The Iowa City Community School District is taking learning outside of the classroom by adding five new outdoor spaces in the 2025-26 school year.
Rather than using desks, the classrooms will include stump or rock seating, activity tables, easels, shade shelters, and small stages to encourage student engagement and hands-on learning.
The outdoor classrooms which are learning spaces built outside school buildings where teachers can hold lessons in direct contact with nature, are part of the district’s Facilities Master Plan, a multi-year district-wide strategy for updating and improving school facilities.
Though the cost of the spaces haven’t been publicly disclosed, the district’s Facilities Master Plan shows the district is setting aside $3 million for the construction of outdoor classrooms and playgrounds from 2025 to 2030.
Fred Meyer, founder of Backyard Abundance, an educational nonprofit based in Johnson County, said the new spaces are an innovative step in the right direction.
“These outdoor classrooms are fantastic,” he said. “It is the best place for us to really learn new material.”
Backyard Abundance helps residents and organizations by planning and building outdoor landscapes.
Meyer has been with the organization for nearly 20 years and has run into countless studies affirming nature’s crucial role in assisting mental and physical health. Meyer said the benefits translate into better learning.
“We humans just feel better when we’re outdoors,” he said. “This is how humans have learned for hundreds of thousands of years, through the outdoors. We’ve only recently come inside and started trying to standardize learning indoors, and we’re learning slowly that’s not the optimal way to engage our brains and our bodies.”
The five upcoming spaces will be sporadically constructed throughout the year and will join 12 other outdoor classrooms under construction or already completed.
Iowa City Community School District said Kirkwood Elementary School is one of five schools adopting the current system. Danielle Riney, secondary curriculum coordinator for the district, said the district intends to build an outdoor classroom for every elementary, middle, and high school.
All of the high school spaces have been completed, Riney said. The district will begin construction on all of the other outdoor spaces at the remaining elementary and middle schools sporadically throughout the year.
Riney said while the ultimate goal of the classrooms is to enhance student learning and well-being by providing an alternative to traditional indoor settings, there are nuances to each space according to school level from elementary to high school.
“The elementary spaces have opportunities to branch into some nature interests like garden clubs and things like that, whereas a lot of our high schools have connections to some pre-established and higher-level Advanced Placement courses like environmental Science,” she said.
Riney said many of the activity tables used in elementary outdoor classrooms were built by high school construction students in class.
“The elementary kiddos get the activities that are created, but then the high school kiddos are actually building and seeing what the construction aspect of those actually requires for them to be successful and sustainable,” she said. “And so it’s a really awesome connection there.”
Meyer said the outdoor spaces will bring benefits translating into better learning, dropping student stress and increasing curiosity and attention.
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Meyer cited attention restoration theory, or ART, as key evidence supporting nature’s role in those benefits. The physiological framework explains how exposure to nature helps people recover from mental fatigue and restores their ability to focus.
In ART, two groups recovering from surgery were observed in a hospital. One group would have a window fixed on a natural environment, while the other group would have a window facing a dull brick wall.
The group with the window looking out to nature were discharged earlier and were in less pain.
“Of course, when we go outside, engaging with those environments, our mental, physical and spiritual healing really gets a big boost,” Meyer said.
Phoebe Yetley, director of UI WILD, said outdoor spaces also allow curiosity to run the class over a textbook. UI WILD is the university’s outdoor education program, teaching students about nature and conservation through hands-on experiences like wildlife camps, bird care, and field-based learning.
Instead of being fed information, students create their own understanding by holding something like a plant and moving around it how they wish instead of watching it through a video or book.
Yetley referred to the idea as the “turtle conundrum,” where a teacher may have a lesson planned ahead but will adjust it in real time if something like a turtle interrupts the class and sparks the students’ curiosity.
“And so the engagement is increased naturally because what you’re learning about is based on your students’ questions,” she said.
Rubye Ney, the program coordinator of UI WILD, hopes while each school upholds the same mission to enhance student learning and well-being by providing an alternative to traditional indoor settings, she also hopes each school adopts the system in a unique way.
“Each school has their own opportunity to make their outdoor classroom specific to their school, their students, their natural phenomena, their teachers,” she said. “It’d be really cool if every outdoor classroom looked a little bit different.”
Riney said the outdoor classrooms will help students adhere to the “portrait of a graduate” framework, which outlines six key skills: adaptability, empathy, communication, global citizenship, critical thinking, and a learner’s mindset students are expected to have by graduation.
“[Students] get to have opportunities for more hands-on and viewable kinds of tools you wouldn’t necessarily have in the classroom sitting at a desk,” she said. “These are all different types of strengths to support kiddos in their educational goals.”