For Real Engagement...Take Them Outside with Becca Katz
Outdoor learning expert Becca Katz shares the powerful, research based reasons why students perform better when outdoor learning is part of everyday education activity. She also shares about how her non-profit organization provides professional learning opportunities for teachers to make outdoor learning part of their regular teaching.
Links
Good Natured Learning website
Becca’s recent article in Chalkbeat
Schools That Heal by Claire Latane mentioned in discussion
Green Schoolyards America website
Association for Learning Environments white paper on school design
Transcript
Scott Lee: Greetings friends and colleagues, welcome to The Thoughtful Teacher Podcast the professional educator’s thought partner-a service of Oncourse Education Solutions. I am Scott Lee. Before we listen to our conversation today, I want to thank everyone for listening and making the 2023 season the most listened to ever for the Thoughtful Teacher Podcast, everyone involved strives to bring you a high-quality learning experience and we appreciate each of you listening and sharing. Be sure to look for new 2024 season episodes in March 2024-we’ll post exact dates on our website and social media. In the meantime, check out our new partner website SEL Resource at SELresource.com- SEL Resource is a growing, curated collection of useful social emotional learning resources for educators everywhere.
Today I am sharing a conversation with Becca Katz. Becca has been a nature-based educator for over two decades. She has worked as a classroom teacher, administrator, and wilderness expedition leader in private and public schools. As we’ll find out, she has used nature as a classroom in many different ways from teaching in parking lots and public parks to leading student expeditions in the Canadian Arctic and the Bolivian Andes. When she discovered the research proving the benefits of apple-a-day nature connections for learners and educators, Becca co-founded Good Natured Learning to empower educators to integrate nature-based learning into their teaching and classroom design practices. Good Natured Learning’s core program is a professional Fellowship for educators. They also run workshops and collaborate with partners to activate nature near schools for learning and growing the broader nature-connected learning movement. We’ll begin our discussion talking about when going outside can support learning better than being indoors.
Scott Lee: Thank you for joining us today, Becca on the Thoughtful Teacher Podcast.
Becca Katz: Yeah. Thanks so much for the opportunity, Scott. I'm really excited to be here.
Scott Lee: Let's just start off with, what's wrong with indoor classrooms.
Becca Katz: Yeah, it's a good question for me since I spend pretty much all my time talking about outdoors and outdoor classrooms and moving learning outdoors. I don't think that it's really about indoor classrooms being bad or outdoor classrooms being good.
I think it just depends and indoor and outdoor classrooms are better or worse depending on what it is that you're trying to accomplish with your students. And so. You think about this concept of the environment as a third teacher, which is something that is closely associated with Reggio Emilia, Montessori.
There's some design architects who've really talked about practical strategies to engage the classroom as the third teacher right after adults in students lives and after their peers as their first and second teachers. And if you think about the classroom environment as a third teacher, then I think it's a really important question to ask , When is the indoor an indoor classroom more advantageous or better for what it is that you're trying to, accomplish and what kind of learning you're trying to foster in your classroom.
And then when is an outdoor environment better for what you're trying to accomplish or foster with your students. And I think there's there are a ton of examples where, I think that educators should be asking that question "is the outdoors actually a more conducive space for the type of learning that I want to accomplish in this lesson," and I think that that's really not on a lot of teachers’ radars. And what that means is that teachers are teaching indoors lessons that Perhaps would be better outdoors, and then and then there's the opposite, right? There are lessons that would be better indoors as well.
But a couple examples of, lessons that are just better outdoors no matter what, even if they have nothing to do with the natural world, is anything that requires space or movement. Instead of tripping over chairs, you could be in an open space and you don't even need a natural setting. You can have a concrete pad and be able to move around and and do more kinesthetic embodied learning.
And I think that that can be really powerful. And I think that also the outdoors is a much, much better place for fostering a peaceful environment for activities that are more reflective. So if students are doing writing or reading and you want them to have a environment that's conducive to that kind of activity, the outdoors is far better for that, because what we find is those brief moments of distraction that happen outdoors.
Really allow for what researchers call, soft fascination. So it just, it rests our attention capacity so that we can focus on what's in front of us, like our book or our writing. And we might get distracted by a bird flying by or by, the branches blowing on a tree nearby. And those types of distractions are actually really restorative to our attention and allow us to better focus on that work.
And so that's what I mean is when I'd say. Outdoor classroom. They're oftentimes actually much more supportive of the learning that educators are trying to accomplish with students. And so I think it's an important question to consider. And then, of course, like I said, there are also also times when indoors will be better.
If you have a bunch of tiny pieces of paper, and you're trying to do an activity where you're gluing tiny pieces of tissue paper to, a larger piece of paper, making a sun catcher or something like that, like Don't do that. You know, on the on the shore of a lake, or in the park outside because you're gonna end up with tissue papers everywhere.
If you have an incredible video to display that really helps students understand a complex concept, there's a ton of incredible technology and of course that's going to be better done in an indoor classroom environment. And so it's really about thinking about what it is that you're trying to accomplish with learners and making sure that your classroom is supportive of that and often an outdoor classroom is going to be the right answer.
Scott Lee: Yeah. And you mentioned, in a recent article on Chalkbeat, and we'll link the, Chalkbeat article, in our website. You were taking your Spanish classes outside into a parking lot. And the reason I think about a parking lot is I've actually used a parking lot with, students as well.
Just for the space, teaching geography, but I think a lot of people when they think outdoors, they don't think about using the parking lot. How can a parking lot even be a good outdoor space?
Becca Katz: Yeah, I mean, to be clear, the parking lot innovation came from us literally cooking inside of a classroom that was in a strip mall and a charter school, you know, charter schools are oftentimes in facilities that are not necessarily ideal learning facilities. And the one I worked at, was in a strip mall and my classroom happened to be one of those front, like window wall classrooms in the strip mall and the air conditioning in my particular classroom did not work.
And so those early fall school days, late summer, early fall days of school in August and September, temperatures inside my classroom were, you know, creeping up towards 100 degrees, and it was essentially intolerable and so we we went outside because we needed air circulation. And, so it was a total move necessity. And as soon as we did it, we found that it was way more fun. And it was what I was talking about before with movement, like doing a head, shoulders, knees and toes activity in Spanish. Outside in a parking lot rather than having to trip over chairs and move all the dust to the outside of the room or the tables or whatever you have.
I think it was just so much easier to move around and be really active in our learning. The other thing to note is that we didn't stay in the parking lot for very long. Also our parking lot was, I guess, if you were ranking parking lots was pretty like a high quality parking lot and that we had a view of Animas Mountain from our parking lot, we had Colorado's blue skies, so I would say not all parking lots are created equal, and then on top of that, we didn't actually stay in the parking lot for very long because there was a park just a short distance, like an actual park with trees and grasses and leaves and all kinds of things, and we ended up moving there, , the type of learning and context Was so much more supportive.
And so parking lot, allow some nature elements and some of those benefits and, the park offered way more.
I, but I love that you did geography outside because that's exactly the point that, that we're making.
We'll talk a little bit about the good nature learning fellowship in a second, I think, but, One of our, one of the teachers that I work with, just was doing an activity with her students where she was trying to help them understand rotation and revolution. And she had a student with a yellow hoodie standing in the middle.
And then students were spinning around as they orbited around the sun. And I think that that was a really powerful lesson. And that's something where she happened to have a park accessible to her. So they were doing it there and it would have been a totally possible activity in a parking lot.
Scott Lee: Yeah. Well, in my case, I, stole a lesson from another teacher, where he would use masking tape on the floor and move all the desks, and do latitude and longitude using the grid lines on the floor and kids had to find their spots my classroom at the time was a trailer, and I didn't have enough room. So, I took chalk out into the parking lot, and of course, in some places had lines I could use anyway, and did the same thing just had more space to do the latitude and longitude, that rotation lesson, I really like, that's a good idea.
Becca Katz: She, I mean, just totally brilliant, and, you know, really simple. And I think her students, just that embodied learning where they just physically were acting it out. Probably accelerated the achievement of, of that understanding so much faster than it would have been if they were like penciling it out or like trying to manipulate something in a desk sort of environment, just great to walk outside and act.
Scott Lee: Tell us a little bit about, your current role and why you started good natured learning.
Becca Katz: Yeah, so my current title I'm self-titled is the instigator of awesomeness. I'm also the leader for good nature learning. My background is that I started my career really with, almost two decades of experience doing outdoor education, immersive field wilderness experiences with students, typically, teenagers, leading wilderness expeditions ranking from three to 50 days in, environments across the world.
So, the longest trip that I led was in the Canadian Arctic, by canoe, and that was a 50 day expedition, but I've also gotten to lead expeditions that, involve remote travel in Bolivia, in the Andes, in India. And so I, and, and then also a lot of the wilderness trips have been in, the Western U.S., especially the Rocky Mountains and Utah's canyon country. And I love those things. And I, I saw That nature connection that those outdoor education experiences were were really impactful and meaningful for students and for me, as a facilitator. I sometimes refer to myself as a wilderness junkie.
I just feel like I couldn't get enough of it. And it was really Something that I just was really blown away over and over again by the power of that for humans for healing for wellness for just A sense of our place in the world and perspective. I was working at a school called the High Mountain Institute in Leadville, Colorado, where I was facilitating.
Wilderness expeditions, ski touring and, backpacking trips for juniors in high school, and they would come for one semester during their junior year and spend six of the 16 weeks outside in the backcountry on three separate two week expeditions I was teaching Spanish in the classroom, and then I was leading these wilderness expeditions and facilitating all kinds of different learning environmental ethics or, field studies and science and also obviously teaching the technical and, community, social, emotional type of skills that you get from outdoor expeditions.
That was really awesome because I got to combine really my passion for wilderness travel, my passion as an educator. I had done some classroom teaching and other things and I got to kind of combine those in that setting. And then one of the things I really realized and missed, I guess, and felt like was an opportunity that kind of came around in a timely way was The idea of, connecting students who maybe don't have that kind of, privilege to be able to have experiences with nature.
So a lot of students that came were coming from boarding schools. The tuition was not trivial and, you know, they've made a lot of strides in terms of endowments and scholarships and other things. And still, it definitely was a bit of a rarefied learning experience. And I knew that every day on my way to work, I would.
Go past our intermediate public school in this town in Leadville, Colorado, and It was a Title One school district, where the students in the school hadn't necessarily been able to even experience the mountains that were less than a mile from their school, and that they had a view of every day, but just had never been to or lakes or trails or the forest even.
So, our community got a grant through which I ended up working in Lake County School District, which is a public Title One school district with a majority BIPOC student body, mostly Latinx student body. And it's a rural mountain school district.
My job was to connect students with nature in their learning experiences district wide. So, PK through 12, experiences. It was a three year grant position. I spent probably the first year and a half really bringing in outside partners to facilitate enriched Learning experiences.
So environmental education or outdoor education organizations that were already in our neighborhood, right? Colorado Outward Bound School had a base there. Colorado Mountain College had an outdoor recreation leadership program there. The High Mountain Institute was based there. So we had all of these entities.
And then we had some local environmental nonprofits that were also facilitating really incredible experiences for our students and That was really great. and as you can see, there's a bit of an and or a but, I
Scott Lee: almost always
is.
Becca Katz: Yeah, there was a, there was a bullet point in my job description that I feel like set me off on Good Natured Learning and the bullet point read , that I should work myself out of a job during the three year grant period and make programs self sustaining.
And it kept me up at night. Because I didn't understand how I could keep what I was doing self sustaining, and I did also really believe that the work that we were doing as a community, that it was meaningful for the students, that, wasn't without challenges or, or failures or mistakes or other things, but, , on net, I think it was really driving
positive impacts for our students and our community. And I was really haunted by this idea of how do I make these self sustaining? And I realized that's, that's not a thing. there aren't like self sustaining programs, each time the bus leaves the barn, it costs money. And every time you hire staff from another agency, they cost money.
And so really the only sustaining path that I could find was to sure, make things more efficient, but also. To chase more grants. And to me, that was that was just a little bit too tenuous to have something so important be wrapped up and whether or not we could secure the right funding to keep it going.
And I hope that that happens. I hope these partnerships continue forever. I zoomed out and I looked at schools and I thought, What is self sustaining in a school? And I thought the two elements that I really felt like we're likely to be baked into schools for a really long time were teachers and students.
So if I could embed nature connection in teacher practice. Then it could just be part of the way teaching and learning happened in our schools, and that would be self sustaining. Because, once you develop this sort of professionalism surrounding how to effectively facilitate nature, connected learning nature based learning, then that can live on in the sort of internal structures of a school.
And it's not without challenges for sure. But that was the path that I could see. And then I guess the other thing that's relevant to the creation of good nature learning is that right around that same time, there was, a body of evidence that came out, it was compelling, it was robust, and it also is growing body of evidence showing the benefits of nature for learners, right, not just a human nature connection, which now there's just like A plethora of resources that talk about that.
But this was specific to learners and learning and how nature connections could drive academic results could drive social emotional benefits could drive, could drive mental health and well being benefits and, this is the least robust from a research standpoint, but could could drive joy in schools.
And I think that that's a really important thing to talk about.
Scott Lee: We don't talk about the joy of learning nearly enough and the importance of that. So, yeah, I love it that you bring that up because it is, it is just so important.
Becca Katz: Yeah, I think that it is and we don't talk about it because it's it feels fuzzier and harder to quantify.
And you know, it's is that going to be on the test? Or is that going to be the accountability metrics to which districts are being held their district leaders or whomever? And the answer is no, unfortunately, although I think it's deeply related to the outcomes in those other more measured areas. And so it's it's a bit short sighted, not to try to strive for it, even though it might not be on the test, so to speak.
Basically, when I made this pivot toward, how can nature connection be something that's integrated in day to day practice. I had a timely conversation on a snow bike ride with my co-founder, Erin Allman. And at the time she was teaching pre service teachers. And when I started talking with her about this, she really latched onto it and got super excited about it.
And said this is the kind of thing that is going to make a huge difference for teachers and feeling a sense of agency and feeling a sense of hope and joy. And so for her, that was such a meaningful way and and then We started looking around because we thought, okay, we'll just try to, , see if we can help with something else that's out there.
And that was sort of our goal, was to find an entity that we could just kind of slot into and see whether or not we could be an initiative that was part of a larger effort that was going on, which we figured surely was happening. And then we looked around and we found tons of incredible stuff happening in like the forest school landscape and outdoor education, environmental education world.
And what we really didn't find very much of, was folks who were talking directly to teachers, and especially folks who were talking directly to formal teachers. Okay, in schools during the school day across subject areas and across grade levels, completely agnostic to school model to, curriculum to what content you're teaching.
We didn't see that. And so We were like, I guess that we need to start something. And so that is the origin story of Good Natured Learning, where we could go to teachers and say, Teachers, you're experts at what you do. You're professionals in what you do. How can these tools of connecting with nature be supportive of your day to day work and your students day to day work?
And so Good Natured Learning, that's, that's our origin story.
Scott Lee: So, tell us about the fellowship, and what that looks like for a teacher.
Becca Katz: Yeah. So, the good nature learning fellowship is our core program and , It's one unified embodiment of our mission, and our mission is to build educator capacity to implement nature based learning, instructional and classroom design practices to activate nature near schools for learning and to grow the broader nature connected learning movement.
And so that's what we do in the fellowship. We bring together educators. Right now we have a cohort in Colorado. We're soon to launch a cohort in Nairobi, Kenya, which is, a bit of a surprising plot twist for people who are listening, I'm sure. However, that's where I live right now and I'm super excited to be exploring this work in a totally different geography with teachers who are just as excited and , and just as innovative, and it's just gonna be super fun to see.
I don't know all the potential that can happen there, but the fellowship itself has a year long arc. And in that in that year long arc, we start with a nature retreat. That's a five day, four night immersive retreat in nature, where educators come from their home school. And we have a pair of educators coming from different schools.
And we try to have about 12 to 16 educators in a cohort. And they come together and they immerse themselves deeply in the theory and practice of nature based learning. They design a case study to then bring that back to their school. They go and they implement that. , and then over the course of the school year, we actually meet each month to connect, to celebrate, to commiserate, to strategize, to, , work through any challenges folks are facing and to just stay motivated.
And then, we actually will be coming together at the end of the fellowship year to kind of think about what's next and what does it look like when you just take this beyond the year to grow the wider audience and and continue sustaining this work as educators in your classroom or outside of your classroom, ideally every day.
And then there's another element to the fellowship that's kind of critical, , we use a train the trainer model and each fellow becomes a trainer who can facilitate our core workshop, which is a teaching students outdoors workshop, and they can facilitate that with their colleagues.
And so they bring this learning and they spread it, throughout their district by bringing other educators into this approach.
Scott Lee: And so this is any content area teacher. At any level.
Becca Katz: Yeah. So we right now in our cohort is all educators from rural schools. So they have that in common, but we have a preschool teacher and we have a high school teacher and kind of everything in between.
Our high school teacher happens to be an environmental science teacher. However, we have a fourth grade teacher who's doing this mostly with math. We have a fifth grade teacher who's really focusing on writing and her implementation work. We have , a preschool teacher who actually teaches in a forest school, which is super cool.
And so she is just trying to deepen the way that they engage with nature through this fellowship. , her preschoolers are doing nature journaling, which is just kind of mind boggling to think about three year olds who are sitting down and deeply observing and reflecting and journaling. I think it's an incredibly powerful illustration.
And actually our preschool teacher and our high school teacher are both doing nature journaling, which I think is so great. Because , they're experiencing some similar challenges and successes as they're trying to do this. And I think that that's pretty wild that, 15, 16 year olds and three year olds aren't that different in certain ways.
Last year's cohort actually had a middle school principal and a social emotional learning specialist. And a sort of a district administrator type position, and so we really are open to educators who are interested in exploring this and thinking about how they can bring it to life in their context, and it's really adaptable.
So educators bring it to life with their students, it's highly localized and relevant to their context, to their community, to their age group, to their content. And so, so it looks really different. Across our, our cohort that's part of the power of it. I think it's seen all the different infinite, manifestations of this work in different, in different contexts.
Scott Lee: And one of the things that, we've talked about before and that you've mentioned, both in your article, and elsewhere, is about the positive outcomes for kids with trauma. Can you share a little bit about that and the research behind that as well?
Becca Katz: Yeah. I mean, I think that this is an incredibly exciting area and I know that you, that you focus on this and you have a background in, in residential treatment and foster care and other contexts. And I think that that. There's so much potential for the connection between nature and therapeutic environments, family environments, educational environments.
We really focus on the educational piece of that puzzle, but the benefits we see for learners in terms of nature connection include improved health and well being. And we're talking about both mental health and physical health, a sense of belonging, social, emotional skills. Academic achievement , within the context of the trauma landscape, I think also just better family bonds and communication from time spent together in nature.
So it can be a really good environment for fostering those connections. And so when you think about nature based learning as a powerful tool for students in trauma, I think it's worth looking at what does that actually mean in schools? Because we're talking about, A treatment being applied in a specific setting, right?
In a really generic way of, hey, this is a blanket treatment that we are it's universal design for learning, right? We're saying all of our students are going to get this. So what does this mean specifically to the students who maybe are suffering from ACEs, or who have a higher dose of of daily trauma or sustained trauma throughout their lives.
And I think this relates especially to some really encouraging research on, nature based learning as, a mechanism to address, sort of a lever you can pull to address systemic inequities. And basically there's research suggesting that nature connection disproportionately positively affects the students who are most impacted by systemic injustices.
Right. And those include things that are oftentimes connected to ACEs, right? You're talking about trauma, poverty, being a neurodivergent learner, being a student of color. Those are all things that are going to be more closely linked with a lot of the things that you typically talk about in the trauma landscape.
And so when we see that and we see, wow, this makes a disproportionately positive. impact on these students. We don't know exactly what's driving that. There's a bunch of different theories. And at the end of the day, what we are seeing is it's really good for students. And by doing it in school, you mean it means in this way that we're talking about with like apple a day.
Nature connections or nature access. What that means is that you have the sustained access to nature's benefits for those learners, for all learners, and for those learners who most need it. Then what you see is that it starts to get more student centered, authentic, and relevant instruction as well.
And that in turn begets better engagement, attention and learning outcomes, which helps close educational achievement gaps, right? Because you're seeing better learning happening, right? Better pedagogy and better learning. And I think this is super relevant when you think about access to nature in general.
And so just a couple of statistics about access to nature, I find really compelling and why I think this is such an important topic is. There are massive zip coded disparities in terms of nature access. And so what you see is that There are over 28 million kids in the United States who don't have a park within a 10 minute walk of home.
High poverty schools are four times more likely to have foregone recess, right? They decided they need more reading time, more time, with different types of interventions, right? And so all of a sudden the students are getting less and less outdoor time if we assume that recess is taking place outdoors.
And students of color, are three times more likely to live in nature deprived neighborhoods. And, schools with predominantly black student bodies are two and a half times more likely to have foregone recess than mostly white schools, right? So you, what you're seeing is this, this stacking of, of cards against people who have any of the ACEs, right?
But particularly associated with, With poverty, right? And access. And so that's one of the theories about why nature is such a powerful tool, right? It's beneficial for all of your students, but it's super beneficial for some of those students. And maybe it's because they have almost no nature access in their day to day life outside of school.
And so that is a really powerful opportunity. And I think there's some really cool research that I just want to mention, because there's some cool work going on in this area, but, Casey Family Programs and Children in Nature Network have teamed up to really delve into this, specifically related to, foster programs and really how nature can be integrated again into family therapeutic and educational context to help drive healing in terms of, different forms of trauma.
Scott Lee: Yeah, it's huge as I, as I think about, I've had some conversations, not on this podcast with some local people recently about, Issues around school buildings and one of the things that I've had to say is, look, you can't build a mega school that has more square footage than the campus actually has, because there's no room to get the kids outside.
There's no opportunity for outdoor learning. You can't have a greenhouse. It's, it's a huge problem, I think, with school design that we don't think about, outside, even though best practices, according to, the AIA, the American Institute of Architects for school buildings is finding ways to bring nature into school or, give students access to nature that's now a best practice for school buildings. Even.
Becca Katz: Yeah, I think that that's, it's a super interesting. It's a super interesting thing to explore. And it reminds me of a couple of things. One, Claire Latane is the name of this author who, and researcher who wrote a book called Schools That Heal. There's some other great work coming out of California, specifically with an organization called Green Schoolyards America. And they talk about schoolyards as a classroom, right?
Another type of textbook or another type of text or learning resource. And so I think you get a lot of potential there with what that can mean for facilities costs. And I think it's a fascinating exercise to think about what if instead of building more indoor spaces, you built more pavilions and more outdoor spaces that were considered learning.
Outdoor classrooms and were integrated into the facility's master planning in a way and how much cost savings would you actually have while you were actually having, accelerated learning and enhanced learning context and outcomes while you were saving money.
And I think that there's a real disconnect there right now, in spite of what maybe is said and what are requirements in the overall planning process. And what we know about what's good for kids and how important nature connection can be for driving so many things that schools are after and for just taking care of humans.
And I think Claire Latane's Schools That Heal book is a really beautiful summary of that and super compelling way to capture that we have an opportunity to design in a holistic way that really thinks about students. As whole humans, and that, whole child education is not new, and I think this idea of a holistic infrastructure and how that supports learning and thinking about infrastructure in as much as it is indoor spaces and Outdoor spaces and how that all is part of the overall shape of what a school is, I think it's a really exciting area.
Scott Lee: Share with us how the fellowship has, changed the practice of teachers that you've worked with or, a teacher that you've worked with if you'd like to share, a specific story.
Becca Katz: Yeah, the first story that comes to mind is, is a pretty recent one, although I, I have a lot of different examples.
Renee Atencio is a fourth grade teacher in Montrose County School District, and she has been teaching fourth grade for a number of years, and she recently was teaching factoring, and that's the common fourth grade standard, and she had, for years, taught factoring using math manipulatives, and so the traditional approach Her school, Johnson Elementary, I think is a relatively typical elementary school.
And so she was using this technique that she had learned and that was sort of part of her teacher training. And she decided this year that her students would walk around and get that outside, you know, the movement, the fresh air. And they would walk around and they would gather nature objects. In their surrounding environment, they were doing factors of 24, is where she happened to apply this. Ended up gathering 24 leaves or 24 rocks or 24 seeds or 24 sticks and then they proceeded to make groups, right? And so then math was so visual She they made eight groups of three or three groups of eight or four groups of six or six groups of four or two groups Of 12, right? And so they work through the different factors of 24 in this super visual way she didn't point to radical change in terms of her student outcomes academically.
I think that , they were good just like they had been before. What she did talk about is just way calmer students, better behaved students, just more regulated students who seemed happier. And I think that that is an incredibly powerful lesson of, what, what happened for her. And if you think about that by extension, What is the experience of a teacher whose students are calm and joyful, right?
I think that that's a pretty awesome thing to imagine. And so for for me, the idea of transforming teacher practice as transforming learning in a way to make, everything kind of surrounding learning more joyful, I think is really compelling and exciting.
Scott Lee: Yeah, just can't overemphasize, you can make learning joyful if you're given the opportunity.
I want to thank you, Becca, for joining us on the thoughtful teacher podcast.
Becca Katz: I'm so grateful to have had the opportunity to meet you and to talk with you and to explore these ideas with you and feel like we could talk for hours and I'm really grateful for, , for the chance that I got to share and so thanks. Thank you.
Scott Lee: The Thoughtful Teacher Podcast is brought to you as a service of Oncourse Education Solutions. If you would like to learn more about how we partner with schools and youth organizations strengthening learning cultures and developing more resilient youth, please visit our website at w w w dot oncoursesolutions dot net.
This has been episode 13 of the 2023 season. If you enjoy this podcast, please tell your friends and colleagues about us, in person and on social media. We also greatly appreciate positive reviews on your favorite podcast app. The Thoughtful Teacher Podcast is a production of Oncourse Education Solutions LLC, Scott Lee executive producer, in partnership with Chattanooga Podcast Studios. We encourage diverse opinions, however, opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of producer, partners or underwriters. Guest was not compensated for appearance, nor did guest pay to appear. Episode notes, links and transcripts are available at our website w w w dot thoughtfulteacherpodcast dot com. Theme music is composed and performed by Audio Coffee. Please follow me on social media, my handle on Instagram and Twitter is @drrscottlee and on Mastodon @drrscottlee@universedon.com
