Teacher Professional Development

Are you interested in taking your budding botanists & biologists outside for immersive learning and inquiry-based games and activities in your schoolyard and neighbourhood nature spaces?

Join us for a fun-filled session where our Environmental Educators will share engaging nature-based activitives that include links to science, math, art, and place-based storytelling. Teachers will gain confidence and bring home pratical activites to incorporate into their lesson plans through immersive outdoor experiences with other elementary teachers.

Register now!

Birds are everywhere, making them a beautiful and engaging nature connection for students right outside your school doors. Join us online for Schoolyard Birds for Educators, a Teacher Pro-D workshop with the Vancouver Avian Research Centre’s (VARC) Public Outreach & Education Coordinator, Candace Ross. This workshop will help empower teachers to incorporate bird themes into the classroom and curriculum. We will explore common backyard birds, their amazing adaptations, and how birds are working for us and the local environment.

This virtual Pro-D session includes a lecture, Q & A, activity ideas and demonstrations, and a teacher resource package.

This course will take place online. Recordings will be available for a limited time to participants.

Register now!

Join us in the Garden on Monday, April 24th for a full day, in-person professional development day!

VanDusen education staff will introduce the basics of native plant species identification, featuring iconic plants of the southern BC coast, and the intricate roles they play in the local ecosystem. Learn key characteristics of the most common trees, shrubs and forbs, and handy tips and tricks to recognize species seen around Metro Vancouver in both urban and wild areas, including the neighbourhood around your school.

This full-day program includes both a morning and afternoon workshop, with an hour lunch in between (lunch is not provided).

Learn more & Register now!

Join Bea Martin at VanDusen Botanical Garden for this fun and interactive skill-building workshop, where participants will learn how to bring nature journaling to their classrooms. In a friendly, welcoming, and supportive environment, participants will learn and practice easy activities and exercises, drawing fundamentals, explore a variety of low-cost art materials, and how to apply them to drawing outdoors with their students, using pictures, words, and numbers. Curricular tie-ins abound!

You do not need to be an artist to bring nature journaling to your classroom or keep a nature journal. All you need is a pencil and a sketchbook… and curiosity! We will spend time indoors and outdoors, weather permitting.

Learn more & Register now!

This online 10-part series with Megan Zeni will support K-7 elementary teachers eager to explore opportunities for teaching across the curriculum in their Westcoast school garden.

Each month we will review timely tasks that help keep gardens growing, as well as specific curricular connections, and practical management tips for teaching outdoors. Seasonal resources will be shared, and participants are encouraged to share their own success stories and challenges to broaden our collective expertise.

Registration is free this year and offered explicitly to a limited number of practicing K-7 school teachers. Please identify your school location and teaching role in the registration process.

Made possible through funding from the Vancouver Master Gardeners.

Register now!

If you are a K – Grade 12 teacher, you may be eligible for free Botany, Ecology or Gardening classes to aid in your classroom teaching or development of a school garden. Check out our course offerings under Adult Education – Botany & Ecology or Gardening & Design, then please complete this Request Form, and send to apineda@vandusen.org to register.

Sponsored by the Vancouver Master Gardeners.