What have we learned from taking school outside?
My hometown of Putney, Vermont, has a small pre-K through 8th grade school. With its single-story of cheery classrooms, a playground, and ball fields, Putney Central School (PCS) resembles hundreds of other rural schools. But PCS has something that most schools don’t: access to a 167-acre forest.
Five years ago, PCS classes occasionally traipsed out to that forest for a hike or an ecology lesson. But in the fall of 2020, when students returned from the COVID-19 quarantine, the “Forest for Learning” became something altogether different. Some classes spent all day, nearly every day, among the trees. Forest classrooms popped up, complete with awnings and fire rings, outdoor lockers full of tools and supplies, handwashing stations, and wagons that teachers used to cart materials along the trails.
PCS students were not alone. Across the country, schools took refuge outdoors. As the father of two children at PCS, I had a socially distanced front-row seat to this transformation. As a science teacher at the nearby high school where there was no accessible forest and where classes remained mostly indoors for the duration of the pandemic, I watched with great interest – and some envy – as schools experimented with new ways of thinking about their land. Later, as schools gradually relaxed pandemic restrictions, I wondered if these experiments had changed schools. Had they changed our outlook on education? And now that the state of emergency had ended, what would become of their outdoor classrooms?
Going Outside
When the pandemic hit, Alissa Shea was a first-grade teacher in Leverett, Massachusetts. She is everything you’d expect a first-grade teacher to be: bright, expressive, and brimming with supportive compliments. But even she turned somber as she talked about trying to teach 6-year-olds on Zoom. “I literally almost lost my mind. It was bad for me. It was bad for the students. It was really bad for their parents,” she said.
When her school announced that remote learning would continue into the 2020–2021 school year, Shea was determined to find another way. After reading a report on outdoor learning, Shea persuaded her principal to let her build an outdoor learning space in the woods at the school. She organized a community work day with about 50 volunteers. A parent who worked in a lumberyard donated 100 log stools for seating. Another parent, a carpenter, hung whiteboards from the trees. In a single day, they built six outdoor classrooms. “It was so inspiring,” said Shea. “All these people showed up. They were so happy to contribute, to do something tangible.”
Shea wasn’t the only teacher looking to outdoor classrooms as an alternative to remote learning. Suddenly the risks associated with going outdoors – falls and bee stings, ticks and sunburns – paled in comparison to the risks of staying in. Outside had become the safest place. And so, students and teachers across the country evacuated – into forests if they had them, into fields and lawns and parking lots if they didn’t. Outdoor classrooms sprang up practically overnight, fueled by ingenuity and need.
Schools rearranged schedules and adjusted curricula. Federal emergency funds helped pay for outdoor infrastructure and supplies. Policies became flexible to enable teachers to respond to rapidly changing conditions.
Teachers had the time, the money, and the administrative blessing to go outside. The outdoor learning that resulted ran the gamut from short outdoor “mask breaks,” such as the kind that most teachers at my high school entertained, to full school days spent in outdoor classrooms, including many elementary schools in our district. Some classes stayed out even through the long New England winter. My own kids showed up to PCS dressed for hours in the cold. Schools in Portland, Maine, used federal funds to equip students with warm outdoor gear, and many classes remained outside through all but the coldest winter days. By that point, for many educators, the question had shifted from, “Can we go outside?” to “How?”
Challenges, Resources, and Outcomes
How, indeed? Even with support from school leaders, the road to outdoor learning wasn’t easy. Within a week after Shea’s inspired barn raising, a windstorm knocked down tents and put several classrooms out of commission. It was also challenging to adapt indoor curricula for outdoor spaces. “How do you take math outdoors?” Shea asked. “Do we take the workbooks? What do we do when it rains? There are a million logistical challenges.”
To meet these challenges, teachers needed help. Many of them found it in grassroots networks of classroom teachers who, even before the pandemic, had already spent years figuring out how to take their classrooms outdoors. These outdoor learning pioneers suddenly became mentors to an entire country.
One such group was Inside-Outside, a New Hampshire–based organization whose report on outdoor learning had inspired Shea to begin her own forest classrooms. Inside-Outside hosted roundtables, led virtual and outdoor workshops, and connected novices with mentors. Another organization, Green Schoolyards America, a California-based group dedicated to helping schools transform their grounds into living greenspaces, led a coalition to found the National COVID-19 Outdoor Learning Initiative, a free online library of resources for teachers and schools who wanted to move learning outdoors.
Some teachers, including Shea, noticed that being outdoors changed more than just the setting. “I started to think about the difference between learning outdoors – just taking your math book outdoors, sitting in the grass, and doing your problems – versus using the outdoors for learning: going out, collecting 100 pine cones, grouping them into 10s and 1s, and using them to solve ‘What is 100 minus 80?’” she said. While math and literacy were challenging to integrate into the outdoor classroom, Shea had less difficulty adapting science and writing instruction. “We started studying the trees: identifying them, writing about them. We did sit spots with nature journals,” she said. “The learning we did [connected] to the standards, but it wasn’t traditional reading groups and math workbooks.”
It wasn’t only the activities that changed as learning shifted from within school walls to beyond them. I spoke with about a dozen elementary and middle school teachers in the course of writing this article, and every one of them commented on changes they noticed in their students. Even skeptics talked about the calm that came over students, about how engaged and excited they were. Many students who had been distracted and dysregulated indoors were able to tune in. “By and large,” said Liza Lowe, director of Inside-Outside, “the students who are challenged to learn indoors tend to be people who shine really bright outside.”
While it is impossible to generalize the varied experiences of teachers and students in outdoor classrooms, a body of research suggests that learning outdoors correlates with improved outcomes for students in academics, physical health, and social development. One study from the University of Illinois even found, contrary to many teachers’ expectations, that outdoor learning improved focus and concentration.
“We Just Couldn’t Go Back.”
In fall 2022, COVID restrictions began to ease. At PCS, classes, more often than not, convened indoors. Tarps and awnings were taken down. The school day began to follow more familiar refrains. There was a sense that things were getting back to normal – getting back to real school.
In Massachusetts, Shea’s experience was similar. Most classes returned indoors. Some teachers remained outside, but they found themselves in a mire of scheduling conflicts as the focus increasingly shifted back to indoor learning. Eventually, Shea moved back into the school building, but she held on to “Wednesdays in the Woods,” one day each week when she and her first-graders spent the day in the outdoor classroom.
Other classes, however, remained committed to learning outside every day. On a sunny day in early May 2023, I visited two such classes at The Center School, a private school in Greenfield, Massachusetts. These two classes, each a mix of kindergarteners and first-graders, had remained in the woods long after others in the region had returned indoors.
A tangle of footpaths wove between tarps and tents in a shady oak-maple forest. Stick forts and hammocks were everywhere. When I arrived, 16 kindergarteners and first-graders sat in a semi-circle on waterproof bins. Their teachers announced the “free play” options from a whiteboard that leaned against a tree. Then the children dispersed. Some picked violets in a nearby field. A group of six boys huddled over a book of paper airplanes, carefully following the directions with pieces of recycled paper. One precocious little girl asked me if I’d ever eaten creeping Charlie and then politely (and correctly) informed me that buttercups were poisonous and that I shouldn’t eat them.
In another part of the forest, a group of students was writing out the guest list for an upcoming wedding. The young bride was engaged to a log with a marker-drawn face who looked very fetching and seemed absolutely thrilled about the upcoming nuptials. Another student pulled my sleeve. “I’m the officiant,” she said with a face that showed she understood the full gravity of her responsibilities. Nearby, another student was using a pair of binoculars to investigate optics. “Look!” he told me, pressing them to my face. “This side’s little.” Then he swung the lenses around, “And this side’s big.”
In some ways this forest classroom was like any other kindergarten or first grade. Kids traded Pokemon stickers and complained about the stuck zippers on their backpacks. But other things were unique. Each child wore a full-body “adventure suit” with neon reflective stripes. And everyone – everyone – reminded me that I should check for ticks.
As children lined up at the end of the day, one student found an absolutely stunning caterpillar, and everyone gathered in reverent silence to appreciate it.
As in so many other places, COVID had forced students and teachers at The Center School outdoors. But when the others had gone back in, the K–1 teachers here chose to remain outside.
“Teaching during COVID was hell for most people,” said Sandy Browne, one of these teachers. “But we were having the best year of our teaching lives. And the kids were learning so much. We just couldn’t go back.”
When I began researching the outdoor classrooms of the pandemic, I wondered how many classes, such as those I visited at The Center School, were inspired to just keep learning outdoors and how many returned indoors. We will probably never know. Nobody kept track. “It’s one of our goals to systematically track those numbers, but right now we don’t have a comprehensive way to measure them,” said Rachel Pringle from Green Schoolyards America. “What we do know is that many districts and schools have carried this on. They’ve started to see what it’s like, and that they can do it. They’ve experienced it. It has definitely planted a seed.”
Lessons Learned
Many educators, including Liza Lowe of Inside-Outside, saw the pandemic shift to outdoor learning as an opportunity to step back and rethink education. Being outside had encouraged learning through play and exploration. It had fostered an intimacy with the natural world. These were things that had seemed sorely lacking from many schools and the lives of many children. Could we make the outdoors a regular part of American schooling? Might we continue the many good things that had come out of an otherwise painful situation?
Yet, for all its enthusiasts, outdoor learning did not appeal to everyone. As Shea noted, “Some teachers were comfortable using outdoor classrooms. Others thought mostly about bees and bugs and the cold.” For these teachers (and, no doubt, some students), a return to indoor learning was a return to comfort and safety. Additionally, as anxiety about COVID-19 gave way to anxiety about learning loss, many educators saw going inside as a necessary step to regain lost ground.
No one I spoke with suggested that outdoor learning should be mandated. “There are so many different demands on everybody involved in public education,” said Pringle. “Teaching is hard enough without pushing teachers out of their comfort zones.”
The question of where to learn, outdoors or in, seems caught up in the biggest educational questions of all. What are schools for? What do we want for our children? What kinds of learning do we value, and how do we prioritize academic outcomes alongside health, happiness, and well-being?
However we answer these questions, I am struck by four things.
First is an appreciation for what a blessing our schoolyards are. In many ways, they saved our schools in a global emergency. As Pringle pointed out to me, “We think of public land as big swaths of national forest, but there’s a lot of public land on public school properties across the United States.” The Trust for Public Land estimates that public schools occupy more than 2 million acres. That’s an area more than twice the size of Rhode Island. Of course, these two million acres host sports fields and playgrounds, but also less obvious services: islands of shade, refuge for wildlife, reservoirs of biodiversity, and riparian buffers that slow and absorb floodwaters. School grounds have seldom featured in discussions of public land, and, frankly, have often been an afterthought for most educators. But now, in the wake of the pandemic, many are seeing these lands for the valuable resources they are.
Second, I am aware that not all schools are as lucky as PCS and Leverett Elementary. Green Schoolyards America talks about “child accessible tree canopy,” which, like most resources, is unequally distributed. As Pringle explained, “The least tree canopy is associated with lower-income communities of color in highly urban areas.” Urban schoolyards are often capped with asphalt. “They’re flat. There’s no shade, windbreaks, places to sit, or places to teach,” she said. “To help transform that into a living space; that’s the work that needs to be done.”
Third, the pandemic has taught us that forests and fields can make great classrooms. It can happen for students of all ages and backgrounds. It can happen for all kinds of subjects. It can happen through the cold New England winter. It doesn’t require a huge budget or a comprehensive plan. All it takes is a teacher with a vision, a schoolyard with a few trees, and the blessing of a supportive administration.
Finally, for those who want it, there has never been an easier time to shift a classroom outdoors. The loose networks of teachers who were interested in outdoor classrooms before the pandemic have grown into international organizations. Infrastructure, built with grants during the COVID era, is still new. The National Outdoor Learning Library makes it easy to find and use resources. Teachers or schools who want to build first-rate outdoor classrooms have the experiences of thousands of practitioners to draw on. More than ever, we have the knowhow to do it well.
Outdoor classrooms can be more than a plan B, a last-resort emergency response. If we want (and I know that’s a big if), they could be part of plan A.