A Day in the Life of an Outdoor/Environmental Education Consultant    

Last week I had the chance to get out for a ride with a group of grade 9 students and their teacher from Simon Fraser School.  It was the sort of experience that made me reflect about the place for outdoor physical activity in an education culture that has a huge emphasis on integration of technology, inquiry based learning, and digital resources and experiences.   I’ve been reading Hattie’s Visible Learning for Teachers the last couple of weeks.  I’ve been mulling over connecting the dots between outdoor education and learning that addresses both surface and deep knowledge and is a part of constructing new ideas.  Can physical learning be an exemplar of visible learning?  Or is it merely supplementary to the important learning work that can happen with a passionate teacher within a classroom?

Here are my observations from the day with Simon Fraser School.  Hattie would say that Visible Learning occurs when:  learning is the explicit goal; the learning task is appropriately challenging; the teacher and student seek to ascertain whether and to what degree the challenging goal is attained; there is deliberate practice aimed at master of the goal; there is feedback that is given and sought; there are active, passionate, and engaging people participating in the act of learning.  Given this definition, I’d say some impactful learning occurred on our mountain bike trip to Nose Hill Park. 

Learning is the explicit goal – The teacher had framed the day as a skill development experience focused on cross country mountain bike riding skills.  He had planned the use of gps units as a skill building experience.  The afternoon was about learning – learning to ride your bike in undulating variable terrain and to be able to use a piece of technology to locate yourself in an expansive natural setting.

The learning task is appropriately challenging – Nose Hill Park provides a variety of terrain to challenge riders – from narrow single track, to double track trails, options for riding on paved paths, or technical sweeping flowy descents.  Terrain that would encourage good riding technique and make skill instruction relevant.

There is deliberate practice aimed at mastery of the goal – instruction and demonstration of technical riding skills were offered, opportunities to practice a skill on appropriate terrain were present, such as neutral position on descents, repeated opportunities to practice ascending, flat ground riding, and descending were provided as part of the two hours of riding in a natural area.

There is feedback that is given and sought – Riding alongside students as they ride a big climb provides a teacher  to suggest and show them how to move forward on their saddle, or drop their elbows or wrists - as a result, skill level improves for the student and their ease in ascending a long climb on their bike improves.  This results in improved student confidence in their abilities and subsequent improved physical skill performance efficiency.  In fact, what also happened on our ride at Nose Hill was students began to offer feedback to other students about their body positions, the riding skills; peer teaching what they had learned to peers who needed some more instruction.

There are active, passionate, and engaging people involved with learning - when you’re riding some twisty undulating single track trail, and you’re the person in charge of your bike, you get engaged pretty easily, otherwise you end up on the ground.  The teachers from Simon Fraser School shared their passion and interest in spending time outdoors engaged with fun, active physical activity. 

None of this really comes as a surprise to me or will it to many others.  Cross country mountain biking at Nose Hill Park has inherent appeal to students - there is adventure and novelty and an experience that has immediate effects on later cycling experiences.  And let’s face it, for many, many students, getting a chance to improve their cycling skills at school may be the only formal instruction they ever get focused on riding trails on a mountain bike.  On top of this, Hattie’s research identifies outdoor education as a significant influence on student achievement.  When students are engaged in deliberate practice in a challenging learning task where feedback is offered and tasks are structured so that learners can attain the learning goals then visible learning happens.

I’m pleased to say, some great visible learning happened last week with Simon Fraser School’s outdoor education class and it happened at Nose Hill Park while kids were riding their bicycles.  Hats off to teacher John Komori for his great work with his students.

Yesterday, I started to write about the importance of learning in different environments. I was thinking of our trip earlier that day to Heritage Park with two grade 2 classes in the community program. One of our big goals this year is to be more involved in the life of the larger school community. It was remarkable to see the joy on the faces of all the students as they explored Calgary history by walking along a replica of a typical prairie Main Street from the turn of the last century. The students showed a level of interest and engagement that we don’t always see in the classroom.

Today, I had one of my best lessons in language arts with one of my students walking on the field during recess. We started with an impromptu retelling of the Three Little Pigs. We then moved on to Little Red Riding Hood. We continued the story retelling at lunch recess with Goldilocks and the Three Bears. The student surprised me with his animated and accurate retelling of the stories. Once we finished Goldilocks, I started asking him how Goldilocks felt at different parts of the story.  When I asked him how Goldilocks felt when she first approached the house in the forest. I was expecting him to say sad or scared.  Instead he said “nervous”. Walking outside surrounded by children playing, we were able to delve deeper into the story and the character’s feelings than we would have inside the classroom.

John Kershaw (@jmkershaw) teaches students with autism. He has a strong belief in helping all students find their place in the community.

Out of the Box and into The Maker Space

Inspiration comes in many ways; our springboard came from Rapid Idea Generation (RIG) activity led by Learning Leaders. Sibbald Staff designed collaborative tasks to engage students in complex thinking, creative design and play.

Accessing our school’s Maker Space, we brought cardboard to life by creating objects that could fulfil a practical need. With a short timeline, our imaginations, and some basic supplies, we collaboratively created a variety of objects. From chairs to vending machines we were able to develop and demonstrate our prototypes. An engaging task that brought staff together.

Teachers carried this spark to their students and The Cardboard Challenge came to life. Students’ eyes filled with gleaming anticipation as creative juices flowed around the school. Teachers and students connected their ideas and creations outside the boundaries of our building via twitter.

Inspired by the 9 year old boy behind Cain’s Arcade, Sibbald Inventors emerged, as Grade 1 students became designers. Using social media to make their work public, communicate with an audience and connect with experts, students were encouraged with re-tweets from Cain himself!

Meanwhile, Kindergarten students jumped on-board with the Imagination Foundation to create and connect through our school’s Maker Space. Eager to tweet their progress and pitfalls our youngest students engaged our parent community in real time throughout the day. Students provided task specific updates, and shared their imaginative play and learning daily.

Follow us on twitter for more innovation to come!

http://schools.cbe.ab.ca/b336/blogs.htm

http://cainesarcade.com/cardboardchallenge/
http://imagination.is/our-projects/cardboard-challenge/

Tracy Kohan, Assistant Principal, Andrew Sibbald School. Passionate educator, big picture thinker with an inquiring mind – always pushing thinking to its limits. @writingonwallAS

More than just ‘Gym’

Being part of a student’s opportunity to participate in physical education is a unique and tangible experience and one that I’ve been grateful for over the past three years. The more time I spend with children in a PhysEd setting, I quickly come to learn that students want more than just 'gym'. I continue to discover that children thrive to participate in games that challenge them both physically and mentally, and in activities that have relevance to their everyday lives.

Enter ‘Physical Literacy’

Students of Panorama Hills School see this relevance daily by participating in lessons designed to promote their development of physical literacy. Like the ability to read various forms of text – magazine, newsprint, and digital media – physical literacy is a person’s ability to move confidently and competently in a verity of physical activities.  This certainly isn’t a short-lived journey, rather one that takes time, even years. Climbing ladders, walking on ice, falling and getting back up are all examples of these everyday tasks whose importance I’ve learned reaches far beyond the walls of our school ... and that’s what drives me, our students and many others within our PhysEd community.

Today, like most days, I continue to learn how capable and eager young children are at leading a healthy and active lifestyle and how fortunate I am to be part of this great journey.

@ChrisFenMac is a husband, father and friend. A Learning Leader and Physical Education specialist advocating for quality #PhysEd and whole-school wellness.

If there’s a school experience that many students remember, it often comes from a field trip – why is that? I believe often this is the case because experiences on field trips are often closer to real life experiences than what is typically experienced in a classroom.

I’ve had the opportunity over the past year to see and experience some of the sites that our schools travel to – and we have many – most of our trips occur in the Calgary area, but we also have trips that go out all around Alberta. We have trips to various locations in Canada, such as West Coast sailing trips and trips to Quebec for French language practice and development.  A few students also get the opportunity to travel internationally.

What I’ve learned is that teachers (as well as their Assistant Principals & Principals) work very hard – harder than most realize - to provide these opportunities because they see the great educational value in these experiences.

This is part of the reason that we work to help schools through the process of planning and completing the forms that are necessary for field trips. We want to help make sure students get many opportunities to have a learning experience that just may be life changing.

If you’ve had a great experience on a field trip, please share below and make sure to say “Thanks!” to your teacher(s) and Principal & Assistant Principal for the work they’ve done in organizing that opportunity.

Sunrise at Tod Inlet near Victoria, BC    





Mark Bylsma (@mbylsma) is currently the Off-Site Activities Coordinator for the Calgary Board of Education. He’s a dad, husband, enjoys most sports, and particularly enjoys brewing a really good cup of coffee. He tries to learn something new every day and his two kids usually make sure he does.    

My kids were outside during Phys. Ed, playing field hockey. My little guy with autism was happy up until the end, when his team hadn’t scored or won a game, for the entire gym period. As his frustration grew, the other 9 kids he was playing with came together for a quick meeting, hatched a plan and then quickly dispersed to continue their game.


Once everyone started playing again, a teammate would either go for the ball and miss it… which let him to get the ball instead. Or they would accidentally pass it to him, instead of someone else. This allowed him and a teammate to hit the ball back and forth to each other, all the way down the field. They got to the net and everyone, on both teams, yelled for him to shoot…. He did and scored the team’s first and only goal of the day! He felt like superman and was over the moon happy, beaming from ear to ear. My heart is happy and I may admit to crying a few tears of joy, as I watched all of this unfold from the sidelines of the field.

Today at school, my kids taught me kindness, compassion, generosity and empathy. They taught me that sometimes you have to stop thinking, and just go where your heart takes you. I am in awe of what amazing kids they already are, and what exceptional people they will continue, to grow up, to become.


Lindsay Wolkowski loves CNG and is a proud Phoenix! Passionate about providing rich learning experiences that allow students to learn and grow, while making our world a tiny bit better.

This year I have been tasked with transforming our library into a learning commons. My focus for year one in the LC has been to use maker stations to create a space where students can come together to create and collaborate, to share and discover. Each day I learn something new about the students I work with, my own teaching practices and my changing beliefs about learning.

As I interact with students in our LC space I have discovered an important question I believe all teachers should ask their students: “What do you want to learn?” When a student is given the ability to help shape his learning and the opportunity to collaborate with his teacher and peers concepts begin to matter, students become engaged and the possibilities truly become endless.

Students have been given the opportunity to provide input into the maker stations set up in the learning commons this year. As many of our stations are designed to be broad in scope students are able to enter into creative tinkering at a level meaningful to them.  The outcome is very evident in our school hallways and classrooms. Students are engaged, interest levels are up and the boys are asking questions. Conversations continue after leaving the learning commons space and there is a level of excitement when students come into it. I believe this is what authentic learning looks like and I am excited to see it happening in our school    

Dan Pye (@dcpye) is a Learning Leader at the All Boys Program. He’s passionate about empowering his students to create and collaborate. 

I have been teaching music with the CBE since 2013.  At first, I was a little apprehensive about teaching music to classes of elementary students, since my background is as a classical singer and private teacher. But since day one, I have had incredible support from colleagues, I have stayed true to myself, and I have had the pleasure to work with hundreds of amazing students. 

From the outset I thought a lot about my end goal for my students.  I realized I want them to develop confidence and an appreciation of music. Music is important because it can be therapeutic, life changing, powerful, and expressive in ways that words cannot express. It is my hope that their appreciation will fuel their curiosity and that they will have the confidence to build upon their skills and talents in music and also in life. 

This venture is a learning experience everyday for the students and myself. I expose them to new genres, new instruments, and challenge what they think they know about music. Everyday, they rise to the challenge and take it further through inquiry and an impressive demonstration of talent, creativity, imagination and leadership. I see young children leading vocal warm-ups, singing dramatically to opera, imagining stories to go along with instrumental music, creating rhythmically interesting compositions, and comparing new music to that of Beethoven. I am constantly learning that children are open-minded risk-takers, and they will show you that they are capable of more than what you imagined.    


Allison (@eleisonsoprano) is a teacher, an opera singer, and a talented home cook. She enjoys reading, camping, puzzles, and spending time with family and friends.

Prototyping Personalized Professional Learning

When we created SHIFT Lab, a year-long professional learning stream for educators at TELUS Spark, we took a human-centered design approach. Participants experienced the impact as we responded to their feedback with a revised schedule in the middle of their summer intensive week. I am always questioning the balance between co-design and required components (some participants said if they’d have had the choice they would have opted out of some sessions that greatly impacted their learning). I would love to hear how other learning leaders and administrators tread this fine line.

Each SHIFT Lab participant writes a Design Declaration, an overarching question they are looking to explore in their practice, that we commit 16 FTE hours to support. This terrified me. How are we going to support 41 teachers with their diverse learning goals? To give you a sense, here are a few of the Design Declarations written by SHIFT Lab teachers that we are supporting this year:

• “How might we use design-thinking to create inclusive and empathetic learning with our PLP (Paced Learning Program) class?”
• “How might we move students from modeling solutions to authentic prototyping during critical problem-based learning?”
• “How might we develop a positive, encouraging environment where ideas are celebrated as highly as results in students and teachers?”

We have only just begun our year-long learning adventure. Stay tuned for May when the teachers share what they’ve learned during the year and we can gauge how successful we were with supporting their declarations.

Stephanie Nemcsok (@book_traveller) is the Professional Learning Specialist at TELUS Spark, The New Science Centre. As a museum educator and nerd, she gets so excited about things that she will uncontrollably wave her arms like Grover.

Today I learned about creativity and risk-taking; my own as well as my students. We were exploring fall colours in our grade one class, and were working on creating a project using the signs of fall that we collected.  

In looking at this job I immediately began to think of how to make the project as easy and mess free as possible, and then I realized my mistake.  I missed the important question of ‘why’.  Why should we paint?  What could student learn with this job?  How is painting a background engaging?  

So instead of simply putting pallets of brown, orange, yellow, red and purple paint out onto tables, we incorporated a colour-mixing lesson into our project.  I explained that we needed to use fall colours for our work, but that we only had primary paint colours to work with.  Swirling students eagerly mixed colours together and excitedly shared how to create orange and purple; matching their samples to the leaf samples around the room.  Then some students noticed that we also needed brown, and teams of students worked together, heads bent to make this new colour. Wild cheers filled the room as a team announced they had found the formula.  Had I done this project as first planned we would have ended up with a nice picture, what we ended up with instead was a great story of how we created fall.

Lori Wilson teaches grade one in Calgary, loves camping, reading and hanging out with her family.