Chris Colley: 0:13

Party is starting. Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of Shift ED Podcast. Scouring this beautiful earth of ours for educational mindsets that we love. And I have one of the most lovely mindsets coming into us today with Rachel Tidd, who is the founder of Wild Learning, has written an amazing book called Wild Learning. Practical ideas to bring teaching outdoors, which we're really starting to talk a lot about here in Quebec in our province. And I'm just so happy, Rachel, to have you here today to talk about. I think two things that we both really love outdoors and kids growing up playing.

Rachel Tidd: 0:56

Yes. No, I'm excited. I was so excited when you reached out and to talk to everyone today about something I'm super passionate, and I know you are too.

Chris Colley: 1:05

Totally. Well, Rachel, I I kind of wanted to start like, where did wild learning come to be? Like, what were some of those beginning phases that kind of brought you to that? That this was going to be something that I was going to start really pushing and talking about and putting out there in the world. Can you give us a little bit of background on on uh the wild learning website?

Rachel Tidd: 1:28

And your Yeah, I can. It's a little strange, a little not anything I planned for sure. So I have children, they're now teens, but they weren't always teens. And my youngest in particular had a lot of sensory difficulties, and he also ended up having dyslexia and dysgraphia and dyscalculia, lots of fun. But at the time when he was in preschool, I sent both my kids to a force preschool, which is an all outdoor play-based preschool. And he was doing really, really well there. But we were struggling at home. And I am a special education teacher by training. That's what I used to do as a special education teacher. And at the elementary age, and even with my toolbox, right, I was still struggling. And so we were looking to get him some services, some help, some occupational therapy, having him evaluated. And there's these, you know, they're called scales you that teachers fill out. And I brought them to his teachers, and they looked at me like with this look, and they were just like, but we don't see any problems with him here. And that really was the start of me thinking about, okay, I'm dealing with these kids in the classroom setting. And this setting outdoors is meeting, and then that's what the evaluation showed was that the outdoors was meeting all of his learning and sensory needs. And so if we're doing all these artificial things in the classroom to meet these same needs, maybe the problem is our setting, and it could be a very not simple, but a good fix for a way to support a lot of learners, just like my own child. Because unfortunately, preschool doesn't last forever. And you eventually have to do things that are like uh reading. You have to learn to read and you have to learn to do math, and you can't really get around those things. And yes, we learn a lot of those things through play, but there is quite a few of those skills that kind of need to be taught, right? And so I was it really got me thinking about, especially that particular child, how I was going to get that child to read and do math. And we didn't even know about the dyslexia and all of that at first. And so that really got me going down this road, and there just wasn't any resources out there, and people just kept seeing what I was doing and asking me to write them down. And I said, I don't have time for that again, young children, et cetera. Um, but I eventually did, and that that's how it all kind of started, if you will.

Chris Colley: 4:17

Amazing, amazing. And your book, I mean, I just love the way you put it together, where it kind of starts small and then expands itself outward, community-wise, I guess, from you know, the backyard of the schoolyard into maybe community, etc. What was your what was your mindset behind that design? What is that so that it it's very kind of low floor, so people are easily accessing, and then they can really start to push higher ceilings as they you know experience more, get more information about how to go about doing it?

Rachel Tidd: 4:52

Yeah, so that's a big part of it. So so many of these like outdoor nature-based books are kind of organized around seasons, which may or may not apply depending on where you are. And I really believe that outdoor learning and play shouldn't be a once in a while thing. That it really needs to be all the time, not all the time, but like frequent, right? Every week, preferably every day, work up to it. But to do that, we can't depend on so often it's like once or twice a year these special field trips or programs, or some places are even lucky to have like an overnight somewhere in like a you know, a park or something, or like a camp, which is amazing. And I wish all kids had that experience as well. But what I'm really thinking about is the everyday, every school day.

Chris Colley: 5:57

In bedin.

Rachel Tidd: 5:59

Yeah, and to be realistic with that and knowing differences in funding and setting, etc., the easiest place to do that was is around our schools in our schoolyard first and foremost. If you have one of those, not all do. I've worked in places with rooftop playgrounds or cut off the streets and or the neighborhood as well. So even if you're in an urban, more urban place, there is plenty of learning opportunities. And I take a very liberal view. Anything and everything outside is game for me to leverage for learning. It doesn't have to necessarily just be nature based. So I use a lot of signs and things like that if that if that is what is in your place, right? So that was intention, that was my intention. So that you you could go, okay, here are the activities that I can pull and lesson ideas to teach, you know, math, reading, and writing within my school yard. Oh, and now I can, now we've got that down, we can expand a little. And now, oh, now we have an opportunity to go farther, I call it farther afield, you know, and so you could like organize it instead of kind of looking through all these activities with, oh, I can't do that. I can't do that. That's not not gonna work where, you know, I can't do that in my schoolyard. That was my intention, I guess.

Chris Colley: 7:27

And do each of those kind of you know, sectors within the community or the and the greater community, do they have certain strategies that come along with them? I mean, I imagine that how you approach like just going into your back schoolyard to, you know, going to the park, which you know takes a half hour walk, like you're but did the strategies change at all as you approach kind of space?

Rachel Tidd: 7:53

Yes and no. And I would say if you're new to this, you know, you want to start in your schoolyard because you really want to build those instructional routines and teach your kids things like call and response. Like, if I howl like a coyote, that means you all need to hobble, howl back and come to our meeting place and establishing a meeting place, establishing boundaries of like how far you can go. Do I, depending on where you are and your comfortable level of comfortableness, you know, do you always need to be able to see me? Or can you not go beyond this particular boundary, fence, cones that you might put out? I visited a great place that they there was like several areas where they went outside, and in a lot of it was just like woods. And in one, it was the beginning of the school year, and one school year, one of the classrooms had taken just like a red string on the outside boundary because the students in that classroom needed a little more of a physical visual reminder of where because it does look all the same, can look, you know, you're in the woods and you just keep going.

Chris Colley: 9:09

And you're kidding, you're focused on the play and the environment, you might not south and west anymore.

Rachel Tidd: 9:16

You know, you're not all of the classrooms had it, but that particular classroom had it. And so you want to build that, and then when you have some of those in in place, you can now rebuild the instructional routine of how we walk down the sidewalk, how we cross the road, how we stop and and talk and listen, right? All of those things we do to prepare for a field trip. We do that when we're walking down the hall. It's very similar, right? But now this is how we do it outside. And now we have cars, so we need to like pay attention. You know, and and depending on your context, you may have different routines. I know at West they have like cougar drills and bear drills and all kinds of things. So it really depends.

Chris Colley: 10:00

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I was talking to a forest school uh bunch of educators last week, and they were saying, too, before they every morning they go and just do a site check and just to make sure everything is like the way they left it, and there's no surprises for the kids when they come out. And they also said meet them at the door, you know, like instead of them going in and getting everything off, and so they prep them the day before, and they know they'll meet them at the door. And they said it it saves them so much time because oftentimes that time restraint seems to be like the kicker, you know. Oh, I got no time for that. And but there's ways that you can do it where you're you're just thinking ahead and and and getting routine settled in, I guess.

Rachel Tidd: 10:42

Yeah. One of my favorite time savers besides the meeting at the front door, there's a couple. One is like make a day, if you make it like make it routine so that families always know, and I think this is in the book, but families always know Wednesdays we go outside. So please send your kids like in their long underwear, right, in their base layers, ready to go. And so as a parent, I know Wednesdays are outdoor days. I gotta do that, right? That really helps me as a parent, but also thinking about I like to like add on to recess. So they're already, hopefully, ideally, not always, but all geared up for outdoors and they're out there. And so to reduce that transition is you meet your kids out there and you add on to that time, right? And so you just extend now, now you do some math out outside, or you do uh, you know, you're a read aloud and then you do some math or writing or whatever it is, but you kind of eliminates the transition of getting dressed. It eliminates the transition between activities, right? You're already out there, and then that can be a that can be a nice, easy entry point to get outside.

Chris Colley: 11:52

Totally, totally. And I really love your your the numeracy and the early literacy stuff that you put out there. And you don't only have a book, but listeners, please go and check our website or I'll put it in the in the description. But you have tons of activity ideas and lesson plans and for all a whole plethora of different subjects around numeracy and literacy for our youngest learners outside.

Rachel Tidd: 12:17

Yeah, my and sometimes I get a little not in trouble, but I get a little pushback, I guess, in some spaces, like environmental education spaces are what the the, you know, there's some nuance in the language, but like outdoor learn outdoor education spaces opposed to outdoor learning. There is some nuance in the the the terms there with a lot of people. But because of my focus on academics, but it's because of my lens, right, as a teacher. I know that a couple things change when we move into the the K-12 space, right? We are contractually obligated to teach the provincial curriculum, right? That is one I know it doesn't seem like that sometimes you, but that is actually our purpose. And um, we have to teach them these skills. Like these are really core foundational skills of math and reading. And if we are really going to reach the goal of getting kids outdoors on a daily basis or at least a weekly basis, we need to be realistic, right? That we need to cover that these skills we can't be an add-on. It can't be an add-on to teacher's plate, an extra thing to do, but that we can teach those same things like multiplication or addition and subtraction facts can be done outdoors, right? Or we can teach phonemic awareness and support that outdoors. So that's where my kind of unique spot is. It's not always embraced by right.

Chris Colley: 13:55

But I mean, there's quite a gap there too. Like, how do you bridge that gap? Because I do hear a lot from teachers that they think they believe it's probably good for the kids, but you know, my stuff's inside, I'm set up here, I'm just how do you bridge that I've gotta follow this curriculum to going outdoors where oftentimes it's seen as recess or lunchtime play? Like, how do you bridge that to say, no, no, there's tons of amazing content out here that you are so responsible for teaching the kids, and you can, but they're just like that awareness isn't there, it seems. Like, how do you how do you bridge that divide?

Rachel Tidd: 14:34

Yeah, I mean, professional learning can help, right? And awareness, and that's one of the big reasons I wrote the book. And I try to continually make resources to help teachers kind of reframe their thinking that oh, I could and can and do teach edition outdoors, but I could also use the outdoors to support this learning. And I think, you know, one of the important pieces for teachers to understand is that I mean, there's a couple ways to look at outdoor learning, right? There is the content and the context, right? The outdoor, the land, the place can be a common integrating context for teaching, are things like social studies and science and tying them to real life. And that can be really, really important for learners and their sense of place and their connection to the natural world and where they live. And just having that real life connection is super important. I can come back to that piece, but also that when we go outside, we the outdoors provides something different than the indoors. And we have a lot of research on how it supports students' attention, it can help them attend, it can restore attention. So we completely lost it in the classroom. I know when I taught first grade grade one, we started fairly early, like around 7 20. And so by 10 o'clock, it was time. No more could be done. We needed to go out. And, you know, so we can restore our attention and support those students. Lots of uh research around students with ADHD and how the outdoors can really be supportive for them, but also attention, I mean, besides attention, engagement, motivation, mental health, executive functioning, and especially in our outdoor risky type play, can be very supportive of you know, knowing our limits, working on our working memory, our flexible thinking, all of these skills are in in play, outdoor play, especially, and more riskier play. So even if you weren't doing academics, right? And then there's some great research that has shown that even if you took your same lesson outdoors, even if you were just doing a worksheet, I don't recommend that. But if you were, you would get a lot of those same benefits. And then those, it's a buy one, get one free event. So you take them out, and we've seen we have research showing that that effect on their attention, engagement, et cetera, lasts into the next lesson, even when you go inside. So it's a buy one, get one free situation. So we're really kind of adding all these supports, things that we're struggling with in the classroom often, right? Attention, engagement, motivation, connecting to the real world, we can get, right, when we go out outside. I wanted to go back, if I can, to the engagement and motivation piece. So I recently finished my doctorate and I did research. Yes, thank you. My research was in three different provinces, and I integrated language arts and place-based sustainability issues. And so we connected science concepts, right? And it was all around community trees. So that was our context and our content, right? And then we're building our language arts skills. This was in upper grades, three, four, five, six. And what really came out, I mean, I saw great gains in literacy and sustainability skills, uh like systems thinking. But what also came out was the, so there was outdoor experiences woven in, because hello, it's me. I could not not do that. But what came out was the importance of the these outdoor experiences and these this real life place-based content that was like relevant to students' lives. These were trees in their schoolyard that they saw all the time. They were evaluating their health. And then they wrote, used writing to advocate after a very long, in-depth unit, uh, to advocate for the health of those trees to various groups that had power, like the government or, you know, but who really shone in there and in the impact we saw was on students that were struggling with attendance. So across provinces, I had 160 students participate in my study, across three provinces, across classrooms, across different schools, chronic ad absenteeism was a problem. Getting to school, being motivated to school, being engaged in school, all of these things were big problems. And those students that were affected by those the most got the most and were the most engaged in this particular unit because they were invested in the problem. It was relevant to their lives. They really wanted to go outside, and they pushed their parents or whomever and started showing up more. Some students had become really disengaged in school and had a lot of behavior issues, had done no work at all all year. This was at the end of the school year, and they did the final project in this unit. So it really speaks to thinking about how our instructional choices and approaches as teachers of how we're delivering in designing our lessons, the power that can have on re-engaging students that are, you know, that we're struggling with, everyone is struggling with, especially post-pandemic. So I like to bring that in because that was just something I wasn't looking for in my research, but was unavoidable.

Chris Colley: 20:50

Yeah. That came out. That's amazing. We actually had our university in Sherbrooke did a similar research, and they came to those same conclusions that kids that tended to be very anxious in class, short memory span, usually were the disruptors, and they brought them outside, and that role shifted. They were like engaged, they were the leaders, they were like the go-getters, they were like they would gather the people together, you know, the other students together, and they were like flabbergasted. They didn't think that that was gonna and they were so surprised about it. And it sounds similar to what you're in.

Rachel Tidd: 21:25

You know, I wrote that unit as part of the study to be kind of not for teachers that were really used to going outside. It wasn't all outside. It had several important outdoor experiences that connected to what kids were learning and built on students' learning. It wasn't by all means all outside, but it had enough and it was relevant, you know what I mean? It it balanced. It was kind of a but to show even just a little went went really.

Chris Colley: 21:54

Yeah, just show give a little and and oftentimes teachers are very good at at listening. To research and you know, trusting that it's that it's accurate and that there could be good benefits, particularly when you're trying to struggle with a student that could nature could help quite easily. I often think we forget about nature, you know, outdoors and trees growing, and you know, like it's just we s become so disconnected. But before we hopped on here, you were saying that you are starting to feel like there's movement and there's a direction that's starting to happen where it's it's becoming more accepted and all actually sought after by parents. What can you can you elaborate on that of of the good that you see coming down the pipe?

Rachel Tidd: 22:46

Yeah, so you know, I feel like when I started this work, I don't know, seven or so years ago formally, and with the coming out of the book, I didn't seek to write a book. That was I was approached by a publisher to write a book, which is something right there, right? That there's even an audience for that. And we're seeing more conferences, like we were talking about for educators around outdoor learning and play and the importance. So that's been really exciting. So talking to teachers, you know, I spend a lot of time talking to teachers and schools and working with schools and seeing their excitement and they're either wanting to get involved and wanting to try this out and just need a little guidance, or they're already in the thick of it and they're looking to refine their practices or expand their practices. And just seeing that and their excitement has been really helpful. Not helpful, but exciting, I guess. Helpful for me and feeling validated, I guess, is where I was going on that. But yeah, so I still think we have a ways to go. Oh, also, a lot of provincial curriculums are curriculum and ministries of education are really recognizing outdoor learning and play as important in for children in their learning and in their health, and making formal pieces or documents or guidance or whatever, it varies across the province. But that has been so amazing. And I feel like that helps so much with some of those barriers, right? A lot of the barriers early on where my administrator doesn't understand that this is important, that this is doing, they don't see less so with the things I I do, because multiplication is multiplication, but you know, it helps to justify and show that yes, this is actually an expectation by my province. Part of my contractual obligation, right? Is this one of the instructional approaches that is that I'm supposed to be using, right? And I think that has been huge. And that is more and more. I'm seeing more and more that I was just I'm working with a group of teachers in Nova Scotia, and they have had a a bunch of and are in midst of a bunch of curricular new newness. And one of them is this outdoor learning document. I was super so excited to see it. I was like, oh my gosh, what is this? And so things like that are just starting to really get in place, and I think that is super exciting.

Chris Colley: 25:30

Amazing. And Rachel, how can we keep following your journey? Like, what is 2026 looking like for you and your work? And how is how keeping it progressing forward?

Rachel Tidd: 25:41

Yeah, 2026. Well, I mean, you can always follow me on social media at Discover Wild Learning. Then I have a website, discoverwildlearning.com. So those are great places to keep up with my work. I often release free things, and I do a lot of videos on really practical. I don't like social media. I should just start there. So if I have to do it, I feel like it should be like useful. And so I'll be like, here's how, here's one way you can teach for numeric awareness outdoors. And here's a way you can teach uh play this multiplic multiplication game outside, right? So little things like that, I put that's what I post on social media. Or here's a really great book that just came out that's about, you know, nature, birds, or here's a way you can use it. So that's a really useful source for teachers that are listening. 2026 um has a couple of things I'm working on. I'm gonna be, I'm working on a new book about bringing literacy, a structured literacy, science of reading aligned practices outside, understanding that it's not an an or, it's an and. And the why and the how. The how is always my intro of my point, right? There's the why, and the why is important, but how, because we get stuck at the why often, right? And so I'm working on that with a colleague. So I'm excited about that. And I'm going to be working with a lot of new teachers. So I'm joining the faculty of Umpire State University and working with a lot of bachelor's of ed students in early childhood education. So that's what I'll probably be mainly working on. I'll still be at some conferences this fall, but yeah, that's my That's amazing.

Chris Colley: 27:26

That's amazing. And listeners, please check out I'll I'll put it in the descriptor of Rachel's LinkedIn because it is you it's so informative. It's these little snapshots of practical, easy things that you can do, and there's tons of them, and they're always great. So that's one more thing.

Rachel Tidd: 27:46

Yes, one more thing. So the outdoor learning store.

Chris Colley: 27:49

Yep.

Rachel Tidd: 27:50

I've worked with them a lot, but this spring in March, I'm doing a four-part math workshop on outdoor math. So, and we're gonna go right through the major strands of numeracy. And so if teachers are interested in that, it's a good opportunity without having to travel.

Chris Colley: 28:07

That's great. That's great because we've actually been doing a lot of work on early numeracy here in Quebec. Uh, there's been quite a few workshops that have been presented, so it'd be a great continuation of that. So for that too for you.

Rachel Tidd: 28:20

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, I I want to go. I've enjoyed I enjoy it, so they ask me to do it, and then uh yeah.

Chris Colley: 28:28

That's great. I love them over there. There's they're so good. I mean, they have a webinar and like a thousand teachers show up. It's like amazing I yes, I've had two community.

Rachel Tidd: 28:37

Yeah, yeah, that had three over three thousand, four thousand people show up. So you never, I mean, it's a little weird, but yeah. This will be smaller. I think last time we did it, we had a hundred teachers. So be awful.

Chris Colley: 28:50

Amazing. Well, Rachel, thank you so much. This has been um a real pleasure talking with you. I feel encouraged and like excited about outdoor learning and our little kids and our big kids. We'll throw teens in there too. They need to go outside as well.

Rachel Tidd: 29:06

Mine are out right now in the snow, so yes.

Chris Colley: 29:08

Excellent. Enjoy the snow, people. There's enough of it. And I hope we can reconnect again sometime, Rachel. This has been a real pleasure. I'd love to continue this conversation.

Rachel Tidd: 29:17

Absolutely.

Chris Colley: 29:18

Awesome. Thanks so much.

Rachel Tidd: 29:20

Thank you.