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Teaching with and in the outdoors during a pandemic

Emily Kang and Mary Jean McCarthy

During these difficult times, we hope all of you are staying safe and healthy.  Based on conversations we’ve had with teachers, many have moved mountains to transition to online teaching.  You’ve received countless hours of professional development on resources such as Screencastify, PearDeck, Google Meets, etc. With the increase of students’ (and our) exposure to screen time, here is one more teaching resource we’d like you to consider: Mother Nature. 

Richard Louv coined the term “Nature-Deficit Disorder” (NDD) in his 2005 book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. The phrase describes the human costs of alienation from nature. An expanding body of scientific evidence suggests that nature-deficit disorder contributes to a diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, conditions of obesity, higher rates of emotional and physical illnesses, and a weaker ecological literacy of the natural world. However, NDD can be reversed! Dr. Lawrence Rosen, a renowned pediatrician, cites numerous evidence for the benefits of the outdoors: it encourages exercise, reduces anxiety, improves focus, and raises interest in the environment.

As educators during this pandemic, incorporating the outdoors into e-learning is an unprecedented opportunity to use every student’s backyard, front yard or window as a science learning tool. Here are some ideas to get you started including those to use with students who have limited access to a green space:

  • Use your phone’s camera as a hand lens. Most students have access to either their own or their parent’s phone and can go outside to zoom in on an object. Students can post their images and have classmates try to figure out what the “mystery object” is. Here is a photo Emily took of a newly hatched monarch caterpillar: 

Zoomed-in version (left) vs. actual scale (right)

  • Engage students with phenomena from the outdoors. This is the same type of NYSSLS-style instruction that many of us were practicing with prior to the pandemic, except modified to suit a virtual audience. For example, present this photo to students: (warning: graphic image so consider showing only to secondary students)

Have them notice and wonder about what they see. Support them in developing a key question to investigate and connect it to a crosscutting concept – for example, what CAUSED the caterpillar to die? Students can then develop an initial model/explanation for the phenomenon via Flipgrid. Then students can read more about this phenomenon here and revise their models. You can then connect this phenomenon to other ideas around parasitism. 

  • For elementary students, if you are recording stories for your students to listen to, consider adding a phenomena at the outset. For example The Grouchy Ladybug was chosen since the students were learning about telling time. This recording has a video of actual ladybugs eating aphids included.  Students are asked to notice and wonder before listening to the story.
  • Notable Notebooks: Scientists and Their Writings by Jessica Fries-Gaither can be posted on your website and serve as a springboard to motivate students to make journal entries. Here is a link to a read aloud version of the book (yes, teachers are allowed to read aloud books on Youtube)
  • Use The Next Time You See NSTA Kids book series to bring outside phenomena onto students’ screens and into family conversations inviting children to share what they  notice and wonder. One first grade teacher used the Seesaw app for her students to listen to Next Time You See a Seashell, followed by a simple shell sorting activity. Students could sort their own shells or complete an online assignment.  Next Time You See a Cloud encourages students to view clouds in their own backyards, relax and enjoy.
  • Record yourself doing something outside as a virtual field trip. (One teacher recorded her friend taking care of her beehive). Crossroads Farm at Grossmann’s, a NOFA certified organic non-profit farm in Malverne, provides a wonderful setting for students to visit. Their experiential programs invite all to join in the activities that make the farm grow. Mary Jean and educators from the Farm connected with a first grade teaching team to “bring” their first graders to the farm. Using Google Meets and an IPad, farm educators invited students to share what they noticed and wondered about seeds, the wide diversity of seedlings in the greenhouse and the crops growing in the fields. Students carefully observed and sketched a sweet pea plant with tendrils. On another trip, students observed bees being drawn to last year’s kale flowers and the killdeer breeding in the field. 

Photo of bee at farm and student’s drawing of bee

  • Afterwards, they will read and discuss Next Time You See a Bee.
  • Seatuck Environmental Association’s “Get Out With Seatuck” project aims to help everyone explore the natural world around their homes. Every morning they post a new nature-based activity or challenge for a daily dose of nature! See also their 2020 Wild & Scenic Film Festival where attendees will enjoy award-winning films about nature, community activism, and conservation, including many that relate to Seatuck and their work on Long Island. 
  • We work with teachers through the Greentree Foundation Teachers Ecology Workshop to support them in using nature in instruction and connecting their students to Long Island ecology. Here are some of what they have shared:
    • have students collect items from the outside (5 different kinds of leaves or rocks, a picture of a tree in bloom)
    • birdwatch outside or through a window using a set of TP roll binoculars.
    • Encourage students to sit outside, close their eyes and quietly listen for 10 minutes. 

As you can see, there are many ways to engage students with nature. Hopefully we will find that these experiences will lead students to a greater sense of connectedness with nature and increased curiosity about phenomena during these times (and always). Stay safe and well! 

*Emily Kang and Mary Jean McCarthy are professors in the College of Education and Health Sciences at Adelphi University. They work with teacher candidates and specialize in science teacher education. 

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Phinding Phenomena: 4 Tips for Locating that Elusive but Essential Component of your NYSSLS Lessons and Units

Many who have started to actively engage with the New York State Science Learning Standards and the Next Generation Science Standards have recognized the importance (and challenge) of teaching with phenomena.  Finding good phenomena with which to anchor lessons and units is hard!! This post will offer some tips on finding phenomena based on work that I’ve done with teachers over the past few years.

Some background (from Using Phenomena in NGSS-Designed Lessons and Units) Natural phenomena are observable events that occur in the universe and that we can use our science knowledge to explain or predict. By centering science education on phenomena that students are motivated to explain, the focus of learning shifts from learning about a topic to figuring out why or how something happens. Explaining phenomena and designing solutions to problems allow students to build general science ideas in the context of their application to understanding phenomena in the real world, leading to deeper and more transferable knowledge.

The process of developing an explanation for a phenomenon should advance students’ understandings. If students already need to know the target knowledge before they can inquire about the phenomenon, then the phenomenon is not appropriate for initial instruction (although it might be useful for assessment). Students should be able to make sense of anchoring (unit-level) or investigative (lesson-level) phenomenon, but not immediately, and not without investigating it using sequences of the science and engineering practices. With instruction and guidance, students should be able to figure out, step by step, how and why the phenomenon works.  

Not all phenomena need to be used for the same amount of instructional time. Teachers could use an anchoring phenomenon or two as the overall focus for a unit, along with other investigative phenomena along the way as the focus of an instructional sequence or lesson. A single phenomenon doesn’t have to cover an entire unit, and different phenomena will take different amounts of time to figure out.

Tips for Finding Phenomena

  1. Use readily available online resources. I like to start here just to get some general ideas. Some of the more well-known resources are Paul Andersen’s The Wonder of Science website, NGSS Phenomena, #Project Phenomena. Sunrise Science is a blog that lists these sites as well as a host of others. I’ve found that while these provide a great starting point for generating ideas, they are not always EXACTLY what I need for a lesson or unit.
  2. BBC videos – but turn off the sound. I also recommend becoming an avid watcher of BBC Nature programs like Planet Earth I and II, Blue Planet, Frozen Planet, etc., as well as other documentaries and websites (which I often find on Facebook). These provide a wealth of high quality nature-based phenomena.  Once I locate a video, I like to show it to students with the sound muted, a strategy I learned from a HS science teacher who works with English language learners in Los Angeles. The main reason for turning off the sound for the first viewing is two-fold: 1) It allows students to take an active role in sense-making (figuring things out) without being told the answer by the narrator (who often explains what is happening while you are watching); 2) It allows students to focus on only one sense at a time (sight) rather than being bombarded with both language (sound) and sight which may be difficult for them to process simultaneously. Not until students are ready to research more deeply into the phenomenon do I consider replaying the video with sound.
  3. Find the phenomenon that’s already hiding in your lesson.  Oftentimes, flipping the sequence in which a lesson is taught is the easiest way to create a phenomenon-based lesson. For example, a 4th grade teacher with whom I work wanted to have students explore a roll-back can in which a can is rolled on a table and then unexpectedly rolls back to you, similar to the one here.  She searched far and wide for a phenomenon to introduce the task, but then realized that the can itself could serve as the phenomenon.  Students generated observations and questions about the can and then proceeded to investigate the cans themselves. Much of Chemistry and Physics labs can be previewed to students as a demo at the start of class to help them generate questions. Students can then explore in lab groups and test variables/variations to address their questions. Thus, you oftentimes don’t have to look very far for a phenomenon – it can be lurking in your lesson somewhere waiting for you to pull it out.
  4. Go outside and keep it local! The most powerful phenomena are culturally or personally relevant or consequential to students, grounded in real world contexts or designing solutions to science-related problems that matter to students, their communities, and society.  Long Island is renowned for its natural beauty (not just strip malls). We have lakes, hills, rivers, forests – all of which need protecting. What better way to have students solve problems and make sense of phenomena than to take them outside into the schoolyard and plant native plants to support dwindling pollinator populations (e.g., native bees, Monarch butterflies) or understand the relationship between sewage and nitrification of our bays (fish kills makes a great anchor phenomenon).  Your current students will likely be voting members of society in less than a decade from now…what kind of citizen do we want to send out to society?

Designing phenomenon-based lessons can be challenging; however, it also provides opportunities to engage students more deeply in explaining relevant phenomena and solving problems that urgently need their attention.  We as science teachers have the privilege of shaping the direction society takes towards addressing these problems.