Contributed by David McClymont
Making the transition from teaching indoors to teaching in the outdoors can seem daunting. The first thing to realise is that our apprehensions stem from what is not known, rather than what is known. In my twelve or so years as an outdooreducator I have seen more than a few classroom teachers who have a wealth of knowledge and wisdom lose their voice when they step out among the trees, and it seems most commonly rooted in a lack of confidence and the presence of apprehension.
But it takes no more, or less, effort to teach outdoors – Just a change of gears.
So, here I would like to outline 3 easy mental gear shifts we aseducators can make to ease the transition from the rigidity of a classroom environment to the wonderous inspiration font of the great outside.
1. Breath
We go to the place we are thinking about moving our learning to and take that time to know it. Don’t worry, I’m not going to advise you to open your chakras or play 20 questions with your past lives, we’re going to want the children in our care to explore and experience this place, so we do it ourselves. Sit with it, poke around. There may be none of the things we are used to having in a classroom, but we will find an awful lot more than meets the eye.
The lovely thing about this process is that as we explore and connect with the natural environment, we will have an appreciation of how the children will be feeling when it’s their turn. We let ourselves see it through their eyes as well as our own and that is how we will know the value it has to offer.
This is a small adjustment in attitude and outlook that will help set the pacing and tone of your future lessons here and in any other new environments. It will also let us identify any key points that are relevant to their current topics – “Are there trees here? Has Oxygen in the atmosphere been a class topic?”To name a basic example.
When standard school curriculums are plotted in steps it is easy to miss the roots and shoots of the topics we cover. By looking to the natural world and seeing all of the concepts we teach about in action it opens our lessons to more self-led and guided discovery opportunities.
The natural world can be an excellent ally in our explanations and teachings and is a better illustrator of important topics than a lot of videos and diagrams. We move at it’s pace and let it bring it’s own contributions, align our breathing with its and encourage the children we teach to do the same.
2. Write Mozart,
We don’t have a lot of enemies in outdoor education, at least I like to hope not. For us, the real undo-er of a plan can just bereal life. The weather changes, the sky darkens, a global pandemic confines us all to our homes, things happen and the world spins on. So those who work with me now will often hear me espouse the phrase “no plan survives contact with real life”.
This is not, however, to say “don’t make a plan”. Actually, make two plans. Make five. Have a stack of lesson plans for each eventuality and neatly bound together with a bow so you can throw them all away at once. The benefit of a plan does not come from having the plan neatly printed, filed and folded. Yes, it ticks boxes in the admin wing but the benefit it bestows upon us as educators is much more.
When we write up these lesson plans it shows us, in writing in front of us, all the things we didn’t know we knew. It lays bare our own capacity for ideas and creativity and we will surprise ourselves. Remember at the top of this article we identified a need for confidence? A great way to have confidence going into something new is to have plans and plans and plans. By doing this we can start to look at all of our ideas for different styles of lessons as something different – different expressions of our own teaching approach.
From here we can start to pick and choose elements of each and drop them into our lessons as and when the opportunity arises. I compare it to a musical scale in my mind. A musician will learn a scale as a series of notes that they will play in ascending or descending sequences in order to memorise them. However, if all music was just ascending and descending sequences then we wouldn’t have had a new songsince Mozarts “twinkle twinkle little star”. Once the notes are learned a musician can pick and choose them at random in sequences of their liking, they can play jazz.
By shifting gear mentally we give ourselves room for that improvisation. We allow our selection of material to grow and expand and we become more comfortable moving away from the carefully scripted sonatas of educational perfection we compose on paper, and create our own, unique, engaging, exciting, and inimitable freestyle jazz of leadership.
3. Learn to Dance
It might be a cliché, but there is a truth in this that is more appliccable to outdoor learning than to nearly anything else, and much more literally. Sometimes it rains. As a Scottish person I can personally testify to this. When I have client groups looking out of the window and reconsidering the 17km hike we had planned, I point out that in Scotland, if we didn’t go out in the rain nothing would get done. An old mentor of mine used to say “there’s no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothes”.
Of course, I dont just mean to write about coping with inclement weather, that is a much more technical aspect of outdoor leadership, what I want to convey is that old mentors attitude to challenges, which is why I titled this point as I did. The phrase I took this from (in case you missed every motivational meme on the internet) is “life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass, it’s about learning to dance in the rain”.
What we should try to take from this is that we can’t control everything, and effort put into trying, or time put into waiting for favourable circumstances is usually wasted. Instead, we shift gears and allow ourselves to improvise.
Find the valuable teaching points in adversity.
So to conclude (and I hope this has been a helpful read), we shouldn’t be afraid to let ourselves out of our own box from time to time, slow down and enjoy what we do. As educators in the outdoors we are at our best when we move with the world around us rather than attempt to tame it. We breathe with it, We play Jazz with it, We dance with it.