Sharing Good Practice
Building appropriate experience and knowledge, and considering each area during planning, will help to manage whatever situation might arise.
Involving young people in the process of risk assessing activities provides an additional opportunity for them to develop key skills, including:
Activities perceived to be high risk can provide multiple learning opportunities when well planned and managed.
necessary skills. High challenge does not always mean difficult.
Knowing when to intervene is crucial. Recognising when students have reached an impasse is key, but simply telling the group what to do might not be the answer. The nature of the intervention will depend on what you are trying to achieve- a key question or clue might unlock the process, or you might need to pause the activity to give the students a chance to recap and plan.
• Dynamic – your ability and experience to manage situations as they arise.
• Identifying and assessing potential risk to themselves and others
• Making safe decisions
• Recognising and following relevant safety measures
The International School Grounds Alliance’ s“ Risk in play and learning declaration” provides a useful framework- http:// www. internationalschoolgrounds. org / risk /. Written for school grounds, the principles apply to all outdoor learning environments.
Another‘ barrier’ which often stops teachers taking learning outside is ideas – what do we do? Next time we will consider some simple activities to take the curriculum outdoors.
Managing risk
Being outdoors, possibly in unfamiliar environments, provides children with the opportunity to take risks, both physical and emotional, in a controlled, supported way. Adopting a benefitrisk approach starts with looking at the positive reasons for doing an activity. Having established it as worthwhile, identify key hazards and establish control measures to reduce this risk to an acceptable level. We cannot and should not remove all risk.
Planning group activities for learning outdoors requires having the correct equipment.
Assessing and managing risk can be broken down into 3 areas:
• Generic – relating to your school and how things are done
• Specific – you, the group, the environment, the activity
Anita is a Director of the outdoor learning consultancy Maximising Learning. She has spent the last 25 years teaching‘ Outside the Classroom’, and works with schools to help them explore and develop opportunities for outdoor learning, embedding these in their curricula.
Class Time | | Jan- Feb 2018 | 37