Learning Beyond the Walls of the Classroom - Steph MacPhail

Teacher

Steph MacPhail is a fifth-grade teacher at Washburn Elementary School and was instrumental in creating the school's new Outdoor Classroom. In Steph’s class, students learn beyond the school walls and are engaged in learning about the world around them. With the help of Washburn's new Outdoor Classroom, Steph is facilitating learning experiences for students that are authentic and student-centered.

Instructional Strategy

Steph and her class of fifth graders connect with nature on a daily basis. Student learning experiences are designed around what students show interest in. Most recently, the fifth graders have been looking for worms on the Washburn grounds and have been using what they find to create graphs and calculate mean, median, and mode. 

The students in Steph’s class connect to the community through a partnership with the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge. Students in Steph’s fifth-grade class visit the Wildlife Refuge three times throughout the year. For many students, the visits mark their first experiences hiking through the woods. The fifth graders have become very interested in identifying birds and can’t wait to pick up their binoculars to look for changes from day to day as they engage in collecting data as Citizen Scientists.


Steph highlights the social and emotional learning that takes place through the students’ increased exposure to nature. When students have the opportunity to write about something that they’ve found or discovered, they make connections to their own lives through empathy. The fifth graders can’t learn enough about the world outside of their school walls and their questioning and engagement in learning have transformed through the outdoor and nature-based experiences they’ve had.

See What It Looks Like

Fifth graders connect their learning to others throughout the world as Citizen Scientists by collecting and tracking data on websites like Journey North and Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

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