How Does Forest School Support Learning?

Today I’m going to be looking at the question ‘How Does Forest School Support Learning?

As part of the ethos of Forest School the child is place at the middle of everything that happens and their ideas and their choices are what drives learning through play. Which is such a powerful, powerful tool.

Play provides the children with the chance to explore freely their interests and motivations, thus supporting their individual learning needs. Not only this, but being able to join other children at Forest School, social development and key inter and intra personal skills are explored and developed.

Unsurprisingly, children are influenced by the world an the people around them and almost know what and how they want to learn, depending on this influence to achieve competence.

This is why children closely observe each other and their adults. They’re learning from behaviours and actions, to become that more competent person. At Forest School children are seen not as empty vessels that need filling up but as competent human beings who have strong desires and drives to achieve learning competence or success in all areas of their development.

Children never actually stop wanting to improve and by providing them with an environment that offers them to freely explore this, without heavy constraints, that is how Forest School supports learning.

Now I use the metaphor of play being like a car, which is the vehicle to take a child through their learning journey, to more meaningful destinations.

They may not have all the skills to competently achieve that learning destination straight away, but the child or children are not alone in this journey and are supported by the other children who may have those skills.

Or by the Forest School leader. The Forest School leader has the indepth knowledge of learning through play and child development, allowing them to expertly play alongside, extend learning opportunities and architect a child’s next step of learning. The child really isn’t missing or absent from any stage of that process at Forest School, infact they inform everything, at every stage of the Leaders support for that child.

How this is possible is through reflection. Asking a child to think about their thinking. It allows a child to see what they have accomplished, how this enters and fits into the bigger picture, any mistakes they may have had an it allows them to develop a plan for the next stages of learning, from their lived experiences.

Now what you may or may not see during a session is that the Leader will do a lot of observing, even when playing alongside a child as it builds up a picture of where that individual or individuals are at and where the child would like to go with that and how the leader can assist them to get there.

This feeds into something called scaffolding. No, not those big metal bars and wooden planks, but something that was first suggested by the childhood development theorist , Lev Vygotsky.

I’d encourage you to go and look at his work. What scaffolding does is that it supports the learner to get to their learning destination informed by observation, breaking down tasks into small achievable chunks or to sensitively suggest things that may spark an idea in a child’s head.

So for example child might be trying to build a swing with a rope and a tree. Depending on what is observed and the knowledge of that child, the leader may support them to break down the task into smaller chunks, until the swing is created

OR

Alternatively the Leader may see that the child is going about it in the correct way, but not quite achieving the success they want, but with a simple suggestion or a tweek, they could or would be able to achieve this.

Now the Leader may set about posing an open question or a thought provoking statement to bring about this ‘ah ha’ moment. So for example if the swing isn;t quite there because it doesn’t have a seat or somewhere to hold for example the question could be ;

‘Does the swing need anything else? ‘ Or the statement could be

‘That swing doesn’t look comfortable?’

In all of this the children in the group become play mates and can offer similar support. But perhaps not always in such a sensitive way and I suppose this is the beauty of Forest School.

Learning by ACTUALLY doing. Experiential learning!