This is an opportunity for schools to model the growth mindset that we talk to our students about.
- Rice University, in Houston, is building nine big new classrooms this summer, all of them outdoors. Five are open-sided circus tents that the university is buying, and another four are semi-permanent structures that workers are building in an open field near dorms.
- In Denmark, schools held spring classes on playgrounds, in public parks and even in the stands of the national soccer stadium.
- At a Baptist church in Westerville, Ohio, the pastor recently climbed into a scissor lift and conducted a drive-in service while he was 25 feet off the ground.
- Many cities have loosened restrictions on outdoor dining.
- Outdoor drive-in concerts are happening in Jersey Shore.
We really think that the solution that Sharon is proposing, to create outdoor learning spaces on school yards, and take advantage of local and regional parks within walking distance is not just a Band-Aid to put on top of a horrible situation during COVID-19... We’re really hoping that we can take advantage of this opportunity, and that what we learn from it will have a lasting benefit to our school system and communities for decades and decades, not just until there’s a vaccine...
Sharon Danks:
The idea is to use the outdoors as an asset with many different
potential permutations and scales. We’re advocates of a large-scale
approach, but we recognize that this is going require flexibility... We’ve
been walking through some case studies with school district partners to
think about how they might use their own environments.
All the modeling suggesting six feet of distance between students in the classroom is predicated on the idea that kids will stay in their seat for eight hours a day. We know that is not going to happen. Even if we’re thinking of this indoor six-foot model, we need our kids to be able to spread into outdoor spaces.
A lot of districts are anticipating being able to host 50% classroom capacity. We’re exploring how a school might place the remaining students in the environment outside, either at parks or at school grounds, in order to potentially serve all enrolled students.
For schools that are modeling 100% capacity, an idea might be that these class clusters are sitting on a combination of existing infrastructure that schools have in their yard and new straw bales and logs and camping chairs and seat cushions, or whatever arrangement of furniture they’d like to have from inexpensive to more of an investment. There are a range of possibilities. They might be sitting under an event tent like you might have at a wedding or a carport or a yurt. There are many choices for outdoor shelter, for shade, and for rain that would place them out into the landscape.
Climate
is another factor. In Southern California, it may be too hot go outside
until November, so they’re looking at how an outdoor plan specifically
from November to May. Schools with colder climates might have the
reverse pattern, staying until it’s really bitter cold or outside until
there’s serious thunderstorms and wind. The question we’re asking is:
how
does the outdoors become Plan A?
How can we get everyone outside as much of the time as possible, looking at indoors and as backup plans rather than the other way around?
Craig Strang: We would advocate for adapting instruction to the opportunity that the outdoors provides, which is usually an improvement to, not a detraction from, teaching and learning. This requires providing opportunities for teachers to improve their practice at outdoor learning, providing them with resources, while also infusing schools with educators who are skilled at outdoor learning. Even if they can expand their space capacity, schools cannot realistically expand their personnel capacity, particularly in an era of budget reduction. Schools have a personnel problem and there’s a workforce currently ready and waiting and trained up. We need to find the mechanism to put them together...
The outdoor education, outdoor science, environmental education community has been hugely impacted by COVID-19. In a recent national survey, 30 percent of environmental education and outdoor science programs say that they are highly unlikely or certain not to reopen if social distancing stays in place and they can’t run
programs at their sites through the end of the year.
About 1,000 organizations respond to
the survey, which is just a fraction of all the programs in the
country. Those 1,000 organizations said that they have 30,000 employees
that will be laid off and furloughed. We think that there’s an
opportunity there for a partnership, to redeploy those 30,000+ outdoor
instructors who are trained, skilled, passionate, eager to work with
kids again outdoors, and put them to work solving this problem that
schools have that otherwise is insoluble.
These
instructors that could be redeployed could be working with kids and
providing extraordinary experiences and outdoor learning, while also
modeling, demonstrating and providing guidance to classroom teachers who
don’t feel as comfortable in those outdoor settings, helping them to
slowly, over time, adjust their instruction for the long run. It’s not a
simple solution, and there are a lot of barriers, but if we could make
it work it would be an extraordinarily mutually beneficial relationship.
As crazy as an idea as it is,
I don’t think it’s any crazier than saying that kids should be home three days a week doing distance learning while their parents are at work,
and trying to figure out how
to get their laptop to work, and doing worksheets and online quizzes for
three or four hours a day in the best-case scenarios.
Bioneers: Public K-12 education can be compared to a massive ocean liner, where making a course correction is not a quick endeavor. It really feels that we don’t have that kind of time right now. However, we just witnessed a dramatic shift, where the entire K-12 education system went online within a matter of weeks. Clearly there were problems and it didn’t work very well, but it probably worked better than people thought it might.
Craig Strang: On February 15th of 2020, distance learning was not a very high priority in our schools. If you came forward and said, “Hey, I have this great idea. I think that our schools would be a lot better if we could have some kind of distance learning thing that would individualize and allow kids to learn at their own pace, and all these great things,” people would tell you that you’re crazy, we can’t afford that, we don’t have the resources, we can barely support classroom instruction.
As you just said, overnight it became a priority. And we did it. We didn’t do a perfect job of it, but it became a priority, and as soon as it was a priority, we had the resources to do it...
People talk about the funding. If it’s a priority, I think we can work it out. People talk about teaching credentials for outdoor ed instructors. There are solutions for that, especially given that the workforce that we’re talking about is trained and skilled and has been working in the field for a long time. Many states have emergency credential-waiver processes. Many schools have systems where if the students that are not with a credentialed teacher are within sight or earshot of a credentialed teacher that can supervise, that’s okay. Some of these of barriers can be addressed with the wave of a hand.
Sharon Danks: ...We know that outdoor learning is an effective and feasible solution that’s been tried before. It’s what happened in the tuberculosis epidemic and the Spanish flu epidemic 100 years ago. It’s also happening around the world. Other countries are looking at the same approach, including Scotland and Italy.
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Under the re-opening conditions that are being envisioned, it’s arguably less complicated to have kids sitting in outdoor environments than it is having them sit in indoor environments. If they’re on the inside of a building, it might require three or four times the janitorial staff to wipe surfaces down, to sanitize everything the kids touch, every time the kids come and go and there’s a new group in, everything has to be cleaned. There’s a lot of installation of barriers and upgrading of HVAC systems that needs to happen. Outdoor education requires the kids and supplies be outside. In a lot of ways this is much simpler and cheaper than the solutions that are being proposed on the interiors.
This is not to say there aren’t complications. Questions around permitting outdoor structures and bathroom access and lunch service, etc. require logistics integration planning that needs to happen, but I would not say that they’re barriers. We need to un-silo some of those thinking processes and bring them together to make them function smoothly. That’s the work that we’re doing right now.
Bioneers: You had a large kick-off event in early June and 1,000 people attended. I assume that the end goal is to provide road maps and resources for communities all over the country who want to rapidly implement this approach?
Sharon Danks: There has been a groundswell of interest that we’re trying to harness. The we in this is Lawrence Hall Science collaborating with Green School Yards America, San Mateo County Office of Education and Ten Strands together alongside a whole network of partners joining us from around the country.
We’re channeling those efforts into 11 working groups that will be working over the summer in their own areas of expertise to weave together some ideas, strategies, frameworks and guidance around the following:
Plans to ensure equity
Outdoor classroom infrastructure
Park/school collaboration
Outdoor learning and instructional models
Staffing and formal/non-formal partnerships
School program integration (with PE, recess, before/after care)
Community engagement
Health and safety considerations
Local and state policy shifts
Funding and economic models
Community of Practice for Early Adopters
The first 10 are set up to produce materials that can be downloaded for free by districts across the country to help them not to reinvent the wheel. The 11th group is one that doesn’t want to wait for the end of the summer for it to happen, and would like to move forward and work it out with us.
We want to invite people who are interested in joining us to look at the website and fill out a survey of how they’d like to be involved. It is fundamentally a collective impact problem.
But we also want to inspire people to go back to their own areas and support their own school districts armed with the collective thoughts from the group, and ready to work in an organized.
Craig Strang: ... It can’t be just an individual outdoor garden coordinator at one school trying to figure it out on their own, and everybody thinks they’re crazy. Right? We need parents and superintendents, and classroom teachers, and business people all going, “Oh yeah, I heard about that idea! Let’s make it happen.”
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