Ten Strategies for Strengthening Outdoor Learning at Your School

By Jennifer Baron

It was hard to leave the ideal job of Outdoor Education Center Teacher once my term was over and I needed to return to the classroom. I felt claustrophobic inside those four walls. I knew I wanted to take my homeroom and rotary Science classes outside. However, at my new school, I lacked both the official mandate and resources to take the learning outside like I had done while working at the wonderfully stocked Outdoor Education Centers. That was over a decade ago, and since that time I have learned how to overcome these problems by applying many strategies to strengthen outdoor learning at the schools where I teach.

With the return to school in the midst of a global pandemic, some school leaders may have embraced outdoor learning with the thinking that it affords more space for physical distancing and conversely less shared indoor air, thereby lessening the potential for virus transmission. That being said, simply transporting learning outdoors — in essence, getting rid of the four walls and copying indoor learning methods outside — does not necessarily lead to greater student achievement and well-being. My proposition is that there is an outdoor education continuum, with the infrastructure of a well-established outdoor education field center on one end, compared to attempting to replicate indoor teaching outside of the four walls of one’s school at the other end. The purpose of this article is to share 10 high-yield strategies, which are based on taking my experiences as an outdoor education and classroom teacher and applying them to any school with the goals to support COVID-19 protocols as well as academic achievement and well-being. The 10 strategies below flow into one another. They are iterative and applicable to students of any age; hopefully you can apply them to build and strengthen the structure of outdoor learning at your school.