During 2020 I studied for a Forest School leadership qualification while working full-time as an Academic Manager for the British Council in Hong Kong. As well as applying what I learnt while volunteering at a local outdoor education centre, I was also able to experiment with applying Forest School principles to an English as a Foreign Language classroom.  

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To learn more about Forest School and its ethos and principles, check out my “What is Forest School?” blog post.  

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Forest School Principles in the EFL classroom 

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So much of the Forest School ethos and principles are already being applied by EFL teachers. Good teaching practice is good teaching practice no matter what specialism or discipline. EFL teachers aim for learner-centred activities, they understand the value of choice, voice, and self-directed learning. I have seen those principles in evidence in the many lessons that I observe and I hear my colleagues discussing in the staffroom. I doubt any of the underlying principles of Forest School are new to anyone who has been working in education in any format!  

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However, having seen the extremely positive reactions and the learning that happened while I was working outdoors with Hong Kong children, I wanted to see what other aspects of Forest School could be integrated into a primary class in an EFL classroom. 

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In a perfect world I would have been able to take my students out of the classroom, maybe into the park over the road, or next door to the Consulate General’s garden. Unfortunately, neither of these were an option at the time, neither was creating a mud kitchen, building a fire, or bringing in natural building materials to my classroom.  

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My experiment

I decided to experiment with creating a rich environment within a classroom space (while still staying on my Head of Facilities good side!). I moved desks and chairs out of the room, creating different zones around the classroom. I brought in large amounts of paper resources, worksheets, books, different coloured and sized paper, scissors, glue, poster board, blue tac, staples. You name it, I raided the resources cupboard for it!

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When my students entered the classroom they were immediately interested, I heard phrases such as; “Where are the desks?” “Are we not going to study today?” “What’s going on?!” from them. We sat in a circle to begin and I guided a discussion about rules for the lesson and ways to keep ourselves safe. Almost all of this came from the students themselves and I didn’t need to impose my own restrictions at all. I elicited what the final task was for the term and asked the learners what they thought they should do to prepare for this task. 

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After discussing the term task I told my primary learners that the rest of the lesson was theirs to work on what they thought they needed to do in order to prepare. This was the “fear moment” for me, everything hinged on this moment. In the outdoors location when we told the participants that they could do anything they wanted to do, they would go and play, climb a tree, jump into the water. These students I was standing in front of at that moment had never come into a British Council classroom and been given free rein for over an hour. I didn’t really know how they’d react. I had some students who I thought needed firm classroom management and guidelines, I had other students who didn’t get along socially so well with each other.  

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There was some initial hesitation but it lasted no longer than a minute or so. Some students did a circuit of the room to look at the available resources, some went into a cluster to discuss what they wanted to do, some went straight to one resource.  

Although I wasn’t “teaching” in the traditional sense, I was very busy throughout the lesson. Students were coming up to me with questions, especially students who didn’t normally speak out much in class usually. I easily achieved my daily step count as I was constantly walking around the classroom, observing and listening in, asking guiding questions where necessary, making notes about language that needed to be brought up in whole class feedback or doing on the spot corrections. I saw some incredible teamwork and peer teaching. Learners asking each other about spelling, content, where in the room they had found specific resources.  

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It was also interesting to see how the learners used the space when they had the freedom to. Some of them moved chairs to a desk area so they could work there, some stood and worked, others sat on the floor and leaned on a chair, one student lay across 2 chairs. I’ll admit, if someone had passed by and briefly looked through the window they might have doubted if learning was happening. However, throughout all my lessons that day, all my students were engaged and on task, they got through so much more material than if I had asked them to do it in lockstep. Also, the quality of task work later in that module was incredibly high and they referred back to the “choice lesson” or “Freedom Lesson” as they called it during the module reflection task. 
 
In the final 15 minutes we did a whole class reflection and feedback, back in the circle and I was pleasantly surprised when this became very student led as they reflected on what they had discovered during class time.  I asked for verbal and written feedback from my students at the end of the class. I asked them what they had learnt from the lesson and was surprised by the range of answers and what they took away from the lesson. Some said they had learnt about working together, others said they had improved their presentation skills, others talked about specific things they had read in a book or on a worksheet. All 64 of them said that they enjoyed the freedom of choice and that they would like to do a lesson like that again. 

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The main disadvantage for us as teachers with this approach is the sheer amount of preparation and number of resources that are required. I walked up and down the stairs carrying resources so many times, it took a lot of setting up before the lesson and a long time to return the classroom to normal. But I proved to myself that not only was it possible to do but it was definitely enjoyed by the learners. It’s not easy to make a rich space out of a space that is designed to conform and be almost, for want of a better word, sterile.  

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Relating back to those holistic principles of Forest School, allowing this amount of freedom developed so much more than just the learners’ linguistic skills. They developed their social skills and their intellectual skills. They developed their emotional intelligence by self-regulating and self-motivating.

 

My main takeaway from this experiment was that I could give my learners a lot more choice and voice within my classes. I could give them options for how they wanted to approach tasks and I could trust them to take learning into their own hands.