How Outdoor Education Can Shift Mindsets in the Classroom

As a small public tuition-free charter school in West Greenwich, Rhode Island, The Greene School has always emphasized themes of interdependence—in their local ecosystems and in their classrooms. In addition to their location—a 74-acre woodland setting—one of the features that make this school so unique is a number of outdoor education elements sprinkled throughout campus, along with the way the faculty utilizes them to help students build the mindsets they need for learning. A climbing tower stands near the pond, and throughout the year, teachers use the ropes course attached to the tower in addition to various team-building activities to help students fully appreciate what they are capable of doing and learn how they can truly support each other.

“There’s so much around group dynamics and group process with a ropes course,” says Principal Alex Edelmann. “It just offers so many powerful examples and metaphors for how we function as a group.”

Educators at The Greene School hold a fundamental belief that outdoor education can help students build resilience and self-reliance—and can even lead to transformational moments.

“We’ve seen students who struggle in the classroom, who are regularly struggling with behavior, who are wandering in the hallways,” says Edelmann. “But they get out there where they’re tackling an initiative with a group of students, and they show up completely differently. There’s this totally different sense of possibility that they have for themselves.”

With time and practice, those tangible experiences of challenge and triumph translate into relationships and skills that support their academic pursuits in the classroom.

As a senior at The Greene School, Roman has experienced that connection between outdoor education and valuable mindsets for learning firsthand. “I think it’s taught me to have more resilience and more collaboration and cooperation with other people because you need all of that when you’re out hiking in the woods, especially when, like me, you’ve never hiked in the woods before coming here. So a lot of the skills that you learn when you’re outside working with other people also come into classwork.”

To learn more about this innovative school, visit the Greene School page on Edutopia.