A school can genuinely believe in outdoor learning and still make it surprisingly difficult for teachers to get outside. Most educators I know do not need another presentation convincing them that children benefit from opportunities to move, explore, notice, wonder and learn beyond four walls. Many already want to create more of those opportunities. Whether the school around them makes that work possible is a separate question.
If taking a class outside regularly means that an individual teacher has to independently navigate supervision, weather, accessibility, equipment, schedules, curriculum expectations, risk procedures and the needs of thirty different learners, outdoor learning can quickly become something we value in principle but struggle to sustain in practice. At that point, motivation is only part of the picture. The conditions around the teacher are doing a lot of the work too.
Research into outdoor learning in Canadian schools has been pointing in this direction for some time. Educator confidence and experience are part of the picture alongside principal support, school and district policies, funding, resources, curriculum expectations, schedules, school culture and the physical environment.[1]
More recent Canadian research examining how outdoor learning can be expanded across public education continues to identify institutional and process-based barriers and emphasizes the need to involve educators, administrators and policy-makers when thinking about implementation at scale.[2]
We can have teachers who believe deeply in outdoor learning and still place them inside structures that make it difficult to do.
I have seen this pattern with plenty of good ideas in schools. Usually, someone gets excited. They try something, learn through experience, collect supplies, solve problems, figure out what works and become the person everybody else asks. That kind of leadership helps schools move forward because educators are willing to experiment, learn and share what they discover.
The challenge is what happens next. If outdoor learning disappears when that teacher changes grades, moves schools, takes a leave or simply no longer has the capacity to carry it, then outdoor learning was never fully built into the school. We benefited from an enthusiastic educator.
Those educators are still essential. The work becomes more sustainable when the conditions around them make it easier for others to join, adapt and continue. Leadership has work to do here.
Before asking teachers to do more, make the work easier to carry
Teachers are already making hundreds of decisions every day. They are thinking about individual student needs, transitions, supervision, assessment, family communication, behaviour, safety, curriculum and everything unexpected that walks through the classroom door before 9:00 a.m. Then we tell them outdoor learning is valuable and encourage them to do more of it.
That encouragement can be completely sincere while still leaving a teacher thinking, “Okay, but how?” Leadership can help answer that question by looking closely at the conditions around the work instead of adding another initiative or another binder.
Are expectations around taking students outside clear? Do teachers understand which spaces they can use and how they can use them? Does everyone have to create their own weather plan? Is there basic equipment available somewhere, or does outdoor learning depend on what individual teachers have bought, borrowed or collected? Have staff had opportunities to think about accessibility, sensory needs and participation outdoors? When a teacher has a reasonable question about supervision or risk, is there somewhere clear to take it? Are educators given opportunities to learn from colleagues who already have experience teaching outside?
At the board or system level, there is another layer to consider. Are policies helping educators use outdoor spaces thoughtfully, or unintentionally adding enough uncertainty that staying inside becomes the easier choice?
None of these questions are especially glamorous, but they shape whether teachers can actually do the work. In practice, sustainability often comes from ordinary decisions that reduce friction. A shared set of expectations can save twenty teachers from independently trying to interpret the same issue. A small collection of communal equipment can remove another obstacle. Time for an experienced teacher to work alongside a colleague can build confidence far more effectively than another reminder to get outside. A clear answer to a question about risk can turn “I’m not sure we’re allowed to do that” into “Okay, we can make this work.”
Take Me Outside’s strategic plan takes that wider view. Their work includes supporting educators who are curious about outdoor learning, building communities of educators already doing the work, and collaborating with school-system administrators to better understand and remove barriers.[3] That systems-level focus is useful because there is a limit to how far any educational practice can spread when its success depends on individual people repeatedly overcoming the same obstacles.
Teachers will always bring creativity, courage and initiative to schools. Schools benefit from that leadership. Good systems do something with what those educators learn. They make the path clearer for the next person, share resources, clarify expectations, notice unnecessary barriers, create opportunities for people to learn from each other, and make participation possible for more students and more educators.
Over time, outdoor learning becomes part of the school rather than something associated with a few particular teachers.
Outdoor learning does not become sustainable because every teacher suddenly becomes an outdoor-learning expert. It becomes more sustainable when teachers no longer have to figure out every part of it alone.
Structure is what makes participation possible outdoors
Sometimes when we talk about outdoor learning, the picture becomes very romantic. Students are exploring, moving, playing, noticing, wondering and learning in a more open environment. Those things can absolutely happen. So can conflict, uncertainty, competing needs and a child yelling from across the field, “He says I can’t go there!” The classroom community comes outside with us.
That tension helps clarify what structure is for. It should protect safety and participation without closing down the possibilities of being outside.
Outside, some of the assumptions of the classroom disappear. Students start asking different questions. Can we run here? Can I climb that? How far can I go? What if I do not want to participate in this activity? What if someone wants rough play and I do not want to be touched? What happens when one person’s exploration affects someone else’s safety?
Adults still hold responsibility for safety. There are decisions in schools that students cannot and should not be expected to carry. But there is a great deal of room between adults deciding everything and students deciding everything, and that space is where meaningful student voice can live.
A class can talk together about what people need to feel safe in a space, where someone might need room, how boundaries will be communicated, what respectful play looks like, which areas are open for exploration and what happens when an agreement stops working. When students help build the agreements that shape their learning community, a boundary can become something that protects another person’s ability to participate rather than simply another instruction from an adult. A conversation about safety can include responsibility. A disagreement can become an opportunity to practise listening, negotiation and repair.
That is still structure. It is simply structure with a purpose.
At the classroom level, that might look like shared agreements. At the school level, it might mean common expectations for outdoor spaces. At the system level, it can mean policies that give educators enough clarity to make thoughtful professional decisions. Across all three levels, the structure should make participation and safety easier without creating so much friction that the easiest option is always to stay inside.
Sustainability is also an equity question
This becomes an equity issue too. When outdoor learning relies on one educator’s confidence, personal collection of supplies, knowledge of risk procedures or ability to solve every logistical problem, access becomes uneven. Some students happen to land in classrooms where outdoor learning is part of the culture. Others may rarely experience it at all.
Recent Canadian research makes this scaling question explicit. Outdoor learning remains far from systematically implemented across public education, and researchers have argued that expanding access requires participation across multiple levels, including students, families, educators, administrators, policy-makers and community organizations.[2] Equitable access cannot be built by asking individual teachers to solve system-level problems one classroom at a time.
Equity will look different from school to school and child to child. Students bring different mobility, sensory, communication and support needs into outdoor spaces just as they do indoors. Schools themselves have different grounds, neighbourhoods, resources and access to green space. Making room for outdoor learning means building enough flexibility and support that educators can respond thoughtfully to those differences instead of treating them as reasons not to begin.
A sustainable system does not standardize the experience. It makes participation possible for more people.
The schoolyard can show us things the classroom sometimes misses
A change in environment can change what becomes visible to us. The student who rarely speaks during a whole-class discussion may suddenly have something to contribute outside. A child who struggles to sit still through a long lesson may become deeply engaged when movement is part of the learning. Students may notice things adults did not anticipate, use a space differently than we imagined or identify a boundary or problem we had not considered.
None of that means every outdoor experience will be peaceful, easy or transformative. Research into school-led nature interventions is encouraging, but it is also a good reminder not to make sweeping promises. A 2024 systematic review of 19 studies found some evidence of benefits in areas including positive affect, physical activity and social relationships or interactions, while also noting that the evidence base is still developing.[4]
That is a useful way for schools to approach this work. Outdoor learning can be worthwhile without being asked to solve every problem in education. We can value the possibilities it creates without turning it into another cure-all.
Those possibilities need to be available often enough for educators and students to learn from them. A practice cannot become part of school culture if every attempt at it feels like starting from zero.
A simple sustainability test
There is a simple question I would use when thinking about outdoor learning in a school: If the teacher who currently takes students outside most often left tomorrow, what would remain?
Would other staff still know how to use the spaces? Would expectations still be clear? Would people know where the resources were? Would teachers know where to take reasonable questions about supervision or risk? Would students still have opportunities to help shape how outdoor spaces are used? Would learning outside still appear in conversations about teaching and learning?
A string of no answers simply shows where the next work is.
The next move might be clearer guidance, shared equipment, time to learn alongside a colleague who already feels comfortable outside, or a staff conversation that reveals everyone has been operating under a rule that is not actually a rule. Students might need to be part of creating common outdoor agreements. None of those changes is dramatic on its own, but school improvement is often built through exactly these kinds of small structural decisions.
School leaders can help without becoming outdoor-learning experts themselves. They can listen to the educators already doing the work, ask what keeps getting in the way, make expectations clearer, create space for people to learn from one another, involve students in shaping the communities they learn in and remove unnecessary friction when they find it.
There will always be teachers who lead the way, and schools benefit from their experience.
Leadership can help turn what those teachers have learned into something colleagues can use and continue.
Making room is the work
We spend a lot of time asking whether teachers are ready to take learning outside. We could ask the system the same question: Is it ready to support the educators who want to?
Making room for outdoor learning still involves structure and clear expectations. The work is to look honestly at whether our schedules, policies, resources, professional learning and everyday leadership decisions make the practice easier to sustain or harder than it needs to be.
A practice that depends on extraordinary persistence is fragile. It becomes easier to sustain when the system learns from the people already doing the work and removes some of the obstacles around them.
Later this October, I’ll be carrying this question into conversations with school-system leaders at Take Me Outside’s Outdoor Learning Leadership Conference in Banff, where the focus includes embedding outdoor learning into policy, strategic planning, operations, professional learning and system-wide practice.[5] The conversation I want to have is about what can change around educators so that their interest in outdoor learning has somewhere to go.
Outdoor learning becomes more sustainable when getting outside stops requiring exceptional effort from a few people and becomes an ordinary possibility for more teachers and students.
What can we change inside the system that would make going outside easier?
References
[1] Oberle, E., Zeni, M., Munday, F., & Brussoni, M. (2021). Support Factors and Barriers for Outdoor Learning in Elementary Schools: A Systemic Perspective. American Journal of Health Education, 52(5), 251–265. https://doi.org/10.1080/19325037.2021.1955232
[2] Simpson, E., Donison, L., Zeni, M., de Lannoy, L., Matheson, K., Buxton, R., & Halsall, T. (2026). Applying Diverse Participatory Approaches to Co-Produce Research Impacts Within Outdoor Learning. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 25. https://doi.org/10.1177/16094069261457199
[3] Take Me Outside. (2025). Strategic Plan 2025–2027. https://takemeoutside.ca/strategic-plan/
[4] Ly, V., & Vella-Brodrick, D. A. (2024). Effects of School-led Greenspace Interventions on Mental, Physical and Social Wellbeing in Children and Adolescents: A Systematic Review. Educational Psychology Review, 36, 133. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-024-09963-1
[5] Take Me Outside. (2026). Outdoor Learning Leadership Conference. https://takemeoutside.ca/leadership-conference/
There are teachers who still believe deeply in public education and feel worn down by it at the same time. You can love the work, care deeply about students, believe in the purpose of public schools, and still find yourself frustrated by the systems surrounding all of it. A policy can make sense from a distance and feel completely different when you’re looking at the child in front of you. A routine can keep a classroom moving and still leave you wondering whether everyone in the room is being served well. I think a lot of teachers know that feeling.
I don’t think frustration means you’ve stopped believing in the work. Sometimes it comes from knowing what school can look like when things are going well. You’ve seen a student who barely spoke begin contributing because they finally felt safe enough to do it. You’ve watched a difficult conversation settle because someone slowed down and listened before deciding what happened. You’ve changed a routine after realizing it was making life easier for the adults but harder for a few students. You’ve held a firm boundary without making a child feel small.
Those moments are easy to overlook because they rarely look dramatic from the outside. They happen between lessons, after recess, during a hallway conversation, or in the few minutes before everyone heads home. But they tell us a great deal about the kind of school we’re creating. Good teaching has never been only about getting through the day with everyone following directions. It also lives in the judgment teachers use when the plan meets an actual group of children.
Teachers make decisions inside competing pressures all day long. Curriculum needs to move. Students need support. The classroom has to be safe enough for everyone to learn. Time is limited, needs are different, families have questions, policies exist, and some days you’re trying to hold all of that together before lunch. That is why I’m cautious when conversations about changing education turn into another list of things teachers need to do.
The work can begin much smaller than that. Sometimes it means explaining a decision even when the answer is still no. Sometimes it means noticing that the same student is being corrected repeatedly and asking whether they actually understand the expectation. After a conflict, it might mean moving beyond “Who started it?” and asking what happened, who was affected, and what needs to happen next. It can also mean recognizing that a student can disagree with an adult without that disagreement automatically becoming disrespect.
None of this removes structure from a classroom. Students need clear expectations, adults who can lead, and boundaries that protect the community. The difference is in how that structure is experienced. A boundary feels different when a child understands what it is protecting. Accountability feels different when dignity survives the conversation. Student voice becomes more useful when students understand that having a voice also means listening, considering other people, and living with decisions that won’t always go their way.
I know many teachers are already doing this work. They’re asking whether a routine is actually helping students learn. They’re listening when a child tells them something isn’t working. They’re trying to separate the student from the behaviour in the language they use, and they’re repairing relationships after hard moments instead of assuming a consequence automatically fixed everything. Most of the time, they aren’t giving that work a special name. They’re simply making thoughtful decisions because they know the children in front of them.
I also know how tiring that can be. There are educators who are tired of watching good people work inside systems that make good work harder. They’re tired of another initiative arriving without anything else being taken away. They’re tired of being expected to respond to individual children inside structures designed around sameness. They know what a student needs and don’t always have the time, staffing, flexibility, or support to provide it.
If that is where you are, I don’t think you need another person telling you to work harder. And I don’t think questioning the system makes you less committed to public education. For me, questioning it is part of taking the promise of public education seriously.
Public schools can bring children from different families, identities, abilities, cultures, languages, and experiences into a shared community. They can give young people a place to learn how to live with other people, work through disagreement, take responsibility, use their voice, and contribute to something larger than themselves. Teachers create so much of that experience every day. Protecting what is good about public education also requires us to be willing to question the structures that get in the way of it.
None of us is going to redesign public education during a Tuesday afternoon lesson. But there are choices available in the room we’re already standing in. We can ask a better question. We can explain the boundary. We can make room for another voice. We can revisit an expectation that isn’t working. We can repair something when we get it wrong.
Those choices won’t solve every problem in public education. They can, however, help us keep building schools that serve the students inside them a little better.
So if you love teaching and sometimes feel worn down by the system around it, you’re not alone in that tension. If you’re still asking hard questions, still noticing the student who isn’t being reached, and still trying to protect what’s good while pushing for something better, there are a lot of us standing in that same place.
I’m glad you’re here.
There are moments in school when the paperwork is done, the policy has been followed, the adult response can be justified, and still, the child in front of us has not really been served.
I think most educators know that feeling. It shows up in small ways at first. A student is struggling, and the conversation turns quickly to behaviour. A teacher is exhausted, and the answer becomes another initiative, another expectation, another system to manage. A parent raises a concern, and suddenly everyone starts speaking carefully, as though the language of school has become more important than the child’s experience of it.
That is the tension the book I'm writing, is trying to name.
I have spent more than two decades inside public education. I have seen extraordinary educators do deeply human work in systems that often make that work harder than it should be. I have seen schools protect students, open doors for students, and give children a place to belong. I have also seen students quietly diminished by routines, assumptions, labels, and policies that were never really built around who they are.
So this book did not begin from a distance. It began from classrooms, hallways, staff rooms, parent conversations, school meetings, and the quiet knowledge many people in education carry but don’t always feel free to say out loud.
We keep saying public education is here for students. I believe it should be. I still believe public education is one of the few places where children from different families, cultures, languages, identities, abilities, and experiences are meant to learn alongside one another. That is worth protecting. I haven’t written this book because I’ve given up on public education. I’ve written it because I haven’t.
But protecting public education cannot mean protecting every structure public education has inherited.
Some of those structures were built for efficiency. Some were built for sameness. Some were built to make large systems easier to manage. Some were built in another time, for another world, around a much narrower idea of the student. And now, many of those same structures are still shaping children who are growing up in a world that requires creativity, flexibility, collaboration, critical thought, and the ability to live well with difference.
That contradiction shows up everywhere once we start paying attention. It shows up when we call a quiet classroom successful without asking who feels safe enough to speak. It shows up when we treat the same consequence as fairness, even when the students involved are carrying entirely different histories, needs, and circumstances. It shows up when a child’s movement, intensity, sensitivity, or questioning is treated as something to correct before it is understood. It shows up when student voice is invited only after the adult decision has already been made.
This is where I think schools have to become more honest.
A student is not simply a behaviour to manage, a score to report, or a problem to solve. A student is a person with rights. That sounds simple, but in practice, it changes how we understand almost every part of school life.
If students are rights-bearing people, then dignity, safety, voice, and belonging cannot be treated as extras. They cannot be offered when learning is smooth and withdrawn when learning becomes difficult. They have to be built into the structure of school itself.
That does not remove adult authority. It does not mean students get whatever they want. It does not mean classrooms become chaotic or expectations disappear. It means the authority adults hold has to be used in service of students, not simply in service of order.
There is a difference between a school system that manages students and a school system that serves them. A system that manages students is usually asking, “How do we get this child to comply?” A system that serves students is asking, “What conditions does this child need in order to learn, participate, repair, belong, and grow?”
Those questions lead to very different schools.
I think many educators already know this. They feel it on the hard days. They feel it when a student’s behaviour finally makes sense after someone takes the time to learn the story underneath it. They feel it when a conflict that could have become a punishment becomes a conversation, an agreement, or a repair. They feel it when students are given enough structure to use their voice well, and the room becomes more grounded instead of less.
Those moments are small, but they are not minor. They show what school can become when the system is willing to learn.
That is really the heart of School the System. For a long time, we have focused on schooling children into the existing structure. We teach them how to line up, wait, produce, perform, meet the measure, and adapt. Some structure is necessary. Schools need routines. Communities need agreements. Children need limits, guidance, and adults who can hold steady when things become difficult.
But structure should serve students. When structure starts serving the system more than the child, we need to be honest enough to notice.
This book is trying to name the moment when compliance gets mistaken for learning. When sameness gets mistaken for fairness. When silence gets mistaken for respect. When a child is asked to become smaller so the system can remain unchanged.
I don’t think we change public education by pretending educators are not trying hard enough. Most of the educators I know are trying very hard. Many are carrying far more than the public sees. But care inside a strained system is not enough on its own. Good people can still be handed tools that don’t serve students well. Thoughtful leaders can still be pulled into decisions that protect process over people. Caring educators can still participate in patterns they would never have designed themselves.
That is why the system itself has to become part of the lesson.
If schools are truly here for students, then schools have to be willing to learn from students. Learn from the student who withdraws. Learn from the student who keeps getting sent out. Learn from the student who asks why. Learn from the student who does well on paper but feels invisible. Learn from the parent who senses something is wrong but does not yet have the language for it. Learn from the teacher who keeps saying, quietly, “This is not working.”
That is the work this book is trying to begin.
Not a finished answer. Not a perfect framework. Not another promise that schools can be transformed if everyone simply follows the steps. Something more honest than that.
A call to look carefully at what public education has inherited, what it still protects, and what students are asking us to become brave enough to change.
The first draft is finished. The work of refining it is just beginning. And maybe that feels fitting, because the book is asking of the system what writing is asking of me right now: revise what no longer serves, keep what is true, and be willing to learn from what is in front of you.
If this is the kind of school conversation you care about, I’ll be sharing more behind-the-book reflections through The Schooling Signal as School the System takes shape.
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