ConocoPhillips sponsors middle school teachers each year to attend The Keystone Center's Key Issues Institute, a national teacher training institute with a focus on the environment and sustainability. The programs are designed primarily for middle school teachers. Participants spend one week during the summer using a framework to investigate issues and learning consensus-building tools to use in the classroom.
Key Issues: Bringing Environmental Issues to the Classroom strives to partner with corporations, foundations and educators to improve students' decision-making abilities by providing them with real-life activities that use science as the backdrop. The program emphasizes the importance of utilizing a balanced, non-biased, comprehensive and interdisciplinary approach to investigate environmental issues within the context of a scientific analysis.
Key Issues II: Bringing Sustainability to the Community provides teachers and their students with the tools to analyze their communities' needs and effectively understand the complex interplay of social, economic and environmental factors and how they might affect quality of life for current and future generations.
The Keystone Center is a non-profit public policy and educational organization founded in 1975. The Center strives to develop creative problem-solving processes that assist diverse parties to address issues of importance and to provide quality science education through hands-on inquiry of the natural world. The Keystone Center pursues this end through its three divisions, the Center for Science and Public Policy, Professional Education and Leadership and Keystone Science School. The Keystone Center is headquartered in Keystone, Colorado, with an office in Washington, D.C.