issues, such as Planetary Health.

• Structured discussion is associated with better understanding and greater confidence. In a study of secondary students in ten countries, students who took part in structured discussions of controversial public issues showed improvement in three areas: their understanding of the issues, their ability to express their own views, and their confidence addressing difficult topics with peers. Relatedly, students who participated in Structured Academic Controversy deliberations also demonstrated stronger perspective-taking skills than students in comparison classes.
• Classroom climate shapes who participates. In a study of secondary students discussing controversial issues, students were more willing to participate when teachers created a warm, structured classroom climate. In those classrooms, individual factors such as identity threat and personality traits were less predictive of who spoke up.
• Perspective taking is linked to empathy and prosocial motivation. A study synthesizing research on social perspective taking reports that encouraging people to imagine and articulate others’ viewpoints is associated with greater empathy, less polarization, and stronger prosocial motivation, including motivation toward environmental action.

Nature-based outdoor learning is associated with benefits for students’ wellbeing, social development, and academic outcomes, with the strongest evidence among elementary students.

• Outdoor learning in natural settings is linked to benefits across several domains. A systematic review of 147 studies of nature-specific outdoor learning programs found measurable benefits for students’ wellbeing, social development, and academic outcomes. Most of the evidence came from primary-aged students, so the findings are less certain for secondary students.
• Time in nature is associated with better mental health in the general population. A synthesis of research on nature and mental health found associations between contact with nature and a range of mental health benefits. These studies mostly involve adults and do not test outdoor instruction specifically, but they suggest one reason outdoor learning may support student wellbeing.
• Outdoor learning may give Planetary Health instruction a direct, local anchor. No studies in this review tested outdoor learning’s effects on Planetary Health knowledge or engagement. However, learning in natural settings lets students observe the ecosystems and environmental conditions the subject asks them to understand, which connects to the evidence on local relevance described above.