Transitions

Reflections on the power of liminal spaces

I’m presenting later today at the Children & Nature Network “Nature Everywhere” Conference and have just traveled across time and space – from Kenya to Wisconsin. I’m jet lagged and this may not be my most coherent thinking. You’ve been warned! 

While in liminal space – in planes and airports and cars and in between – straddling my life in Kenya and my life in Colorado – which together form my “one-wild-and-precious-life”¹ – I got time to do a little bit of reflection. Not a lot, because I watched The Boys in the Boat and slept, but a little bit. 

Photo by Ross Parmly on Unsplash

Hurtling through space, suspended, defying gravity and without wifi (because I’m too cheap to pay for it on a plane plus Eric, my wise husband, told me to “chill the f’ out and not work all the time”) I was presented with an opportunity to think in a way that was also unbound by the laws of physics.

Change is hard

Transitions are part of change and change is something many of us humans struggle with. 

In my current transition, which so far has involved 20+ hours in a plane and 4+ hours in a car, I was thinking about this nuanced part of the art of teaching. Managing transitions can be challenging. Sometimes it feels like just when students are finally settled into a task, a shift to a new task abruptly interrupts their flow. In a school, many of these transitions are beyond a teacher’s control – driven by external forces like class schedules and indicated with a bell or an intercom message or an alarm sounding. Others are internal to the classroom and are something effective teachers thoughtfully manage so as not to derail learning.

Managing transitions is one of the barriers teachers consistently raise when I facilitate “Teaching Students Outdoors” workshops with Good Natured Learning. This is a fair concern. Choosing to do outdoor nature-based learning – to teach outside – is choosing to add a significant, extra, and, seemingly unnecessary transition. 

Indeed, walking outdoors is a profound shift in environment accompanied by changes in temperature, weather, sun, breeze, seating, materials, activities, scenery. It can interrupt concentration, social dynamics, moods, and potentially even that elusive species of productivity called “flow.”  

Generally teachers who raise this concern are worried about losing instructional time – something the education establishment (in the U.S. at least) painstakingly quantifies in a bean-counting exercise that feels pedantic to me. This metric, colloquially referred to as “butts in seats,” is indeed easy to count. When I was teaching Spanish, I remember stressing out about losing time to random crap – assemblies that felt poorly planned, announcements over the intercom that dragged on, reciting the pledge of allegiance, and especially active shooter drills which felt like safety theater in which we all dutifully acted out unproven placebos to make us feel like we could do something in the event a gunman came into our school with an assault rifle. 

Even where there are correlations between total instructional time and academic performance (which I assume there are because otherwise WHY the obsession about this metric, but I actually haven’t looked into this), I’m deeply skeptical about the causality. If instructional time equated to academic success, we would theoretically have a globe full of high-performing students. 

Malcolm Gladwell popularized the ‘10,000 hours’ theory in his book Outliers. Loosely this theory suggests if you spend 10,000 hours practicing something (e.g., guitar, basketball, reading), you should arrive at mastery of that skill. Students spend approximately 16,380 hours practicing learning (again, if we equate instructional time with the practice of learning) during their 14-year, 2280-day educational career from preschool to 12th grade. Yet mastery is not what most would suggest is the current condition of graduates across the U.S. or the globe. Now, I know you can poke holes in this argument (it’s ok) – as school includes a lot of different skills and no student spends 16,380 hours practicing any one of those skills. But let’s not get our undies in a bundle parsing my logic because both of these metrics – 10,000 hours and instructional time – are deeply flawed. 

What if we measured something that mattered?

The point of that long ramble is that many teachers fear teaching students outdoors because they are worried about wasting time in transitions. What if, though, the transitions to the outdoor classroom were part of the power of nature-based learning? In a 2018 paper, Do Lessons in Nature Boost Subsequent Classroom Engagement? Refueling Students in Flight researchers Ming Kuo, Matthew Browning, and Milbert Penner examined the hypothesis that lessons in nature have positive, immediate aftereffects on classroom engagement.

Their findings were stunning. Classroom engagement was significantly better after lessons in nature than after matched, classroom-based lessons. The likelihood that classroom engagement was higher after a lesson outdoors in nature than after a lesson indoors was 81%. The rate of "redirects" – or how often a teacher had to interrupt class to tell a student or students to get back on task – was cut almost in half after a lesson in nature. Normally, these redirects occur roughly once every 3.5 min of instruction; after a lesson in nature, classroom engagement was such that teachers were able to teach for 6.5 minutes, on average, without interruption. Even though they “lost” 10 minutes walking to and from their outdoor classroom, teachers and students gained back that time and more with higher levels of engagement and fewer interruptions after they did this. 

The extent to which students are on-task and paying attention - is a major driver of learning and academic success. This study suggests that instructional time is not the limited resource. In fact, students already spend 10-50% of their time at school unengaged and off-task - burning through LOTS of instructional time. Instead, classroom engagement might be the real limited resource in academic achievement. 

If learning outdoors can boost engagement, then we might actually be gaining learning time by spending time walking to an outdoor classroom. 

Banking Time 

Me and Mr. Muñoz at the Children & Nature Network conference.

On a less researchy and quantitative front about transitions for outdoor learning, I want to highlight one other recent “finding” from one of the Colorado Good Natured Learning fellows.

Mike Muñoz is a high school science teacher. When asked his main takeaways from embracing outdoor nature-based learning with his students this year, Mike immediately said this: 

“Banking time is huge.” 

Photo by Braňo on Unsplash

Throughout this school year, Mr. Muñoz intentionally used transitions to the outdoor classroom to walk with one student while other student walked together. He took time to get to have a conversation and build rapport one-on-one. He thoughtfully rotated through different students on different days and made space to develop better relationships with each one.

I don’t have any statistics to offer up here – and still experience tells me that relationships are the KEY to effective teaching and learning. It’s why I don’t think AI will ever replace teachers. AI can’t “bank time” with students. It can’t check in on them. It can’t empathize and relate and connect.  

What made Mr. Muñoz able to “bank time?” Was it the walking? Was it nature? Was it a break from classroom drudgery? Was it the transition itself? 

For now, I’m also not going to get my undies in a bundle about the mechanism by which he built better relationships with students. I do know he wouldn’t have been on a walk to get to his classroom if he hadn’t been teaching outdoors – and he wouldn’t have had the chance to have those one-on-one conversations to connect with individual students if it weren’t for those transitions. 

If Mr. Muñoz said he was able to “bank time” on his walks to their outdoor classroom, I’ll take that to the bank as another win for outdoor nature-based learning. 

❤️B

1. Mary Oliver - https://www.loc.gov/programs/poetry-and-literature/poet-laureate/poet-laureate-projects/poetry-180/all-poems/item/poetry-180-133/the-summer-day/