VMN for Educators

2025 Program Information

This unique collaboration between North Branch Nature Center (NBNC) and Vermont Master Naturalist is a place-based, integrated training in interpreting the local landscape and applying that training to the 5th-12th grade classroom and curricula. Each day immerses in a different ecosystem, exploring the pieces, patterns, and processes driving local ecology. We’ll practice field-based activities and classroom-based extensions aligned with Next Generation Science Standards and Proficiency-Based Learning frameworks.

Instructors: Sean Beckett, Alicia Daniel, & Guest Instructors
August 4 – 8, 2025 | $1300 ($1750 with 3 graduate credits)
Class Size: 16 students

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Each day focuses on a different “layer” of the landscape, beginning with the bedrock beneath our feet, and ending with the birdlife flying above. Topics will include geology, glacial history, soils, botany, rivers and wetlands, and wildlife. Each day will present ecological puzzles that will be teased apart by participants through each day’s explorations.

By the end of the week, participants will be equipped with a deeper repertoire of naturalist skills as well as a range of resources, activities, and frameworks to understand and teach about Vermont ecology and conservation. No prerequisite naturalist training is required– only a love of the natural world and a healthy dose of curiosity.

This course is about reconnecting with nature, re-imagining nature-based teaching and learning at the middle and high school level, and cultivating a community of educators passionate about exploring and understanding our wild world.

Course Goals

  • Pieces: Gain comfort identifying the characteristic residents of the Vermont woods, including birds, trees, plants, rocks, mammals, and insects.
  • Patterns: Become familiar recognizing and interpreting the particular distribution of species and their habitats across the landscape.
  • Processes: Explore how landscape patterns are driven by factors like precipitation, slope, human disturbance, temperature, climate change, beaver dynamics, and more.
  • Partners: Cultivate relationships with educators and conservation professionals to enrich student engagement in nature-related curricula.
  • Proficiencies: Explore alignment of ecological and nature-based curriculum with Next Generation Science Standards and Proficiency-based Learning.

Course Objectives

  • Practice standards-aligned, field- and classroom-based activities designed to study local species and ecosystems.
  • Engage with state ecologists and conservation organizations.
  • Practice using digital tools such as iNaturalist, Seek, eButterfly, and eBird to aid in species identification and contribution to Citizen Science.
  • Practice using written guides to identify plant species and categorize natural communities.
  • Visit a key suite of Vermont’s Natural Community Types, and become familiar using the Natural Community concept to explain ecological and biotic/abiotic systems in Vermont.
  • Explore strategies for building written and digital tools into classroom extensions of field-based activities.

Banner photo from North Branch Nature Center.