Nature-based education professional development for reducing children's sedentary screen life at the University of Delaware Laboratory School
Date
2022
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This Educational Leadership Portfolio (ELP) addresses the issue related to children’s screen time and indoor sedentary behavior. Research shows that young children need to have time outside in nature to ensure holistic development in the twenty-first century. The overarching goal of this work is to reduce the extent of children's indoor sedentary behaviors by creating, implementing and evaluating nature-based professional development (PD) for in-service teachers. Specifically, I hoped to strengthen teachers’ knowledge and beliefs about nature-based education (NBE) and encourage participants to engage in NBE lessons and programs. This work does not measure child outcomes, however, the overarching goal is something that I hope to contribute to with this work, while it is outside the scope of this project. ☐ This work is situated at the UD Lab School which is the lab for the Early Childhood Education academic unit in the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences in the College of Education and Human Development (CEHD) at UD. Two sources of information guided the design of the PD’s curriculum content: A literature review and a needs analysis. The literature review addresses how NBE is defined, reviews the history of NBE, provides empirical evidence for the benefits of NBE, and identifies critical issues specific to NBE. The data from the needs assessment survey clearly laid out the path of curriculum development for the PD in order to meet the needs of participating in-service teachers. Subsequently, I created a nature-based education module with a total of six PD hours, which was anchored in the literature review and needs assessment. The needs analysis survey included elements that identified the extent of the in-service teachers’ prior knowledge, beliefs, and learning experiences with NBE as preliminary data to inform curriculum development for the PD. These data also served a secondary purpose, which was to provide a baseline for comparing responses to the same survey questions on completion of the PD. ☐ I analyzed data using quantitative techniques from a needs assessment survey as well as pre and post knowledge and survey assessments. ELP Artifacts were utilized to support teachers through the PD module. The goal of this improvement effort is to evaluate the PD needs, create and facilitate PD, and determine its effectiveness by comparing teachers’ self-assessment of their knowledge and the pre and post participation in the PD module. The improvement effort was overall successful. At post testing, 80% of participants reported a competent or very competent level of knowing how to meet curriculum standards while teaching NBE, compared to 30% at pretesting. ☐ Recommendations as a result of this work include continuing to offer NBE introductory courses and expand to targeted modules to in-service teachers locally as well as pre-service teachers. This recommendation is based on the success of the NBE PD for in-service teachers and can only help to extend the knowledge base to a new generation of teachers to incorporate into their practices. This would provide more of an opportunity for ongoing mentoring which has shown to help teachers be more successful. Additionally, I recommend expanding PD offerings to include online versions with various resources available for teachers to download to help them feel prepared in teaching about nature-based education. I suggest redesigning the knowledge portion of the needs assessment to include more questions to create more beneficial PD modules based on expressed needs. Lastly, I recommend creating a university level NBE course.
Description
Keywords
Children, Nature, Nature-based education, Outdoor learning, Professional development