If you drove through Morgantown, West Virginia, and took a wrong turn at the roundabout, you would find yourself on an impromptu tour of Eastwood Elementary, a PreK-5 public school serving roughly 600 students. As you drove around our 21-acre campus trying to find your way back to the exit to our suburban college town, you might notice Willow’s Bridge, our sundial, our greenhouse, and our produce patch. Chances are, you’d also see several classes of students engaged in a variety of outdoor learning experiences.
At most schools the bulk of learning takes place inside the four walls of a classroom, but if you were to visit Eastwood on a nice day, you’d likely find most classrooms empty. Over the last eight years, since becoming our district’s first green school, we’ve been working to make environmental education and outdoor learning integral to our identity, and the pandemic has only strengthened our commitment to that mission.
Becoming Eastwood
Born in 2014, out of the consolidation of a pair of smaller schools, Eastwood Elementary is a beautiful, environmentally friendly facility that includes features such as insulating concrete form (ICF) wall systems, a geothermal heating system, rapidly renewable resources, and low volatile organic compound (VOC) paints, all of which were part of the building’s initial design (and which have allowed us to become LEED Gold Certified and win a National Green Ribbon Schools Award). These design elements help to increase our energy efficiency and decrease both harmful gases and our use of nonrenewable resources.
At first, while we were proud of our new building and grounds, we had no idea what it actually meant to be a green school or how to use our new space to its fullest educational potential. However, we’ve worked hard to learn how to provide our students with a truly meaningful environmental curriculum, taking advantage of the setting our district created for us. Several times, for instance, our teachers and staff have attended the annual national Green Schools Conference to learn from other schools. In turn, we initiated a recycling program, a composting program, and an outdoor sensory garden where students can engage all five of their senses as they experience the natural world.
With support from the district, we also designated a classroom to use for STEM activities and filled it to the brim with resources such as gardening tools, weights and measures, LEGO robotics kits, and much more. We hired a teacher to coordinate the use of this space for environmental projects and activities. We also appointed a “green team” of teachers and staff to help us integrate environmental education into our lesson plans and materials. And we developed leadership opportunities for our 5th graders, such as asking them to serve as tour guides for visitors or to join the school’s sustainability squad, which ran our student-led recycling program.
While we were proud of our new building and grounds, we had no idea what it actually meant to be a green school or how to use our new space to its fullest educational potential.
Over time, the community has become increasingly involved in developing Eastwood’s resources, too. For example, local Eagle Scouts designed our trail, pavilion, and bridge, and we expanded our environmental education curriculum and our outdoor learning spaces with help from faculty members at West Virginia University; staff from a local NASA facility; and members of Partners in Education, a community-based organization.
By the 2019-20 school year, we had a plethora of resources and tools in place, and we had begun to feel successful in our efforts to integrate environmental studies into the K-5 curriculum. Still, though, many of us grappled with how to fit in these topics without giving up time needed to teach core academic content. We were integrating some outdoor learning, but most of our activities were still classroom-based. Plus, designing such a curriculum was hard work, requiring us to spend enormous amounts of time creating new materials and planning new lessons. So, while we were clearly moving in the right direction, we knew we had a lot of room for improvement. And then COVID-19 happened.
Finding space outside
In so many ways, our efforts came to a screeching halt in 2020. Our students left our campus in March and did not return until October. And to ensure schools had enough space for physical distancing, the district shifted to a hybrid schedule for much of the 2020-21 year, with only half of our students attending school in-person each day and the other half learning online.
Safety protocols required us to alter many of our practices. Our recycling program and leadership opportunities were put on hold. Students were not permitted to share materials, which forced us to halt many of our hands-on activities. With social distancing protocols, students were unable to move around or collaborate in the classroom. And since visitors were not permitted on our campus, we could no longer share our successes with the community. But amid of all this, something magical happened.
It began when our teachers recognized that young students needed a break from our newly hyper-structured classroom environments, so many of them began taking students outside for a quick walk instead of giving them their usual “brain breaks.” To provide further social distancing, teachers also began taking students outside for snack time. Many teachers began having their silent reading time outdoors on nice days, so students could enjoy the safety benefits of better ventilation. Before we knew it, many of our classes were spending more time outside than inside.
Teachers began to realize that they did not have to plan elaborate lessons with innumerable materials to incorporate outdoor learning.
At first, this outdoor learning did not look any different from what might have gone on inside of the classroom. Students brought their materials outside and completed assignments to take advantage of the fresh air, not to engage in a specific outdoor activity. And there was freedom in that. But, interestingly, teachers began to truly integrate outdoor learning into their grade-level content. Instead of planning lengthy integrated units, teachers found opportunities to fit environmental education into their lessons more spontaneously. If you were to take a walk around our campus last year, you might have seen students measuring area and perimeter in our new produce patch or learning about plant life cycles in the greenhouse. You might have seen classes at our Black Bear Box Stations, learning stations spaced around our campus and named for our school mascot, where students could participate in content-integrated activities. For example, they might gather on Willow’s Bridge to create a roll-a-story using dice to pick story elements, or they could construct large food webs using the space around our sundial. Doing these activities outdoors has created a lot of teachable moments in which students ask about the features of our campus, and it has created in students a mindset that we are an environmentally conscious school.
These activities had taken place before, but the break from the normal routine seemed to enable our faculty to fully embrace the environmental education and outdoor learning that we had been trying diligently to implement all along. Teachers began to realize that they did not have to plan elaborate lessons with innumerable materials to incorporate outdoor learning. In many cases, they could move activities they’d normally do in the classroom outside and adapt those activities to the different space. We also realized that we didn’t have time to do it all, especially when students only attended school every other day, but these integrated lessons enabled us to expose students to many different standards at the same time. Now, with students back full-time, we’ve continued to combine content instruction with outdoor learning.
Our students began to embrace this new way of learning as well. As one of my students told me, “going to Eastwood means expecting to be outside a lot.” Our students came dressed to go outside each day, and they were disappointed on days when the weather was not cooperative (as was often the case during the winter months). When spring finally began to arrive in March and April, everybody was thrilled to be able to spend even more time outside.
At our school, our students recite our mission each day: “Growing healthy kids in a healthy world.” So many of them have taken this mission to heart in the last year. Our students are proud of our facility, but it is our sustainable practices and environmental education efforts that make them truly love being Eastwood Black Bears. It is often the hard or unexpected things in life that can be catalysts for positive change. Just as that wrong turn in the roundabout could lead you to find yourself in a place of magic and learning, the pandemic finally pushed us out of our comfort zones to find new ways to thrive in nature.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jennifer Potts
JENNIFER POTTS is a 5th-grade teacher at Eastwood Elementary School in Morgantown, WV, and a PhD student at Robert Morris University in Moon Township, PA.
