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Chapter 3: Lesson Planning for Middle Years Outdoor Education

Josh Ambrosy and Sandy Allen-Craig

Learning Intentions

  • Describe the purpose of lesson planning as a pre-service Outdoor Education teacher
  • Analyse models for the development of lessons outdoors
  • Develop lesson plans using templates and models for outdoor education in and outside the classroom

3.1 Introduction to Lesson Planning

Planning lessons is a key skill you will develop over time as a teacher. In outdoor education (OE), the planning of effective lessons needs to consider how lessons can be delivered effectively both during outdoor experiences and at school in the case of OE programs that have timetabled class time. This chapter begins by considering the various parts of an effective lesson. We then explore how different lessons may have different focus areas depending on their place within a teaching and learning sequence. Following this, we will ask you to think about the young people you will teach and how their assets, wants and needs (Bahr, 2017) might guide your middle years OE lesson planning. Finally, and possibly most importantly, we offer a teaching model which is responsive to not only the learners but the place in which they are learning, enhancing the unique opportunities that emerge when teaching outside as students participate in carefully planned and conducted outdoor experiences.

3.1.1 Key Parts of a Lesson

Although there are many ways of structuring lessons, we have found that a guided inquiry approach is best when teaching OE in the middle years. Through this approach, most of your lesson planning should focus on what the students will be doing at different times. This requires you to consider your role as a teacher. Rather than being the source of information, with this approach you work as a guide to the learning. The key phases of an effective middle-year OE lesson can be broken down as follows.

The timings below are based on a lesson that runs for around an hour and can be scaled as required.

Activity 3.1 – Your Role in the Lesson

The above lesson structure encourages you to teach in a manner that focuses on the student’s engagement in the learning rather than the source of the information and knowledge (Tancredi et al., 2024). In doing so, it adopts a learner-centred ideology of education (Schiro, 2013), where the underlying belief is that students hold agency and can themselves create knowledge through education. This approach is not only suited to outdoor education as a progressive form of education but also to the broader middle years students’ learning styles that we address in the first half of this book (Bahr, 2017); we address this in more detail below (see 3.1.3).

To adopt this teaching style, it is important to consider your role as the teacher in the classroom and during outdoor experiences. Specifically, consider how you can become a guide to learning rather than a source of information or knowledge within the school. Below is a sample lesson plan that focuses on teaching students about the equipment they need to go canoeing. It specifies what the students would do throughout the different phases of the lesson.

    • Read through and think about what the students would be doing and learning in each part of the lesson.
    • Complete the teacher’s boxes for each part.

Answer the following questions:

    • What would year 9/10 students like about this lesson?
    • What might they find challenging/difficult?
    • What safety considerations would I need to monitor for during the lesson?
    • What would be a good next lesson for students? Why?

 

Case Study 3.1 Equipment for Canoeing

Table 3.2 Equipment for canoeing, by Josh Ambrosy, CC BY-NC 4.0

Year

9/10

Lesson Title

Introduction to Canoeing Equipment (School grounds, outside)

Content Descriptors

participate in physical activities that promote health, safety and social outcomes in outdoor environments and aquatic settings to design and evaluate participation strategies for themselves and others (VC2HP10M06)

 

Learning Intention

What equipment and knowledge do we need to be safe when going canoeing to explore relationships with the Yarra River?

Time and section

Teacher will…

Students will…

Introduction (10 minutes)

 

Recap of last lesson. In pairs, students create a story of how relationships with the Yarra River have changed over time. They use, as many Woiwurrung words as they can remember from their previous lesson in their story.

Instruction to Task (5 minutes)

 

Students listen to the explanation of the stations.

Students watch the canoe lifting demonstration.

Body (25 minutes)

 

Students work in groups through stations set up to practice skills. Each station has the required equipment and information (cards, videos, etc.). At each station, students use a cause-and-effect model to analyse why the equipment is necessary on a worksheet (table) to consider the risks that each piece of equipment/skill is helping to address.

Station 1: Identify all parts of a canoe and demonstrate safe lifting as a group

Station 2: Fitting a lifejacket and helmet

Station 3: Dryland paddle strokes with a partner (Forward, backward, sweep, pull)

Station 4: River signals – call and response

Station 5: River swimming safety and clothing (Theory only)

Conclusion (20 minutes)

 

In groups, students compare their cause-and-effect analysis with another group.

Each group is assigned one station, to present their analysis to the group.

 

3.1.2 e5 Model and Inquiry-Based Teaching for Outdoor Education

The e5 instructional model can help you as a teacher to think about the focus of your lessons, whether they be during outdoor experiences or at school. Specifically, the five stages of the e5 model can assist you in considering how content might be structured across a unit planner; we discuss how lessons should be sequenced in the chapter 4.

Within your OE lessons, you should focus on students participating in learning. However, the type of participation within each lesson should change and progress throughout a unit of work. The e5 Model can help you to think about the types of active participation within the learning that students will undertake at different points within your units of work or even across the period of outdoor experience if you are teaching a unit that is solely delivered during an outdoor experience.

Activity 3.2

  • Read through the below summary of the e5 model (Department of Education, n.d.)
  • Observe which part of the model you think the canoeing lesson from Activity 3.1 would align to.
  • Develop an idea for a lesson (focus area, body activity, etc.), for the other four parts of the model.
  • Reflect on how the five lessons you have developed would be scaffolded across a unit and analyse how active student participation in learning might change across different stages of the e5 model.
Table 3.3  e5 Instructional Model , by Victoria. Department of Education. Copyright State Government of Victoria. CC – BY

Engage

The teacher fosters positive relations with and between students and develops shared expectations for learning and interacting. They stimulate interest and curiosity, promote questioning and connect learning to real world experiences.

 

The teacher structures tasks, elicits students’ prior knowledge and supports them to make connections to past learning experiences. They present a purpose for learning, determining challenging learning goals and making assessment and performance requirements clear.

 

The teacher assists students to consider and identify processes that will support the achievement of the learning goals.

Explore

 The teacher presents challenging tasks to support students to generate and investigate questions, gather relevant information and develop ideas. They provide tools and procedures for students to organise information and ideas. The teacher identifies students’ conceptions and challenges misconceptions. They assist students to expand their perspectives and reflect on their learning. The teacher is mindful of the learning requirements of the task, attentive to student responses and intervenes accordingly.

Explain

The teacher provides opportunities for students to demonstrate their current level of understanding through verbal and non-verbal means. They explicitly teach relevant knowledge, concepts and skills. This content is represented in multiple ways. The teacher provides strategies to enable students to connect and organise new and existing knowledge.

 

They assist students to represent their ideas, using language and images to engage them in reading, writing, speaking, listening and viewing. The teacher explicitly teaches the language of the discipline. They progressively assess students’ understanding and structure opportunities for students to practise new skills.

Elaborate

The teacher engages students in dialogue, continuously extending and refining students’ understanding. They support students to identify and define relationships between concepts and to generate principles or rules.

 

The teacher selects contexts from familiar to unfamiliar, which progressively build the students’ ability to transfer and generalise their learning. The teacher supports students to create and test hypotheses and to make and justify decisions. They monitor student understanding, providing explicit feedback, and adjusting instruction accordingly.

Evaluate

The teacher supports students to continuously refine and improve their work using assessment criteria in preparation for a performance of understanding.

 

They integrate evidence from each phase, formally recording students’ progress against learning goals. The teacher provides feedback and assists students to evaluate their progress and achievements. They support students to reflect on their learning processes and the impact of effort on achievement. The teacher guides students to identify future learning goals.

3.1.3 Lesson Intentions

It is important, when presenting all lessons to students, that you frame them correctly. To do this, you need to explicitly introduce the focus of the lesson and help your students understand the purpose of the learning by adequate framing. This framing should be in the form of a learning intention, which can be framed as a statement or a question. For example, an open-ended question might be, ‘How can we leave the Yarra River better than we found it?’.

An open-ended learning intention is preferred when using a learner-centred approach (Schiro, 2013), which we advocate for in this chapter. Specifically, using a question or statement is better than a closed-ended learning intention and success criteria. These have become popular in schools but may not have the best needs of the students in mind because:

    • Open framing can promote critical thinking and help students think about their learning.
    • By using open framing, you can better cater to the diverse cognitive levels within your classes, as well-developed questions and statements will enable students to access them at various cognitive levels.
    • The use of open framing can be used across multiple lessons (e.g., one question used to frame the lessons for a week of classes or even a week-long outdoor experience), this will:
      • help students to access the curriculum at a deeper level and
      • reduce the planning time for you as a teacher.

When structuring your learning intention as a question, you should provide multiple levels of entry to the question so that students at different levels can access your curriculum. When you structure your learning intention as a statement, phrase it using a verb at the beginning and consider what is being learnt by the students rather than the activity being completed.

Activity 3.3 – Developing Lesson Intentions

You are teaching a unit on how technologies used during outdoor experiences impact the health of outdoor environments for a year 9/10 Outdoor Education elective. You and your students have recently been on an overnight outdoor experience to the Surf Coast, where you undertook a range of activities that involve different technology, including:

  • Surfing
  • Canoeing
  • Bushwalking
  • Base Camping

Following the outdoor experience, you plan to teach a lesson where students evaluate the impacts of different technologies used on the trip, which can impact the outdoor environment’s health (e.g., soft surfboards that are made from expanded polystyrene).

    • Write out 5 different learning intentions you could use to teach this lesson (at least two should be a statement starting with a verb, and two as a question).
    • Cross out the learning intention that you like the least.
    • Combine two or more of the remaining intentions into one.
    •  Select the most appropriate learning intention.
    • Read it aloud as if you were introducing it to your class.
    • Make any edits you need to, after reading it aloud to help with flow.
    • Reflect on:
      • The process you have undertaken to develop a learning intention.
      • What types of learning intentions have you used in the past?
      • The types of learning intentions you might use in the future based on this activity.

3.1.4 Planning for Middle Years Learners

Students in the middle years are unique cohorts to teach. Students undergo significant development during the middle years. In many schools, the curriculum is structured differently to best cater to the students during these formative years. For example, many schools in Victoria deliver their year nine curriculum via specific programs and structures that are more relevant to middle-year learners and allow students to learn about themselves and the world around them (Ambrosy, 2023).

When developing lessons for students in the middle years, consider what is being taught and who you are teaching. What you teach is articulated by the content descriptors, what is being assessed and at what cognitive level, as articulated by the achievement standards in the Victorian Curriculum F-10. However, there is a more underlying need as a teacher of the middle years, to not only be responsive to the formal curriculum, but to plan your lessons based on who you are teaching and the outdoor environments you are teaching through.

Bahr (2017) provides teachers of the middle years with a helpful framework to conceptualise the middle years learner. Specifically, rather than falling into the traps of the dominant and at times, unhelpful discourses of students in the middle years being disengaged, lost, or being defined by what they are not (not an adult, not a child). Bahr’s framework helps teachers of middle years students to consider the assets, wants and needs of students at this age group, which can, in turn, help underscore the development of engaging lessons.

Table 3.4 Assets, Wants and Needs of Middle Years Learners by Josh Ambrosy, 2024. CC BY-NC 4.0
Assets Self-centred/orientated, Globally aware, Concrete vs abstract, Tensions, Untested/unknown, Unique, Physicality
Wants Fun, Relevance, Success, Direction/goals
Developmental Needs Support/guidance/acceptance, Connection with prior knowledge, Authentic/situated learning, To take risks

Activity 3.4 The Assets Wants and Needs of Middle Years Learners

The above table from Bahr (2017), presents a framework for thinking about who you might teach as a middle years outdoor education teacher. Although this framework can help you to develop relationships with your students at this age group, it should also be used to underpin your lesson and curriculum planning (see Chapter 4).

  1. Take the time to review the various assets, wants and development needs in Table 3.2.
  2. For each of the 15 assets, wants, and developmental needs, write down three observations about the types of students you are planning outdoor education lessons for.

E.g., Globally aware:

    • Students are interested in big issues that have real-world consequences.
    • Students are questioning the world around them on many scales.
    • Students are likely to enjoy learning based on responses to global problems, such as local ecological restoration as climate mitigation strategies.
    • Imagine you are teaching an outdoor education elective to year eight students where you will be undertaking an outdoor experience, including downhill snow sports. In preparation for this experience, you have a double period (120 minutes) through which you plan to teach the students about snow sports safety and the alpine responsibility code (Case Study 3.1), in preparation for their trip. Develop a lesson that:
        • Teachers students how to be safe when in an alpine resort, including their obligations under the alpine responsibility code.
        • Is taught in a way, that the unique assets inform the, wants and needs of middle years students. In doing so, consider both how information might be presented to the year eight students and how they might take an active role within the classroom.

Alpine Responsibility Code

  1. Stay in control and avoid other people and hazards.
  2. Use appropriate protective equipment, especially helmets, to minimise the risk of injury.
  3. You must have the ability to use each lift safely. If in doubt ask the lift attendant.
  4. Obey all signs and warnings, and keep off closed trails and areas.
  5. It is your responsibility to avoid and give way to people below and beside you.
  6. Do not stop where you are not visible from above or where you obstruct a trail.
  7. Before starting downhill, or merging into a trail, look uphill and give way to others.
  8. Use care to prevent runaway snowboards.
  9. If you are involved in or see an accident, alert and identify yourself to Resort Staff.
  10. Be aware that it is dangerous to ski, board or ride lifts if your ability is impaired by drugs or alcohol.

From Alpine responsiblity code [Australian version]. Snowsafe.  Note. Versions from UK, USA, Canada and Australia exist, with National Ski Areas Association [USA] being noted as the creator of the US original version.

 

 

3.1.5 Collaborative Learning for Effective Outdoor Education Classroom Practice

 In many schools, outdoor education appears in the middle years solely through experiences. In others, outdoor education might be an elective that encompasses both timetabled weekly classes along with outdoor experiences. Although the use of outdoor experiences, both at school, locally and further afield, should constitute most of these scheduled classes, some scheduled class time will end up inside for various logistical and other pragmatic reasons. Accordingly, it is important to think about how this time can be used effectively to both deliver curriculum whilst meeting the overachieving aims of what outdoor education is trying to achieve.

Collaborative learning is a powerful pedagogical practice for the middle years classroom more generally (Main, 2017), and is well suited to teaching outdoor education. Collaborative learning is based on Vygotsky’s social constructivist theory. Through cooperative learning, students become responsible for their learning and the learning of others around them and take on an active role in co-creating knowledge through classes. Furthermore, through collaborative learning, students build relationships within their class groups which can be leveraged in multiple ways during outdoor experiences.

  1.  Simulations and Scenarios: Role-playing activities that mimic real-life situations for practical learning. Example: Students participate in a first aid scenario, practising decision-making and teamwork.
  2. Peer Learning: Students work in pairs or small groups to share knowledge and solve problems together. Example: Students pair up and plan a route card for a section of an upcoming hike that their pair has been assigned to lead.
  3. Environmental Issue Debates: Students participate in discussions where students argue different sides of an issue. Example: Students debate land use policies, such as conservation, versus developing for a nearby reserve. 
  4. Jigsaw Strategies: Students learn different parts of a topic and then teach their peers. Example: Groups research various aspects of a national park’s history and then teach each other, promoting collaborative learning.

3.2 A Model for Lessons in the Outdoors

When teaching your students outdoors, it is equally important to develop lessons that are responses to the place, to the learners, and leverage the unique opportunities to teach outside. Lessons should be part of a broader sequence of learning (see Chapter 4). In our experience, we often see pre-service and beginning teachers conduct lessons in outdoor environments that could have been easily done in the classroom (worksheets, comprehension-based activities, etc.). Such approaches not only miss out on the pedagogical benefits of being outside but also allow school leaders to raise questions about the necessity of outdoor experiences (see Chapter 6). When planning outdoor experiences, the following four constructs are helpful to think about. This model of planning.

Table 3.5 – A Model for Lessons in the Outdoors (J. Quay, personal communication, 6 August 2024). Reproduced with permission. 

Construct

Planning Questions

Venturing – to venture into outdoor environs. A sense of adventure can be sought near and far from the school. The environment is their environs.

What do you want students to achieve during this venturing into outdoor environs?

How will the lesson connect their way of venturing with their environs?

Who do you expect them to be?

Learning – to learn through the ways they are being, in the place and outdoor environment visited. What is learned through Outdoor Education happens through connected being, doing and knowing.

How will the experiences students participate in enable them to express the knowledge you wish them to learn?

Who are you asking them to be during the lesson, in connection with the place they are in?

Being – the environs and the venturing are inseparable, as who they are in this place.

Who will students ‘be’ when participating?

Doing – the venturing practices they undertake are how they engage with the environs.

How will students participate and be this person, in this place?

Knowing – the knowledge they need to undertake these venturing practices and be this person in this place, these environs.

What is it important for students to know to be able to participate and be this person in this place?

 

Chapter Summary

Lesson planning is a fundamental skill for outdoor education teachers, requiring careful consideration of both classroom-based and outdoor learning experiences. This chapter introduces key elements of effective lesson planning, emphasising a student-centred, inquiry-based approach. It explores structured lesson components, including warm-ups, task instructions, active learning activities, and reflection. The e5 instructional model is presented as a framework for structuring lessons, ensuring a progression of student engagement and critical thinking. Additionally, the chapter highlights the importance of lesson intentions, advocating for open-ended, inquiry-driven framing to promote deeper learning. Planning for middle years learners requires responsiveness to their unique assets, wants, and developmental needs, which can be leveraged to create meaningful and engaging lessons. The chapter also introduces collaborative learning strategies, such as simulations, debates, and peer-led activities, to enhance both classroom-based and outdoor education. Finally, a model for planning lessons in outdoor environments is provided, ensuring lessons are purposefully designed to utilise the unique opportunities of learning outside.

 

Reflection Questions

  • Why do you need to undertake lesson planning as a pre-service Outdoor Education teacher?
  • What are some approaches to developing lessons both in the classroom and during outdoor experiences suited to middle years outdoor education?
  • What are the unique assets, wants and needs of middle years learners? – How can your planning reflect these students?

References

Ambrosy, J. (2023). The essence of being a year nine teacher. Curriculum Perspectives, 43(2), 169-181. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41297-023-00198-8

Bahr, N. (2017). The middle years learner. In D. Pendergast & N. Bahr (Eds.), Teaching middle years: Rethinking curriculum, pedagogy and assessment (2nd ed., pp. 21-46). Allen & Unwin.Department of Education. (n.d.). The e5 Instructional Model https://www.education.vic.gov.au/school/teachers/teachingresources/practice/Pages/expired/e5about.aspx

Main, K. (2017). Cooperative and Collaborative Learning. In D. Pendergast, K. Main, & N. Bahr (Eds.), Teaching middle years: Rethingking curriculum pedagogy and assessment. Allen & Unwin.

Quay, J. (2016). Outdoor education and school curriculum distinctiveness: More than content, more than process. Journal of Outdoor & Environmental Education, 19(2), 42-50. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03400993

Schiro, M. (2013). Curriculum theory: Conflicting visions and enduring concerns (2nd ed.). SAGE.

SnowSafe. (n.d.). Alpine Responsibility Code. https://www.snowsafe.org.au/alpiner-esponsibility-code

Tancredi, H., Killingly, C., & Gramham, L., J. . (2024). ‘My brain leaves the room’: what happens when teachers talk too much? The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/my-brain-leaves-the-room-what-happens-when-teachers-talk-too-much-234685?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=bylinecopy_url_button

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Chapter 3: Lesson Planning for Middle Years Outdoor Education Copyright © 2023 by Josh Ambrosy and Sandy Allen-Craig is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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