If you build it they will go
A model for fostering science education and outdoor learning within a school and across a district
Having arrived early for my meeting at Centreville Elementary School in Fairfax County, Virginia, located just a few miles south of Dulles International Airport, I sat with the windows rolled down in my mica grey Toyota Sienna minivan.
Mindlessly watching the morning traffic of buses and vehicles roll by the school’s drop-off area, my daydreaming was interrupted by the charming sound of a tolling bell marking the beginning of the school day.
As vehicles departed, leaving a relatively quiet parking lot behind, my ears perked up once again to a different noise. This time, instead of vehicle engines and the tolls of a bell, my auditory cortex received the cry of a kid goat bleating for its mother. As it turned out, my visit to Centreville ES coincided with ‘Farm Day,’ a day on which a menagerie of animals from a nearby farm occupied one of the many outdoor learning classrooms scattered across campus.
Having recently read about Centreville’s focus on getting its students to learn from and within the outdoors, I was pleasantly surprised to see the inspirational impetus of my visit immediately in action. Indeed, I’ve often seen and witnessed firsthand how capital investments in outdoor learning spaces, while initially constructed and made available, can often sit idle - looking and sounding great in theory but becoming little more than showpieces that one can point to and tout, but in reality not add to a student’s experience at school.
Outdoor learning at Centreville ES, however, is not just something that is talked about; it is actively encouraged and lived, thanks in no small part to my host for the day, former CES school teacher turned principal Josh Douds.
Walking past the flag poles where Centreville ES proudly flies its green Eco Flag from the National Wildlife Federation (the school has permanent status), I met the gregarious and athletic-looking Principal Douds in the main office. Mr. Douds was donning red, white, and black school-themed gear, including a quarter-zip pullover with the head of the school’s bald eagle mascot stitched over one side of his chest and customized Nike high-tops emblazoned with a monogrammed ‘CES’ on the heel.
Principal Douds greeted me warmly, and his sidekick, ‘principal for the day’ Martin (name changed for privacy), soon after walked me along Centreville ES’s halls for a quick look around.
Standing at the intersection of the building’s two long hallways, described to me by Mr. Douds as an airplane with its central fuselage flanked by two wings, we chatted about the school’s changing and increasingly diverse demographics, as well as the small-school feel offered thanks to Centreville ES’s relatively small size and tight-knit community.
Stepping inside a second-grade classroom led by Mary Ann Settlemyre, the school’s STEM coordinator, we saw students seated on a large rug in groups of three chatting excitedly—voices crescendoing any time the baby duck scurrying back and forth within the perimeter of their cross-legged circle sent out a small speck of excrement from beneath their waggling tail feathers.
Moving from the rug to a pair of small aquariums resting on a counter in the back of the classroom, Mary Ann - while still keeping a master teacher’s watchful eye on her second graders - informed us about the ongoing citizen science research project her students were participating in. Her students, who were responsible for feeding and measuring the growth of different species of turtles and relaying the data collected to a herpetologist at a nearby university, fondly reminded me of my own classroom turtles that lived in a large lab sink at the back of my NYC classroom.
When I learned about this students-as-scientists project and others, like participation in the famed Trout in the Classroom program, I couldn’t help but feel envious of the reptilian project and somewhat disappointed that I hadn’t turned my classroom’s turtle habitat into a living experiment. Indeed, seeing how Mary Ann and Centreville ES were actively encouraging their young students to become scientists so early in their lives when synapses are more naturally attuned to the scientific discovery process, I couldn’t help but think that CES’s children were being primed to not only appreciate the natural world around them but also be set up for a lifetime of scientific pursuits.
In fact, Mr. Douds soon supported this hunch, noting that many of the outdoor campus projects we were about to view were launched thanks in no small part to the volunteer efforts of Eagle Scouts. Emphasizing how many returning scouts - always eager for a project - were Centreville ES alums.
Leaving the building’s walls behind, our group of three stepped outside into one of Centreville ES’s many courtyards flanked by the ‘Eagle’s Nest’ pollinator garden and a series of downspouts that diverted rainwater from the roofed awning to the vegetation, including the monarch favorited milkweed, growing in the soil below.
Towards the center of the courtyard, we viewed one of the many outdoor classrooms marked by two 4x4s dug into the ground and affixed together about 3 feet off the ground by white-painted plywood that was covered by a thin piece of translucent plexiglass. Combined, these three pieces of wood and one piece of plastic made for a rather elegant and utilitarian whiteboard.
Many of these outdoor learning spaces (at least a dozen were scattered across campus) had seating in the form of large cross-sections of tree trunks. Whereas outdoor spaces without predetermined places to sit benefited from easy access to collapsible stools that could be gathered from a storage chest near a building exit.
While Principal Douds and Principal for the Day Martin continued to guide me around the CES grounds, they revealed some of the keys to community-wide outdoor learning success.
Establishing local partnerships (like the aforementioned Eagle Scouts), with businesses (carpenters to build the whiteboards, for example), and with families.
A supportive school and district administration (Fairfax County has a Get2Green initiative and working staff) that encourages outdoor learning from the classroom up and not a top-down stance of compliance.
Making outdoor learning a part of the school’s culture via student empowerment and ownership of projects. Yes, teachers help facilitate and design outdoor learning experiences for students, but ultimately, it is the students who are given agency to do and, more importantly, inform the direction of the work.
Not surprisingly, many of the best practices outlined above also helped me be successful in my environmental science classroom and will appear as recurrent themes throughout Learning Environment.
Coming to the front of Centreville ES’s campus, Douds pointed out a solar panel installation near the school’s entrance before we ambled across the parking lot toward a large white tent-turned-outdoor classroom. This protected and, perhaps more importantly, shaded learning space seems to be of much importance to students' comfort. Indeed, Principal for the day Martin conferred as much when I asked him about his preference for outdoor or indoor learning, to which he remarked, “Indoor, unless it’s cool, because sometimes outside is too hot.” A poignant reminder for both Centreville ES and other schools looking to build their own outdoor classrooms in an ever-warming, climate change-induced world.
When reaching the tented learning space, complete with an outdoor whiteboard, students and their teachers interacted with ‘Farm Day’ animals, including the kid goat that had bleated its welcome to me earlier that morning, along with its mother and a rather stoic Jersey cow.
Continuing past the tent, we slipped into a small patch of woodland bordering the school’s entrance and busy route 28, which is currently undergoing a widening project that has since destroyed the once noise and pollution buffering treeline perimeter of Centreville ES - taking a nefarious page from the oft-repeated playbook that prioritizes space for cars over people, plants, and pedagogy.
Despite dwelling on the loss of natural space, Douds instead uplifts the ongoing science students engage with at the wooded area’s vernal pond. The ephemeral wetland, easily accessed from a raised-deck platform and continually analyzed by students for water quality and evidence of living things, has shown marked improvement since the project’s beginning, as measured by increased water clarity and the number of amphibious life in the form of frogs.
After the vernal pond, we briefly visited another outdoor classroom in a different section of woods, viewed the school’s composting bins from a distance, and wrapped things up at a neatly arranged grouping of raised bed planters, one of which was fashioned to resemble a Star Wars AT-AT Walker.
Thanking Mr. Douds and Martin for their time and gracious welcome, I returned to the driver’s seat of my minivan and jotted down some notes. Taking time to process my visit, I was struck by how seamlessly science and outdoor learning appeared to be incorporated into the essence of the school. No doubt (and based on my own experience trying to run this type of programming in my own classroom), I was acutely aware of the tireless effort and longstanding commitment needed to get programming off the ground, but whereas I struggled to keep programs going from year to year as students came and went, Centreville seemed to have established a flywheel of science and sustainability - speaking to the importance of institutional support across an entire institution in order for new pedagogical approaches to be successful at scale.
I must admit, I was envious when first recognizing how in sync and committed the CES community appeared to be to science and the environment. Thankfully, however, these pangs of jealousy were quickly overshadowed by a sense of admiration for what Principal Douds, Mary Ann, Prinicpal-for-a-day Martin, Centreville ES community, and Fairfax County School District are doing as it is nothing short of remarkable and worthy of celebration and replication.
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Jared
This looks divine! What a setting!