Population Education (PopEd) provides K-12 teachers and other types of educators with innovative, hands-on lesson plans and professional development offerings to prepare them to teach about human population growth and its effects on the environment and human well-being. As the only national program for teachers that focuses on human population issues, PopEd fills an important need within US classrooms.
With an emphasis on interactive learning and balanced discussion of different viewpoints, our program, which turned 50 years old in 2025, has earned a reputation for educational excellence. All Population Education curriculum materials are classroom-tested, rigorously evaluated, and frequently updated to be leaders in their content and approach. They are interdisciplinary, well-suited for a cooperative learning environment, and classroom-ready. All of the materials are matched to current national and state academic standards and frameworks.
We provide hands-on training to 10,000+ teachers and future teachers annually in Northern America. Tens of thousands of educators are introducing important population concepts to their students using these outstanding resources, and millions of students are benefiting from them. In fact, our bi-annual surveys of participating educators allow us to estimate that each year we reach about 3 million students with our curriculum resources!
Since 1975, Population Education materials have encouraged students of all grade levels to think critically, engage in real-world issues, and work to become the next generation of informed leaders, voters, and global citizens.
Measuring the Impact of Population Education
Year after year, PopEd has earned a reputation for educational excellence. To ensure we continually improve our materials and trainings, we ask educators who have participated in our workshops to provide feedback.
Population Education Reaches Thousands of Educators Each Year
- Over the past 10 years, we have trained over 100,000 educators through 5,000+ Population Education workshops and webinars.
- Between 2010 and 2020, 3,866 of these were pre-service workshops on 500 college and university campuses around the United States and Canada.
The Population Education Workshop Experience
PopEd offers both in-person and online workshops. No matter the format, our top-notch facilitators lead memorable trainings, giving educators timely and innovative classroom materials for teaching global issues. Educators consistently rate PopEd workshops as superior to other PD events they’ve attended.
See our Evaluation of 2021-2022 Teacher Training Workshops below:
