in the classroom
beneficial to do that in a safe, controlled environment with students,
so you don’t end up with horrendous failures. To pinch Ray Dalio’s
quote on this: “I’ll let the kids dent the car, but I won’t let them
write it off.”
Is there anything about the outdoors in particular that makes it a
good place to learn these lessons?
There are many reasons why outdoors is a good place to learn, and
while a lot of my experience has been outdoor education, a lot of
what I've been looking into is a sense of place and sense of space.
In one of the podcast interviews we talk about creative space in the
bush. It was actually Bundanon Trust – Arthur Boyd’s property that
he donated to the Australian people. I talked with the education
director there about how space affects creativity among students,
how it affects their emotional states, and how you use that to
produce good artwork.
A lot of it comes back to clearing the noise. Kids are bombarded
with marketing, advertising and social media messages in all
sorts of ways through their devices, TV or life in general. Taking
them out of that busy environment and into an outdoor setting
where they don’t have those distractions makes a huge difference.
They start to think and they start to relate to the content of what
they’re engaging in.
If you take a group out for a couple of days, the longer you’re
out, the more settled and balanced that group is, and the issue of
communicating with people via a phone starts to fade quickly.
Another interview I did was with Cyn Smith from Tihoi Venture
School in New Zealand. The students there go five months without
devices, and again, Cyn’s feedback was it gets them back to
basics about creating a relationship between one another, not a
relationship with their phone.
How do you get the students to apply the lessons they’ve learnt?
That’s one of the challenges, and it's why I’ve been looking at,
not just outdoor ed, but also what are people doing in STEM and
STEAM subjects.
It needs to be a continuum, and it’s often not. Often you
have, say, an outdoor ed experience in isolation, and it’s a fun
experience. You enjoy it and you have a week away, which is
fantastic, but unless you’re linking that back to the wider culture
and context of the school, that experience in isolation doesn’t
benefit students. If you look at the skills you require for STEM and
STEAM subjects, they’re the problem-solving skills: adaptability,
intelligent design and so on. They’re the same skills you need for
outdoor ed. One of the reasons I started the podcast was to help
people translate and apply those experiences in the classroom.
Do you have any tips on what teachers can do in their everyday
lessons to introduce some of those ideas in a smaller way?
One of the biggest and easiest is just the reflection on the learning.
What a lot of my work has involved over the years as a teacher is
doing debriefs. Now, a debrief is simply sitting around in a circle
after an activity, and either guiding it yourself, so pre-empting with a
question, or as the students develop in that program, allow them to
guide or run that debrief. You pose a question: “What did you learn
from this experience? What was the most challenging part of this
experience? Who was someone who really stood out who helped
you? Who did something nice that you didn’t ask for but they did it,
and they helped you work as a team or achieve a goal?”
You can apply these debrief techniques to the classroom. It
could be a group activity, and if you don’t debrief a group activity
you’re doing in class, you’ve lost most of the learning. This comes
through in pretty much every interview I do with all these different
educators. Reflection on learning has the greatest impact on the
learning outcome. If you take 5–10 minutes at the end to debrief
that experience, be it in the classroom, outdoors or a workplace,
that’s where your learning happens.
You’ve written that it can be a challenge to convince parents to let
go and let their kids explore outdoors. What can teachers do to
convince parents this is a good thing for their children?
One of the biggest challenges is translating that experience to
parents. I’ve done a lot of parent information nights where I explain
to