The word I took away from this week was “practical”. My partner and I decided that both of our questions need to be practical and easy for others to understand. I’m going to layout my inquiry in the form of a mind-map and branch all of the BC curriculum subjects from the main hub, ‘Outdoor Education’. From there, I want to provide tangible resources that other teachers can use to apply in their lessons during each subject. In addition to the curriculum subjects branching out from ‘Outdoor Education’, I’d like to have a bubble for classroom management techniques. I’ve found that a lot of my resources bring forward the notion of fear from many teachers towards Outdoor Education because of difficulty with managing their students. Hopefully I can remove this stigma and create more lessons inclusive to the outdoors.
I just finished writing up a lesson on heart rate for my students, which is geared towards Science, P.E., and Math. If all goes well then I’ll add it into my bucket of resources that will eventually end up on my mind map.
My partner and I are meeting with a renowned UBC professor next week to hopefully gather some insight into more resources. He runs some amazing programs at UBC, and I’m sure he’ll provide us with an abundance of material.
Chris
Hi Chris,
I really liked our ‘practical’ discussion as well. I found it very productive when we considered the application of our inquiry questions into our real teaching practice. It allowed me to consider the tangible ideas we were constructing and where our next steps should be. I would also like to think of more field trips and discussions with other leading experts in the environmental field 🙂
Hopefully you were able to put your question into practice this weekend, despite the rainy weather!
Cheers,
Meghan
Chris, I think you have touched upon an important factor in outdoor education: teacher fear. It will be very useful for you to consider ways to make outdoor education a reality for more students and teachers, especially by thinking about “classroom” management or effective ways to manage groups in an outside environment. I like too how you are thinking about what outdoor education could look like – what really is possible, given the new curriculum? Checking in with your students regarding their preferences and graphing the results is a good way for you to create optimum learning opportunities to best meet the needs of your class – and that fact that it was tied to their current data analysis study was excellent! I look forward to hearing about your meeting with Hartley Banack – he is an inspirational leader in this area for sure. You should definitely look into his summer course as one of your electives.