Forest School Leader Corner: Listen, Read, Watch [February 2022]

It’s nearly half term already, and we’re putting away the thermals in anticipation of better weather… although it might be a bit soon for that!

Here’s what we’ve been reading, watching and listening to this month.

Listen

Kristen RB Peterson of Learning Wild has a podcast, and while this is an episode from December, I thought it was worth listening to.

She talks about defining success and that’s a tricky concept. How do we decide what success looks like? It doesn’t mean the same thing for each individual involved in forest school provision (we saw that in the forest school statistics from our 2022 survey).

Read

The Child and Nature Alliance of Canada has a useful pitch deck (pdf) for talking to the leadership team about the value of outdoor learning. If you are not in Canada you’d need to adapt it, but why start from scratch when there is a proven template for helping talk about the value of forest school?

ForestSchooled has a really lovely read about nature and the nervous system and how we are built to regulate outside.

If you ever feel calmer just by being in the woods, then this will explain why.

Watch

There’s a new series starting which isn’t Forest School the way we understand it, but does sound like it is going to be interesting.

It’s a collaboration by Central St Martins, architecture experts, Forestry England and others, and there will be a series of talks including one on Rewilding which should be good.

I haven’t watched it all the way through yet as it’s quite long at 1 hour 55 mins, but it’s queued on my playlist to get to.

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Hope you enjoy this month’s roundup. Have a suggestion for a future one? Leave it in the comments.