How a School Turns Nature Into the Ultimate Classroom

On a crisp fall morning last year, a group of Damaris Borden’s freshmen hiked a thin trail along the edge of a mossy pond in West Greenwich, Rhode Island, chatting amiably as they threaded through rocks, fallen leaves, and outgrowths of native oak and maple trees. 

Every so often, the group paused to take in natural features that most teenagers might overlook, like a massive beaver dam stretched across a bend in the pond. 

Pressed by Borden to explain its significance in the ecosystem, a discerning girl offers that the dams “create new water sources,” recalling what she’d learned about how the makeshift structures improve water quality by creating slow-moving wetlands that trap sediments and absorb nutrients, acting as natural filters.

Borden stood aside and watched as a tight knot of students deliberated whether this particular fact about the natural setting—set on a sprawling tract of 74 acres, which also happens to double as the backyard to their high school—was worth pointing out to the parents and local leaders they would lead on a campus tour later that week. 

It wasn’t the students’ first foray into the woods. In the previous weeks, they had studied the campus’ natural watersheds and sharpened arguments they’d present on the tour in mock debates—role-playing as government officials, conservationists, and solar company executives—about the tradeoffs between preserving forest land or razing it in favor of developing more renewable sources of energy. “It’s an imaginary scenario,” Borden said, “but it’s also one that’s playing out across the state and the country.” 

It is also fertile ground for study at The Greene School, where getting students to work collaboratively as they tackle challenging, real-world environmental problems is central to the school’s mission. Over the course of the next four years, Borden’s freshmen will learn about teamwork and risk-taking in both academic and social contexts, cheering each other on as they scramble up the school’s climbing wall or camp together in the wilderness—before they head inside to design and build functioning water filters, or engage in a months-long project to study local soil quality before presenting their findings in public forums like the state legislature. 

“We are showing kids that they have an opportunity to step into their learning in a different way,” said principal Alex Edelmann of the school’s unique philosophy.

“It’s not about doing things because they have to, it’s about doing things because they can see that it's meaningful and they can see its value and they understand that the work they're doing is contributing to a better school and a better world.” 

Into the Wild

Every freshman takes Borden’s ecology course. It introduces students to the rolling hills, rock formations, tree species, and water systems that make up their new high school, and serves as their “immersion into our mission—what it means to explore the independence of the human and natural world,” Borden says.  

For a student body that gets bussed in from across the state, including a sizable population from urban areas in Providence, the course acclimates them to The Greene School’s distinct model, where social-emotional and academic learning integrate seamlessly between traditional classrooms and the woods. 

Within a month of starting high school, in fact, all students head to the outskirts of the rural campus for a multi-day camping trip known as “Wilderness.” Crews—small advisory groups of students led by an educator that stick together all four years—hike, camp, and share meals in an experience meant to build trust, independence, and a shared sense of purpose. 

The students take on rotating responsibilities, cooking, cleaning, packing up gear, and leading hikes. 

Sarah Kristiansen, an English teacher and a crew leader, said an important transformation in student attitudes happens during the outing. At first kids fear getting lost and complain about bugs and sore feet. Some buck at the responsibilities thrust upon them. “But we just say, ‘We’re good, and I’m going to let you guys lead the way anyway. Good luck’,’” Kristiansen said. 

That shift—trusting students to lead, and pushing them to lean into discomfort—is intentional and sets the groundwork for the academic and social autonomy the school is set on developing over the course of four years. But they don’t have to wait that long, according to Kristiansen. The payoff is almost immediate. 

"By the time we get to the campfire that first night, it is just the most joyful and exuberant time. They feel so accomplished.” Under the open sky, something changes, she said. Crews start to name themselves, inside jokes form, friendships blossom, and trust deepens. 

It’s also an early glimpse into a broader idea The Greene School fosters: that wellness isn't separate from learning, but intertwined with it. Outdoor experiences, physical movement, and moments of reflection around a fire are seen as essential to students’ mental, emotional, and academic growth.

Adriel, a junior at the school who hails from Providence where “you don’t really see forests and stuff like that when you’re walking down the streets,” said he wasn’t initially thrilled about how much The Greene School integrates outdoor experiences into a normal school day. “I was that one person: I hated bugs. I hated spiders. Mosquitoes. All of it.” 

Now, three years in, he has a new perspective. “It’s rare to ever go to a school where you really get to be in nature,” he says. “Those are two very separate things usually, and I appreciate how the school mashes them together,” whether that’s in small ways like outdoor lunches and breaks between classes, or in larger, more immersive experiences like wilderness, which he said have had an outsized influence not only on his mental health, but on his relationships with his peers and his confidence as a student. 

Going through wilderness, for example, “kind of teaches you perseverance in a sense, because it's not always easy,” Adriel said. “You have to break a lot of barriers just to gather the courage to do something like that.” 

The Sound That No Bells Make

While a sprawling, wooded campus is a striking departure from the norm, it’s what happens within and beyond this natural environment that defines The Greene School: A deliberate dismantling of traditional structures to foster agency, autonomy, and a deep sense of community.

Whole-school, student-led morning meetings kick off every day. There are no bells marking the school day’s transitions. Administrative offices aren’t clustered in a wing, but are located near the center of the three school structures students pass in and out of each day. If a student has a pressing need to pop into Edelmann’s office, sometimes simply to crack a joke, there is no secretary to stop and see first. 

At lunch, the cafeteria is mostly desolate; students sit outside and eat together, go for walks on the trail networks that surround the school, or play instruments on the lawn.

All of this is by design, Edelmann said, citing a line from Richard Louv’s 2005 best-selling book Last Child in the Woods, which was an inspiration for the school and has become a mantra that teachers and administrators live by: “Education is not intended to be a polite form of incarceration.”

The opposite of incarceration is autonomy and self-regulation, which is what head of school Kerry Tuttlebee says are the skills she wants students to develop. Choices about the school’s process and approach are rooted in the belief that young people thrive when they’re treated as capable and trusted members of a community. 

“We design flexible spaces and routines to reflect our belief that students are capable of making good choices, and learning from the moments when they don’t,” Tuttlebee said.  

The absence of school bells, for example, is foreign to most students entering the school, but she said it is also an effective means of teaching kids how to manage and track their time over the course of four years. “There are very few situations after high school where students are going to be working in a place or living in a place that is organized by bells,” Tuttlebee said. “So why not start preparing them now to manage time?”

This approach fosters more than just independence; it also builds a deep sense of agency, which is ultimately what school leaders say they are after.

The goal is to mold students “who are curious, who enjoy learning, and who feel a sense of obligation to contribute to whatever community they choose to be a part of,” Edelmann said. But that kind of contribution doesn’t come from compliance “You don’t build leaders by telling them what to do. You help them realize they’re powerful. That they can do a lot. That they have a lot to offer.”

To hear students tell it, the approach works. 

Batoul, a senior, said the entire design of the school—from the outdoor experiences, to the self-directed time management, to the hands-on experiential learning—helps increase confidence. 

“I was not much of a risk taker,” she said. “But that helped to push me.” 

Learning That Extends Beyond the Classroom Walls

In a recent AP Statistics class, teacher James Bailey led his class through a data investigation using the Tree Equity Score tool, which maps tree canopy coverage across the U.S. Students worked in groups to use their knowledge of statistical methods and explore data layers—poverty, race, and other census variables—to examine environmental disparities in the city of Providence—a community from which many of them hail. 

Using a representative sample of blocks in the city, they generated scatter plots and lines of best fit. They calculated correlation coefficients, interpreted residual plots, and used their models to glean insights. “There were a lot of outliers,” Bailey said. “It’s not a clean data set—there were places that had high poverty but also high tree equity.” Instead of trying to simplify the data, or gloss over important nuances, Bailey pushed students to think critically. “What do the numbers mean? How strong is this relationship, and can it be used to make an argument?”

Roman, a senior in the class, said the activity deepened his understanding of statistics, but also pointed him back to the mission of the school, and his place in the community more broadly.“ A lot of the work that we do here at the Greene School focuses on not just environmental problems, but also social problems,” he said. “The data we were looking at told us that a lot of places where we find environmental issues, such as a lack of canopy, often correlate with people who are in poverty, who have a lack of resources.” 

It helped that the data focused on the city he lives in and knows well. “I can see myself in that data,” Roman said. “That’s pretty cool.”

In the 10th grade, students conduct a months-long research project comparing pollution or climate issues in their own neighborhoods to higher income neighborhoods in the state. The project is called “A Tale of Two Cities”, and yes, they read and discuss the Dickens novel in English class. In the past, the project has culminated in formal presentations by students for legislators at the Rhode Island State House.

For most students, it is their first brush with public policy—and a lightbulb moment when they realize their voices can have a real-world impact. “It felt like, wow, this is more than just a school assignment,” said Batoul, who presented her findings before policy makers during her sophomore year. “It was an opportunity to take initiative and make a difference.”

A Different Kind of Preparedness

Despite its unique emphasis on nature and community, The Greene School offers most of the coursework of a traditional high school. Students take AP courses, earn college credit through dual enrollment, and outperform their peers on state assessments in ELA, math, and science.

But test scores aren’t the ultimate measure of success, says Amy Pratt, the founder of the school. Academic preparation is just one part of a broader vision to help students become curious, self-aware, and resilient human beings—ready not only for college, but for life.

Pratt, who started the school in 2010, said she always envisioned it as a place where students could become not only environmentally literate, but deeply capable.

“It’s not that we have to be here,” Pratt said, waving a hand toward the campus outside her window. “We’re fortunate to be here. But you can do this anywhere if you have the right mindset. You just have to have the will.”

For Pratt, and the school leaders and teachers that make her school work, there is a guiding belief that students desperately need schools where curricula grapple with real-world issues they face, where moments of time for them to learn how to reset, breathe, and reflect are built into their days, and where values like trust, connection, and agency are encouraged just as much as high scores. “You can’t just send kids off into the world without teaching them how to self-regulate and take care of themselves,” Pratt said. 

That broader vision is what drew Olivia, a senior, to the school in the first place. After struggling in a large urban middle school where she felt lost and disconnected and struggled behaviorally, she was curious about a campus that offered something different—more nature, fewer walls.

Four years later, she’s planning to major in biology and focus on plant conservation when she goes to college in the fall. But the shift the school has made in her life, she says, runs far deeper than academics. “I feel free here,” Olivia said. “Which I hadn’t ever felt before in school.”