Hey Folks! To those of you who are headed back to school or have already returned to your
classrooms, welcome back! To our friends in public lands spaces that are finally starting to slow down a little, you made it!
This month, I have two quick shares as well as a longer post focused on Back To School ideas inspired by the work of interpretive rangers.
First, here is a collection of 63 resources work integrating into your classroom this year - one for each of our national parks.
Second, I came across this website that has a large collection of links to virtual park experiences. Many of them are really great, but be warned, some of them have expired. I’ll be including some suggestions on how to use virtual programs like these in the future, so bookmark it.
Finally, here is my first pass at a “Back to School With National Parks” guide for all of you to look over! I’d love to hear in the comments what you think or how it could be expanded as i’ll be building more strategy guides like this over the next year! Thanks!
It's back to school time once again, and across the country teachers and their learners are returning to the classroom. How a teacher feels about the first few weeks of school varies; some enjoy getting to know their students while others lament the tediousness that comes with establishing how their classroom will run. However, effective teachers agree that the first few weeks of school are perhaps the most important weeks of the year. As Harry Wong said, “The most important day of a person’s education is the first day of school, not graduation.”
Starting the year off on the right foot is essential, and there are many things that teachers are expected to do or accomplish in the first few weeks that set their students up for success. An exhaustive internet search combined with my own research conducted for my upcoming book revealed the following commonalities;
Build Relationships and a Supportive Classroom Environment
Establish Norms
Introduce Routines
Determine Effective Instructional Methods
Identify Gaps in Skill and Knowledge
Chances are you already incorporate most of this list into the beginning of your year, but like you, I am always on the lookout for new methods and strategies, so I took some time to consider what inspiration might come from outside brick-and-mortar education spaces.
With this list of “start of school year essentials” in mind, here are some methods and resources from our national parks that you might consider drawing inspiration from to get your year started on the right foot.
Build Relationships and a Supportive Classroom Environment
While this element isn’t always at the top of every teacher's priority list, it should be. A growing body of evidence confirms the importance of relationship building and classroom culture as perhaps the most important early indicators of a successful school year. Time spent upfront getting to know your learners, helping them build their trust in you, and creating a sense of social inclusion and community in the classroom pay off in dividends later on.
Park rangers are also keenly aware of the importance of relationships and group culture as a way to retain their audience and encourage participation and do this several different ways at the outset of their interpretive programs. They utilize dialogic questioning early on to encourage sharing and establish that the relationship between them and their audience is built on shared power and two-way communication. They build their program around universal themes that relate to the lived experience of audience members so that people can make their own connections and feel the relevance of the learning right away. Perhaps most importantly, they are skilled at playing the “long game” regarding participation and building trust gradually so that the program ends with more introspective or challenging questions and answers toward the end rather than the beginning. Easy to answer, safe questions are used to build rapport so that when the ranger gets to more complex and challenging questions they have built up individual investment and social capital required to share higher-stakes opinions or attempt more complex questions.
Participation and success in park programs is often publicly celebrated. For example, when a visitor completes their Junior Ranger booklet they earn a wearable badge and sometimes even get accolades broadcast across the visitor center PA system.
In Your Classroom;
Establish an environment built around shared power and responsibility. Make sure you broadcast that as the teacher you have a role and your learners have a co-equal role where one isn’t better or more than the other. Reinforce this by including lots of opportunities for choice and voice whenever you can. Allow time for learners to choose their partner for the day. Provide them a menu of learning options or resources to draw on during early lessons. Ask for their input in establishing norms and encourage their ownership by circling back periodically.
Design activities, lessons, and “asks” that are easy to accomplish and don’t require a large amount of prior knowledge. These ORACLE-style questions and tasks encourage participation early on and provide early wins that encourage more participation. The beginning of the year is a natural time for this as the more you get them sharing about their lived experiences the more you get to know them.
Build culture early on with dialogic activities that require student voice like bellringers, open-ended discussions, or reflective activities where students draw on knowledge they already have in a collaborative or social way. These “easy wins” build buy-in and social capital for more rigorous and through-requiring tasks later in the week such as short diagnostic assessments or the first few content-focused lessons.
Encourage participation by making a habit of clearly establishing success criteria or expectations from the beginning. Junior Ranger books are clear on how to earn your badge, so make sure that your learners always understand the goal of a lesson or activity.
Catch your kids doing something right early. Make a point of publicly calling out the things they do correctly, especially during the first few weeks. In your roster keep track of who you’ve provided public reinforcement to so you don’t overlook anyone.
Establish Norms
Norms are often conflated with rules but they aren’t the same. Rules are created by a higher authority and imposed with little to no say from those subject to them while norms are agreements or guidelines that lead to an outcome that everyone already agrees with. The result of strong and well established norms is a classroom where learners manage their own behavior to a greater degree so that you, the teacher, are less involved in that task.
At national parks, many of which are the size of small states, there is absolutely no way for the handful of rangers on duty to monitor the behavior of all their visitors, so the establishment of norms based on agreed upon values is key. Visitors to parks generally agree on things like conservation, personal responsibility to the land, and that one person’s good time shouldn’t impact others. These shared values are present in the seven principles of Leave No Trace, a set of norms that promote responsible recreation that are widely adopted and practiced by visitors because they share the outcomes that result from following them.
In Your Classroom
Start your year by establishing the kind of learning environment your learners want. What do they need to focus and thrive? What descriptors come to mind? Creating a shared list of values or outcomes together is key to the continued buy-in required from them to be effective.
What conditions or norms can be put into place that will help perpetuate the list of shared values? Help your learners think of agreements they can commit to regarding their own behavior. Don’t make this about “the group will” or “other will” because the idea is if everyone does their part and minds themselves, it’ll work out for everyone.
If you need a resource to jumpstart their thinking, you can download and print this set of Leave No Trave classroom principles as the foundation for your own norming - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Nqh8iErW5bnenUhSCWQKA66KY8pxChSs/view?usp=sharing
Introducing Routines
Whether or not they admit it, learners crave structure. Predictability is critical to the foundation of an effective learning environment and contrary to popular belief, it also leads to more independence and agency within the classroom and a lot of saved time. When learners know what's coming next or use familiar strategies and tools, they feel more confident taking the initiative and can accomplish more at a quicker pace since they don’t need the directions explained. Routines are also most effective when introduced early on in the year so that familiarity is built quickly.
Parks have predictable structures in place to provide visitors with information. All parks have a visitor center with giant display boards that contain current information about weather, programming, and road closures. This helps visitors help themselves and saves rangers time answering easy-to-find questions so they can dedicate themselves to more complex ones. This approach is also used at trailheads, where information about the trail and what hikers should keep in mind is on display. This information gives them the lay of the land ahead, making for a more predictable and therefore more enjoyable overall experience.
Routines also help parks with instruction. Rangers who are good at interpretation generally pull from a small established collection of strategies and methods. Dialogic questions, visual elements, storytelling for effect; these are the strategies for compelling learning that rangers regularly reach for over and over so instead of pulling from dozens and dozens of different strategies, they perfect and continually use a smaller collection bringing in new ones periodically.
In Your Classroom
Find a place in your classroom that can function as an “info center” where everything learners would need to participate is kept. This could be a learning wall where you display the information or a website that has key learning resources. This will foster independence and save you from answering “where do I find x” type questions.
Before you begin a new unit or project, make sure to share the basics. You could print out an info sheet that shares basic information about what is in store for your learners. Things like major due dates, basic learning goals, and key resources should all be listed on it so they can get the “lay of the land” before they start. Here is an example of one used for a middle school project - https://drive.google.com/drive/u/2/folders/1FOQmiB40J-R_a201tbch1QWQiRLholw5
Over the first few weeks, introduce your “core routines” to your learners. Allow them to experience what learning will be like in your class and start building familiarity with a small amount of strategies before introducing others or having them use them for graded portions of your class. Comfort and predictability will lead to better participation from them and stronger facilitation from you.
Determine Effective Instructional Methods
Routines are one part of the wider instructional strategy that teachers employ in their classroom, and the first few weeks are an important opportunity for seeing what methods you employ result in the “stickiest” learning. This time also provides you opportunities to experiment and bring in the new things you might have discovered over the summer. Every class of learners is different and you’ll want to make sure that the strategies you employ work for the widest cross section possible, and there are some great ideas for doing so that our national parks have discovered.
Parks and rangers often experience this same challenge as the needs of visitors and patterns of visitation shift seasonally, and what was engaging and relevant last season may not be true this season. Also, the resources they have also shift. For example, a park ranger I met in California’s Calaveras Big Trees told me that for three years she included a specific tree in her talks..until it fell over one winter, forcing her to shift the entire program to another part of the park.
Learning opportunities abound even when a ranger isn’t leading a program, but making sure that learning resources remain engaging and relevant to the widest swath of visitors possible is tricky. How do you design a visitor center that is engaging to 8-year-olds as well as 80-year-olds? One fundamental is the 3-30-3 rule, a design concept that dictates how every part and panel of an exhibit can be made. It provides an onramp for building knowledge on a topic based around non-human learning resources; within three seconds the topic should be clear. Within thirty seconds the basic idea or concept should be clear. And within three minutes general knowledge on the topic should have increased
Resources that promote individualization of learning are also key. Parks are ecosystems of learning where visitors often have a choice in how they engage. Audio tours, print guides, ranger tours, and multimedia offerings are just some of the methods used to ensure that every learner can find a mechanism that works for them but still provides movement towards the same goal - better understanding the place they are visiting.
In Your Classroom
Be mindful of overreliance on one resource, activity or lesson. Building an entire project or unit around a specific “thing” that could disappear (Adobe Flash anyone?) might spell disaster to your pacing calendar or your wider instructional sequence. Always be on the lookout for ways to diversify or revise those old mainstays of your lessons BEFORE they are gone.
Design lessons around the 3-30-3 rule; the topic should be clear within three seconds, the learning goal should be clear within thirty seconds, and the learner’s knowledge on the topic should be increased within three minutes. This structure helps you avoid creating resources that cause MEGO (my eyes glaze over)
Provide choice and multiple means of building knowledge upfront so you can design more effective lessons and learning opportunities. If you want to begin with a text source to build literacy skills, that's fine, but could the next resource be visually driven or based on
Identify Opportunities for Building Skills and Knowledge
Learners are all different, and they often come into class with a range of knowledge and skills. Some of them are advanced in certain areas while they may struggle in others. Whatever their skillset might be, the more you know about what they know and don’t know, the more effective you will be in planning lessons that help move them toward skill and content mastery.
Park rangers never know who they will have in their programs, but they still understand the value of in-the-moment informal assessment so they can better adjust their interpretive programs. An often-used technique is to start off a program with open-ended questions and use the quality and rate of the responses as a way to judge both engagement and knowledge. As a general rule, the more the better. If you ask a question about a geologic feature or the life of a historic figure and you hear crickets, that is a pretty good indicator that starting a few steps back with more basic information is a good plan.
Another effective strategy often employed by parks is providing time to reflect or process new information. You see this often on learning trails when interpretive panels end with a question that the hiker should ponder while they walk to the next sign. This is in part to help the learner consider what he or she might need in order to continue learning. Reflection helps learners identify gaps in knowledge as well as areas of interest to bolster engagement.
In Your Classroom
Make pre-assessment a part of every unit or project. Create strong kick-off activities that help you uncover what your learners already know so that you can adjust your plan or materials accordingly.
Allow time for periodic reflection so that your learners can think about their next steps or what they might require to continue their learning.
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