Why Kids Need More Outdoors

Chris Colley 0:13

Welcome everybody back to another episode of Shift Ed Podcast coming to you as the snow persists. We are lucky though, because I have a wonderful guest from out in the BC area, which I'm sure it's full spring over there, while here in the eastern coast of Canada, we are getting walled by ice, sleet, rain, hail, you name it. But uh the smell of spring is in the air. Today, Lauren McLean has joined us, who's an educator, an outdoor ed guru, founder of also Teach Outdoors, which is an absolutely wonderful site. She's written so many amazing books too, which we'll we'll talk uh to about a couple of them. A risky play gone away, me and my sit spot. Oh, got a lot of sit spots. And she's joined us today to kind of explore outdoor learning and why we need to start doing it much more. Again, just a quick stat before we start, listeners, kids are going outside about 10 minutes a day. And if that doesn't scare us, think about your past, your childhood. I'm sure it was more than 10 minutes a day. So something has to happen because nature never intended kids to be inside so much and sit so much for so long periods of time without doing anything. So we will try to make sense of all that. And Lauren is such a great thinker. So I'm really happy to have you today, Lauren. So thanks for joining us.

Lauren MacLean 1:43

Thank you so much, Chris. It's so lovely to connect. And yes, technically, for most parts of BC, spring is here, but up on my mountain, we have just been dumped with snow once again. So I've got sore muscles from shoveling our driveway.

Lauren’s Outdoor Origin Story

Chris Colley 2:01

And well, we're still there, right? Yeah. Winter really starts to drag its legs after a while, but spring all the more beautiful when it finally arrives. And we're like, we forget all about all that past and move forward. Lauren, I'd love to start these off with just a little walk down memory lane of what were some of the situations or experiences that brought you to, you know, being an author and a teacher and just an advocate for outdoor. Do you have any of those salient kind of experiences that really powered you forward into this journey that you're on now?

Lauren MacLean 2:39

Yeah, I think part of sort of what brought me here is I had a very, as you were alluding to earlier, I had a very free childhood. I have an abundance of energy. Let me say that. I am loud, I'm a bit wild, I'm a bit chaotic, a bit scattered. I very much have classic ADHD. And I always have, as does, you know, not throwing him under the bus, as does my dad. It's a very strong line, as do probably my children. And outside was where I felt more relaxed. I didn't feel claustrophobic. I felt that I was able to run around and I wouldn't get in trouble. And that led me to then being down a line of athletics. So I was very heavily involved in athletics my entire life: biking, kayaking, absolutely anything. I think probably to tire me out so that I could fall asleep at night. I ended up going and playing field hockey at the Canadian national level. So almost, we almost made it to the Olympics. We did not quite get there. And then when I retired from that, I sort of had this moment of will I go into coaching or will I go into teaching? And teaching is just something, I mean, they're very much related, but teaching was something I always felt comfortable with. I love, I love talking, I love playing, I love that team atmosphere. And again, with the athletics, part of our training, I guess, was having a student, or not a student journal, an athlete journal. We had to document everything, what we ate, how we felt after training, our goals, short-term, long term. And I think that was where a bit of my passion for writing came from, is that I anytime I have a thought, I like to write it down. I love stationary, I love new journals, I love all that stuff. And so once I became a teacher, I was also working at a nature school and I just wanted to blend those two worlds together.

What A Garden Classroom Means

Chris Colley 4:52

Really? Well, that's so cool. I love that too. Like I love the journaling part too, because it's so it transfers so nicely into teaching and taking kids outside and kind of gathering their trace evidence of their journey as they explore. And so there's been this idea of garden classrooms, and I love this idea because it's not just like, okay, let's have a garden and we'll plant it in the spring, it will overgrow in the summer, and then we'll try to pull whatever we can out of the mess when we get back. This mindset is different than that, right? Where the garden classroom is a yearly and it's I don't know, more of a living, breathing classroom idea. I'd love to poke your mind a little bit about what is that? Like it's a term that we're not really familiar with here in Quebec of this garden classrooms. Maybe you could expand on that idea a bit for us.

Lauren MacLean 5:49

Yeah, I think when people first hear, you know, just school garden, as you said, they they envision planting something in the spring and then harvesting in the fall, or just leaving it by the front entrance of your school. And it's just something there that looks pretty. But a garden classroom is a lot more than that. It is that living learning space where our curriculum unfolds across the year. And I do have to say that one of the educators that really shaped my thinking about this, and I'm sure most educators who are involved in this has had an impact on them as well, is Megan Zenny. She has done so much work around school gardens and outdoor learning and play. And from her, I learned that what makes a garden classroom so powerful is routine and relationship. Students need to return to the space regularly so that they begin to feel a sense of belonging and stewardship. And so for in our school, we visit our garden classroom often daily, if but definitely weekly, throughout the whole year. And even in winter, even this week when we got dumped with snow, you know, many people think that, oh, the garden's, you know, done. But there's so much learning that is still happening because winter is, you know, a beautiful time of year to talk about hidden growth. And we make this connection between how growth in nature can be slow or sometimes invisible, like the seeds resting underground, and how growth in our lives can also be quiet and gradual. And just because we can't see it, it doesn't mean it's not happening, right? So when we're outside, we're constantly making these observations of what's the same as yesterday, what's different. And those consistent observations become that foundation for learning across subjects. And, you know, then that garden stops being a one-time project. It really does become a classroom that just happens to be outside, not inside.

Chris Colley 8:05

Right. No, it's amazing. And what are what are some of those like practical examples of the kinds of things like teachers often come to me and ask, like, love it? How? You know, like what do you like, what does that look like? What would it be like? Like what what kinds of things would you do? What are some ideas that I could do if I wanted to start exploring that?

A Realistic Outdoor Learning Block

Lauren MacLean 8:28

Can you flush that out a bit for me? Right. Yeah, and it can look like anything. And the nice thing about teaching is we have so much autonomy. So my indoor classroom looks different than my next door neighbors, which is still so beautiful, but we all have our strengths and things that we that we really lean into. So for and you know, we are constricted by our time of day, right? There's recess bells, there's lunch bells, there's assemblies. So I try to find the biggest chunk of time that I have in my day so that I can lessen the amount of transitions of indoor, outdoor, indoor, outdoor. So for this year, that happens to be between recess and lunch. So the learners go outside at recess. We have our snack before we go out. They go out, they have got their free playtime, 20 minutes-ish. When the bell comes, they line up outside and we stay outside for the next hour to 90 minutes. And then again, they stay outside because we do outside lunch first and then they eat afterwards. So I have this big chunk of time. When the learners are lining up outside, waiting for me to come out. I usually bring a book. Maybe I'll read a couple pages, usually not the entire book. We head out for a bit of a nature walk so that we can see what we're noticing outside. We meet in the circle afterwards to debrief our walk. Now, our walk could also be five minutes, but if we're really into it and we want to go a bit further, maybe our nature walk's 20 minutes or longer. That part's very flexible depending on what the students are interested in. We debrief it at circle. What were we interested in? What did we notice? Oh, that's a great idea. Should we explore that further? Okay. And then, you know, let's come up with an idea. We're gonna go do this. We'll investigate this. We go grab the magnifying glasses. If we need our nature journals, we grab that. It's right by our outside door. So it's very, I just plop in, grab the bin, and out I go. And then we go do some sort of activity together. Looking closely, maybe we've got our watercolor palettes and we're gonna do some nature journaling. We go to the garden, we're harvesting something. And then at the end, we always make sure we have time to go visit our sit spot so that we can stop and reflect on what we did. And then that's sort of the end of our time together.

Chris Colley 10:54

Amazing. Yeah. I love that timeline. I want to come and be in your class.

Lauren MacLean 10:58

Enjoy. It's only a few hour flight for you.

Chris Colley 11:02

That's right. And Lauren, you have this great book called Me and My Sit Spot. And we've started to talk about sit spots before we hopped on here. I was telling you about this PD that we're going to do with teachers. And we we we anchored it between two sit spots experiences. So one kind of at the start and then one kind of at the end. Can you talk to us about the value of spit sit spots and why they're important to integrate? So the the gathering spot for sure, but then going off on your own, kind of and and and being with yourself in nature, like it just seems like that's gotta be good.

Sit Spots For Calm And Notice

Lauren MacLean 11:42

Right? I agree. And I think the big thing is that we rarely get the time to just pause and breathe out because we are so busy. My brain is like a squirrel, it's just ping-pong and all the time. Our lives are like that. You know, go to my own kids, get dressed, we gotta go. We're running late. Like we're just rushed all the time. And when we actually give ourselves this gift of sitting, and sometimes it's uncomfortable, and that's okay. Do I care about it? And what are my goals? And kids, it doesn't have to be that long. It could be 30 seconds, it could be five minutes. It really depends on the age of your learner. But when they have that time, they get to see where their thoughts go. So I do often give them a bit of a prompt, you know, let's go reflect on your nature walk, let's say, or go look for something that's moving or still at your sit spot. So give them a verb. Or we're give them a curricular connection. Can you find patterns or the number five? Something. They then have the choice, again, the autonomy, that they're gonna go visit their sit spot and they can try to find that, or they realize that they're more interested in something else and they're focusing on something else, but they can share that at circle. And that's okay, right? Like I want to know what they're actually interested in while they're at that, having that reflection piece. So sit spots are about reflection, it's about observation, and it's about connecting to place. And I think that is why they are so important. Now, in education, I do not assess sit spots, right? That is, they are nowhere in our curriculum, but we elevate sit spots for the deeper learning. So if we're doing mapping and we're talking about history of place, well, I'm gonna use sit spots as a place for them to reflect, maybe in a nature journal through a picture, through a writing piece. And that's where we can assess like the formative assessment piece that comes from the learning and thinking at their sit spot.

Chris Colley 14:12

I love that. I I read something too that about boredom, you know, like our kids are always saying, Oh, I'm bored, or like if they don't have this constant, like you're saying, this like you know, franticness going on around them. And that boredom is a lost, I mean, part of our lives that was so important because it allowed for that deeper thought, you know, where you're not distracted. Um Right.

Lauren MacLean 14:40

And oh, Chris, you're you're bored. Let me come save you. I'll give you something else to do. It's okay, Chris. Right. And so for me, I'm thinking, you know, okay, I'm gonna go complain that I'm bored and someone's gonna solve the problem for me. Nope. That's not. That's nope. So sorry. But congratulations on naming the emotion. It's good that you recognize what boredom is. What do you think you can do? Where, you know, what do you need a tool? Do you need to just sit a bit longer? Do you right? We we just have to nudge them along because it is a lost skill. It's so important. But we usually in our in our classroom environment, all the adults that are in that space, we definitely handle that by saying, you know, I'm so proud of you for making that emotional recognition. We're so proud of you. Keep going.

Chris Colley 15:33

Yeah.

Lauren MacLean 15:34

And then we just leave it. Yeah.

Chris Colley 15:36

It's important for them to start reconnecting too. I like it. Just seems to the kids are just kind of disconnected and are just feed me, feed me, you know, like instead of imagining and creating and like, yeah, no problem. I I got half an hour to go do whatever I want. Awesome. See ya.

Lauren MacLean 15:54

Right. And they can feel lost with that. And they they're losing those skills of, as you said, creativity, using their imagination, resilience, perseverance, all those skills we we need to pump back up a little bit.

Chris Colley 16:11

Totally. Totally. I wanted to talk to you and and wanted your your thoughts on uh uh this idea that and and I'm not saying all of teachers have these ideas that uh going outside is like you can do a lot of like scientific, you know, like the earth and science and how do we move beyond that? Because I know that there's so many more areas that I mean the whole curriculum is out there, it's just identifying it, I guess. And you said something at the start where we just need to look more closely at things. How can you make those two connections between other stuff that may not be like, okay, we're gonna learn about how the trees grow and but other curriculum things like art and and literature and like how can we merge those so that it's not just seen as this kind of almost we removing ourselves and let's just go and look as scientists.

Relearning Boredom And Imagination

Teaching Every Subject Outside

Lauren MacLean 17:12

Yes, nature. For sure. Yeah. And this is this is probably one of my favorite things to talk about is this idea of a holistic education outside. Because you're right, outdoor learning often gets placed in the science category, but it is the perfect place to teach every subject. And again, I love I love being able to give credit where credit is due. The mentor who sort of helped me expand my thinking in this area was Janice Novikowski. And she helped me start looking for stories and patterns in the environment to uncover all the curriculum through play and through invitations and prompts. And I think once you start doing that, you realize that outdoor learning is full of opportunities for literacy and math and social emotional learning, art, ABST. So, some examples are, you know, if we if we take it sort of curriculum by curriculum, which I don't often do when I'm outside, we definitely try to weave it all together. But for ease of just providing examples today, when I think about our literacy curriculum, we do a lot of vocabulary building outside, learning the names of plants, insects, natural features. We do a lot of sensory awareness activities where, again, we have to use our vocabulary to describe what we see or hear, smell, and feel. We elevate nature journals all the time. So we can write poetry. We can include how to write labels, wonder questions, comparison charts, nonfiction writing, narrative writing, all of that can be through our outdoor experiences with a nature journal. You know, with social studies, which I think is one that people think is a difficult one, probably my favorite, because we can do mapping of the school grounds. We can learn how people are interacting with ecosystems within our community. We can identify meaningful locations and sort of predict what do we think this looked like 100 years ago, 50 years ago, what might it look like in another hundred years? And then, you know, math, especially with our school or the classroom garden. You know, we can be measuring plant growth, estimating the heights of trees using the shadows. We can look for patterns and symmetry or or sorting and classifying. There's so much data collection that we can do outside. It's, you know, we can graph everything while we're out there. So yeah, the outdoors really does become less about taking science outside. It's more just about expanding the curriculum through the environment that we're in.

Chris Colley 20:02

It feels too, Lauren, as you're talking that it just starts to snowball a bit, right? Like one idea feeds into the next, into the next, into the next.

Lauren MacLean 20:11

Yeah. Yeah. I get so excited. So I apologize if I talk too much. No, no, I but it's that's where my mind goes. So when we're outside and and we see a bird fly by, well, I'm not just thinking about the science of that bird. I want to now map the flight pattern. I want to talk about the size and the shape of the and the color of the bird and and talk about how the bird is communicating with other birds or with us. And so again, we're talking about those interconnections and communication skills. So through one thing, we can there's the math, the science, the socials, the SCL learning, all through just watching birds.

Chris Colley 20:52

Right, right. And they all almost like naturally start to connect themselves because they all are interconnected. I mean, school has this great way of kind of splitting everything apart. You know, I often joked with my kids like, all right, as we sat down for dinner, okay, it's math time. We're only talking about a math right now. I don't want to hear about Jim. I don't want to hear about like, and we just know that that's not the way the world works, right?

Lauren MacLean 21:20

Yet this is how we set our kids up for understanding things holistically in silos or and I think again, we were talking earlier about pre-service teachers, and it makes it easier because I am teaching two math outcomes today. Check, check. I did it. But when we start engaging in this holistic way of teaching and learning, it can feel overwhelming, I think, because okay, did I just did that math outcome? Oh, I did a bit of that science. Oh, do I repeat it again in two months or sort of have I finished it? And so Becoming a bit more comfortable with, you know, spiraling our our curriculum and how we document and capture those learning and the growth throughout the year, it's a big skill. It's can be overwhelming, but it's it's it's so magical when it starts to click.

Chris Colley 22:19

Yeah. And I think like through anything, the more you practice a style, it it starts to become a habit for you and embedded into what you do in your natural job or environment or wherever it might be. Yeah.

Lauren MacLean 22:32

Absolutely.

Chris Colley 22:33

I guess what my kind of closing, and this is because I know that you have the teacher mindset and you have, you know, the kind of like, how do we get teachers prepared? So the pedagogical development side of it. So you're the perfect person to ask because you can merge the two together. We kind of talked about that, the the bridge that divides the talking about it to the doing it. How do you get teachers to start to shift that mindset to that it's okay to go outside and use nature as my classroom and that I'm not not doing what I should be doing? Like it's there anyway, like you were saying before. Like, what are you how do you kind of coach a teacher to make that step?

Helping Teachers Feel Ready Outdoors

Lauren MacLean 23:19

Yeah. And I think possibly sometimes what I've heard is, you know, oh, well, I try, I tried to do it, but they were really loud. They didn't listen to me. They didn't look at the book. I'm like, fair enough. Okay. So let's let's lean into those sort of challenges because what I'm hearing is that they're worried about, you know, attention, they're worried about the movement or the distractions, or maybe even uh possibly worried about that unpredictability of nature, because that's true. I had literally this week in my day plan on Monday that we were gonna do, you know, signs of spring, because this is our last week before spring break. And then 20 minutes into being outdoors, the snow just dumped on us. So yeah, my my plan was out the window. But I think the biggest, I think the shift comes with thinking that outdoor learning doesn't mean that we are lacking structure. It's not saying, oh, just go for it. It's we're not abandoning routines. We're just bringing our routines outside. So, you know, we've been using the language really intentionally, I think, right now. You know, both you and I are saying outdoor classroom, garden classroom. And that language really helps students and parents and men understand that it is a place for learning. So we gather and circle outside the same way we gather indoors. So inside, these are the expectations. Oh, guess what? Outside, same expectations, right? Our nature journals, same outdoors as it is indoors. So we we need to shift from thinking of it as it's like it's a free-for-all, from okay, well, what structures do I need to put in place? And then co-creating those expectations with your learners. So if they're having a hard time listening to the whole book, read it indoors first, then go outside, revisit it. Teach the math lesson indoors, and then we're gonna revisit it outside and go deeper, right? So it's not that you have to use the outside as the first time of teaching something, but we're using the outdoor space as, okay, this is an opportunity for you to show me your understanding of fractions today. We explored it indoors. Now we're going outside. Can you find examples of half and three-quarters outside? Can we make something with art, with natural loose materials? So I think that mindset, mindset shift of using it as a way to elevate your the teaching that we have done to dig deeper.

Chris Colley 26:04

Yeah, I love that. Yeah. And and we know, like based on science, because we we love research and we we know what we're saying is good. We're not trying to bamboozle them, but kids benefit from going outside globally, just as a human, right? Like that was nature's plan. Get them out early, get them exploring, playing with bricks and and uh trees and leaves, and that that is a part of that developmental process that they have to go through because it will come back and bite them if they don't.

Lauren MacLean 26:37

It will. Yeah. And as you said, the research is so clear. Like there, the mental well-being benefits, the social emotional benefits, academic achievements, when you have time to go outside, explore, get dirty, fresh air, they come back. They are so focused on the next whatever, however long you have back in the classroom, an hour, two hours. Their math that we're gonna be doing. Like they are so into it because they've had this opportunity to explore, to play, hands-on learning. It really helps. And they are happier, and the research shows how much happier teachers are too, because of it. So there's less teacher attrition. We stay in the job. We're we're so happy. Look at us.

Final Takeaways And Farewell

Chris Colley 27:26

Yeah, I like that too, because we need to focus on the teacher's well-being much more now as well. So it's just a total benefit, like you know, and you're doing something that they're gonna remember. You know, it's like it's kind of learning that sticks if you want to use the burr analogy to nature, which I I I I think is important. Yeah, Lauren, this has been amazing. I'm so happy that we cross paths and I too. We are really interested in this right now, and we're at the phase of just our toes are out those doors, but I just feel there's momentum coming. And I think you experts like yourself coming in, sharing your thoughts only, you know, now maybe there's two or three toes at the door. So I appreciate your your insight and uh your thoughtfulness. And please come back and chat with us again sometime.

Lauren MacLean 28:30

Oh, I would love to. This has been so wonderful. Thank you so much.

Chris Colley 28:35

Thank you.