If you have been to any number of national parks, then you have probably attended at least one ranger walk and talks. Since their establishment, rangers walk and talks have been one of the most common approaches to education within national parks.
Generally, most walk-and-talk programs follow the predictable progression that the one I saw at Zion National Park a few weeks back ; a ranger gather their groups at a specific location and provide them some basic framing information. They then walk the group to another location and provide additional context there. In addition to lecturing, rangers might employ the use of questions, visual aids, or discussions to expand upon the information they share. Then, the process repeats as the group continues to the next location.
While it might sound a bit out of place in a school, taking your learners outside for instruction provides opportunities for integrating the positive effects of even short amounts of time in an outdoor environment with the space you don’t have access to indoors.
There are many things about this particular technique that make it a fabulous tool for learning;
It’s not very demanding and requires little orientation. You either listen, discuss, or observe. Every learning task revolves around one of those three basic moves meaning that just about everyone can participate with a little instruction.
It capitalizes on the connections between learning and movement. Research has clearly shown that adding movement improves learning outcomes, especially with younger learners.
It can be incorporated into other routines. It lends itself to direct instruction, dialogic learning, independent inquiry, and many other approaches that teachers already use, meaning that it is complementary instead of disruptive to existing routines or processes that teachers already use.
Daniel Pink, the author of Drive, shared a formula for replenishing focus that aligns well to the idea of a progressive Walk and Talk and can make your learners more ready to learn. The elements include being outside, talking with others, including movement, and trying to minimize distractions like tech.
Planning also doesn’t need to take a large amount of time either as you can very easily segment your next lecture or teacher-directed lesson and plan a route where you share the information little by little at stops that you designate ahead of time. Its worked for park rangers for many, many years and it’ll work for you as well.
But as with all things, there is definite room for improvement that can make this already effective technique even more effective. What follows is a proposed expansion, a 2.0 model if you will, that adds value and makes walk and talks more applicable to brick and mortar educators. Many of these innovations and clever twists have been pieced together after participating in numerous park ranger programs during my own adventures in national parks, so give them a read and pick the ones that are most aligned with your own approach to teaching.
Orientation
Prior to participating in the walk and talk, the teacher should provide some sort of orientation to those who are participating. This includes not just the Anchor Question that underpins the entire walk and the rest of the unit, but especially includes activities or assessments that will be given during the walk and talk. In fact, you might even consider putting together a visual aid as a way of supporting your emerging bilingual population. Students can bring it with them during the walk and use it to guide their inquiry and anticipate what comes next. You might even consider turning it into a handout with spaces for questions that can be submitted as another form of assessment.
Create a Companion
Following along the same lines as above, a lot of parks offer guidebooks or audio companions, sometimes through their dedicated apps to enhance the visitor experience. These handy references supplement the information that people come across during the walk and talk program, providing a deeper level of information and another method of learning that aligns with the philosophy of free choice learning. You can provide the same thing for your students to supplement or scaffold the information that you provide on your walk and talk. It can be printed if you don’t have access to technology, but if you do you might create a web app using Google Slides or some other web publishing tool.
Teaching Aids and Visuals
Because a walk and talk tends to be extremely verbal, relying a lot on the ability of the ranger to communicate certain things, they generally come equipped with visuals to help illustrate specific concepts that are better communicated through nonverbal means. Any teaching aid you can use in a classroom and carry around in a backpack can be used for the verbal instruction that goes into a walk and talk. Science teachers could bring labs, English teachers can pass out excerpts from a novel, and math teachers can even bring tape measure or other tools to share preplanned problems of geometry or trigonometry.
Create Installations.
When you combine the last two ideas, you get installations. During ranger walk and talks, stopping points are sometimes selected because of an interpretive panel or some other education resource that the ranger would like to incorporate. Chances are your school doesn’t come outfitted with many of those, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t create them yourself. If you create a panel, a large map, or a QR code on a page that links to some sort of image or other source of information that you would like to share, it creates a helpful reference that you can use in your talk. Even if it’s information that you’re going to share orally, remember that some of your learners might prefer to learn differently and could appreciate another method of building knowledge. Some students might appreciate having a text version of the information you’re sharing, so definitely consider creating your own installations along your pre-planned route.
Emphasize the Learner as Much as Possible
Keeping a group of park visitors engaged so they don’t wander off requires more than just an interesting topic and a warm temperament. To make sure that they keep their participants engaged, rangers will involve their audience as frequently as they can, giving them roles beyond just simply walking and listening. And they do so in a way that is respectful of the fact that everybody has a certain level of comfort when it comes to participation. Learners being asked to hold certain objects is one way. Having someone share their observations or ideas at the beginning of a short lecture or discussion is another. You might cut up and distribute an important information source like an article or picture thereby segmenting answers into fragments the group has to collectively reassemble and interpret. You should also think about your favorite participatory classroom strategies and utilize them to make the walk less of a teacher-focused activity and more of a shared endeavor.
Provide Mile Marker Questions
During most ranger talk programs the discussion is facilitated by the ranger at the stops, not while walking. But a few very clever and crafty rangers take advantage of instructional time between stops because if they don’t, they lose as much as 50% of the educational opportunities in their program due to transit. To utilize every minute they have for educational purposes, rangers will queue up their next stop by providing a walking question visitors can choose to discuss or reflect on independently as they move from point A to point B. This is an optional scaffolding technique that makes much better use of the time that would otherwise go unused and breaks down the larger Anchor Question into more manageable Mile Marker questions. Classroom teachers can also use them to refocus students who are unfocused by telling them ahead of time “ at the next stop, I’m gonna ask you to answer the following question…” This provides them both a warning and avoids “gotcha” moments while also letting them have processing time before they share their answers with the class. This is especially effective for students who are ELL’s because they may need a little additional time to collect their thoughts and think over what they’re going to say.
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