Building confidence and changing behaviour in a Cornish woodland

1. Jane Acton nature workshops If you go down to the woods today....: Building confidence and changing behaviour in a Cornish woodland

3. Aim 1 ‘to assess and investigate the impact of nature workshops on children’s self esteem, confidence and emotional literacy’ Aim 2 ‘to explore how best to evaluate this practice in future’ Aim 3 ‘to reflect on practice and determine how nature workshops can be developed further for children’

5. Measures used to evaluate the impact on child well being

15. Name of child Date What worked well for child? What didn’t work well for the child? What were the child’s strengths? What were the child’s difficulties? What might I need to check up on/do more of in the next session? Other issues; Child review at end of each session

16. Aim 1‘to assess and investigate the impact of nature workshops on children’s self esteem, confidence and emotional literacy’

17. Childs satisfaction with the sessions

19. Children’s Emotional Literacy Checklist Scores

21. Parents Overall SDQ Score

22. Aim 2 ‘to explore how best to evaluate this practice in future’

23. We managed to receive complete sets of data on each child from their parents, teachers and the children themselves. In future we would like to do some qualitative research which includes asking children open ended questions. It would be good to find a more tangible way of recording the children’s satisfaction with the sessions than simply marks out of 10. Perhaps drawings, sound or video recordings could be made by the children. We found the SDQ system quite time consuming compared with the ELC. Also the ELC was the most relevant in helping us to measure how well the sessions built resilience in the children.

24. Aim 3 ‘to reflect on practice and determine how nature workshops can be developed further for children’

25. Session reviews Weekly reviews Mixed groups Collaborations Feedback reports Common Assessment Framework

27. We have successfully assessed and investigated the impact of nature workshops and have measured improvements in self esteem, confidence and emotional literacy according to the children, parents and teachers. Without a control group we cannot conclude this is solely due to these sessions. The sessions were well attended, the children enjoyed what they did and would all like to do more. The quantitative measures we used generally worked well and qualitative methods would also be good in future. Conclusions

29. Time spent in child focussed sessions prepared specifically to suit their learning styles clearly supports improved self esteem and emotional literacy. The model outlined here worked well. It might be used with families in the future. Feedback to parents and teachers on individual children might be useful in future where assessments are required. More research on a larger scale, conducted by an independent body, would allow us to measure the impact of nature workshops as a potential tool for improving well being and learning over time. We would also recommend research on the impacts of nature workshops where perhaps some children have much more than 22 hours on a regular weekly basis. Recommendations