Connecting Content With Nature in High School Lessons

Students stroll into the classroom on a sunny afternoon. They fall into their assigned seats, open their laptops, and lean in so that only the tops of their heads are visible. Except for Steven. He walks to the window and asks, “Why don’t we ever go outside like we did in elementary school?”

For many secondary teachers, the reflex answer probably sounds something like this: “Because we have to get this unit done before the benchmark assessment next week.”

Yet, getting the unit done on time does not mean we can’t go outside to learn. In fact, holding class outside might just be the spark that boosts scores on that upcoming benchmark assessment.

Here’s why: Outdoor lessons can make abstract concepts more concrete, which often means the lesson is more meaningful and memorable. Plus, just about any lesson can be adapted to just about any space available on campus. I discovered that outdoor lessons can have transformative power, even within curriculum requirements, if the lessons contain a few key elements.

Select a Focus

The first step to crafting a powerful outdoor lesson is determining what concepts are essential to a student’s understanding of the content being assessed, especially those important concepts that students struggle to explain clearly. For example, in an English language arts class, students sometimes struggle to explain the purpose of literary or rhetorical techniques, which often hinders them from using those techniques in their writing. Therefore, I often built my outdoor lessons around practicing a technique they would likely see on an upcoming assessment.

For social studies, the essential concept might be a term used to describe a type of government, such as republic or democracy. For math, students might have a difficult time explaining measurement concepts such as circumference, area, or volume. In world language classes, students might need help conjugating verbs. What part of the unit is crucial to scoring well on their next assessment? What is a foundational concept on which future learning is predicated? Those are the concepts to target in an outdoor lesson.

Design the Task as a Quest

The next step is to design an outdoor quest that will help students understand the targeted concept. Creating a challenge can motivate students by inviting emotion into a lesson that might otherwise be perceived as bland. The task does not have to be complex or require much setup beforehand—the point is to challenge students to communicate understanding of the targeted concept by accomplishing a task that uses items found or created outside.

For example, a math quest might involve finding examples of acute, right, and obtuse angles around campus. For verb conjugation, the challenge might be to perform an ordinary action, such as walking across the courtyard or smelling a flower, and to narrate the action in past, present, and future tenses.

The task can be simple and direct, and it can be done individually or in small groups. The quest might also require students to work together as a class to create a single product, such as a plot diagram using found items to represent each plot point or a flow map where found items indicate steps in a process. The options are nearly limitless, but the goal is to design the activity as a specific quest that requires movement and interaction with the setting.

Engage Students’ Senses

Sensory engagement is where the abstract becomes concrete and is a major part of what sets an outdoor lesson apart from an active indoor lesson. An ideal outdoor lesson will invite students to feel, touch, or hold something; it will combine physical movement with sensory experience so that students might connect the abstract concept to the memory of that sensory experience.

When they attempt to recall and explain the targeted concept when they are back inside and in front of a screen, students recall the sensory experience tied to the essential learning concept. The recollection of the physical experience provides students with a way to describe the abstract concept in concrete terms, even if that explanation is just in their minds as they determine the correct answer during an exam. Sensory engagement is the access point to memory and understanding of the targeted concept.

Solidify Learning in Writing

While engaging in an outdoor lesson, it can be helpful for students to have a way to easily take notes and make observations. As I took students outside more often, I decided to purchase a class set of clipboards, which we used every time we went outside for nearly a decade after the purchase. I often printed a lesson guide that listed an agenda for the lesson, directed their note taking, and provided space for reflective writing at the lesson’s conclusion.

Students kept all their lesson guides in a folder back in the classroom, which served as a course-long record of their outdoor learning. To begin, however, a piece of paper and something sturdy like a textbook are all you need for writing outside.

Once students returned to the classroom from their outdoor learning experience, I would provide time for them to reflect on the lesson in writing and share their observations. This helped students internalize the lesson content and connect the outdoor experience to their indoor learning as they expressed their observations through drawing, listing, diagramming, or writing in traditional formats.

Changing settings changes perspectives; it invites conversation and cooperation while harnessing whole-body learning. Plus, a sunny afternoon might afford us a view of our students’ faces and smiles instead of just the tops of their heads.