O U T D O O R   C L A S S R O O M                                                            

Using Outdoor Classrooms to Enhance Education
Teaching outdoors can provide an environment for creative learning as well as supplement and enrich existing curricula. Use of outdoor classrooms stimulates student interest by allowing students to experience firsthand the natural world which complements textbook lessons, lectures and class discussions. This classroom can also provide an ideal setting for teaching critical thinking skills such as observing, measuring, analyzing, and interpreting phenomena. There are other benefits of outdoor classrooms such as students seeing life cycles in action, patterns and relationships among living and non-living parts of the environment, and hands-on reinforcement of these complex interactions. "A picture is worth a thousand words" and an outdoor classroom provides the opportunity for the pictures as well as the words, experiences and mastery of learning that will last for many years.

What is an Outdoor Classroom?

Outdoor classrooms are defined by what they are not:

• undisturbed natural areas,
• trails with labeled points of interest, or
• a place where resident people come to speak and teach

An outdoor classroom is immediately available for continuous use by groups and individuals. It expands the learning environment readily available to students and teachers. It allows classes to work outside the classroom without the hassles associated with field trips. Visits require no special permits; no time-consuming arrangements for transportation, lunches and comfort facilities; no shifting of class schedules and no substitute teachers.

Outdoor classrooms begin when a teacher takes students outdoors and asks them to locate a problem on the school site.  As they discuss what to do about it, the students begin to think and respond.  This is when an outdoor classroom has begun.

A well planned outdoor classroom can be used to give depth, meaning, and new dimension to understanding of man's relationship with his environment. It can also serve to reinforce the following essential environmental concepts:

• all living things, including people, are interdependent with one another
  and their natural environment;
• natural resources undergo continuous change because nothing in the 
  natural world is static;
• man depends on renewable and non-renewable natural resources for survival;
• use and care of natural resources in accord with ecological principles determines man's fate;
• natural resources and ecological systems have specific capabilities and limitations; and the rate of natural resource use depends on the economy of the populations and the degree of industrial development of a nation.

A well designed outdoor classroom can be used to enhance all parts of a school’s curriculum. While specific uses will vary by schools, some general uses of an outdoor classroom can be seen by a correlation of an outdoor classroom to the major curicula areas - science, language arts, math and social studies of study for Louisiana schools.

Evaluating What You Have
Developing a Written Plan
Implementing the Plan
PLT Conceptual Framework