My Green School
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4.5. Teacher’s perceptions of how green spaces affect children’s behaviour While the children are aware of their own changes in behaviour when they are in their classrooms during lessons and when they are in the playground during playtime, this is also noticed by the teachers. The freedom that children are perceived to have outside is also a point of concern for teachers and makes them wary about facilitating lessons outside. Going outside ... it’s different than keeping the children inside the classroom and in their places and with the people ... quite a lot of the time you have seating plans for where the children sit and it’s very sort of deliberate to help, you know, the children be able to learn in the best way possible really and separate any sort of behaviour issues, whereas that becomes a problem when you go outside and it’s not as easy to mange that. And so that, you know, will sort of be on your mind as well when you’re thinking about going outside (Teacher, Year 5). In addition to the challenges of managing behaviour in outdoor spaces, teachers also find it difficult to teach when children are excited. Nature is seen by teachers as a source of excitement for children. This excitement is something that teachers feel needs to dissipate in order for the children to ‘settle’ back into learning once they return to the classroom. And they are very excitable by nature a lot of these children ... some of them are just like a bullet out of a gun as soon as they get out that [classroom] door... You take them out on the odd occasion and they go out through the glass door and they actually run in the yard screaming as if they’ve been kept down in a cellar for three weeks... It’s like ‘urgh’, you know. And you think, well we just can’t really afford to do that mid-afternoon or mid-morning because it takes them so long to settle back down (Teacher, Year 5). For another teacher, it is the lack of enclosure or containment by physical space that is seen to be challenging. And some children just seem, you know, when they get outside it’s like ... all of a sudden they’ve not got these walls to sort of keep them in (Teacher, Year 5). These concerns about how children respond to going outside was reflected in one teacher’s careful focus upon the setting of expectations before the children leave the classroom for an outdoor lesson on one of the school’s terraces. The extract from fieldnotes below demonstrates how teacher’s