Students observe a “pocket prairie” installed by teacher Mark Dorhout who leads an outdoor education program at the middle school in Panora. (Photo courtesy of Mark Dorhout)
A science class for middle school students at Panorama Middle School commonly involves a trek out to the prairie behind the school, a sketch of native seeds under the microscope or a homework assignment to track the progress of a backyard bluebird from its birdhouse.
Teacher Mark Dorhout created an outdoor education program at the middle school in Panora to “connect (students) to the natural world,” foster environmental stewardship, and give students a real-world application to the science they learn in the classroom.
Dorhout, who has a degree in wildlife and fisheries sciences, spent the majority of his career teaching or administering at middle schools and has been teaching sixth through eighth grade science at Panorama Middle School for four years.
He started the outdoor education program by taking students out to a recently restored prairie behind the school, and using the school’s backyard in his lessons as much as possible.
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“This has been a long-standing passion of mine that has become more and more apparent as we move along in this society,” Dorhout said. “And really the main thrust to that is that kids are out less and less into this environment.”
Now the class and its non-traditional classroom has a reputation among the middle schoolers — all of whom will go through the project, make a birdhouse, and get to meet Dorhout’s Labrador retriever, which never misses a field day.
Dorhout said he’s thankful the school district has been very supportive of the program and works with him to supply materials and promote the course in newsletters to parents.
“They get it,” Dorhout said of his district. “They understand the value of a program like this.”
Dorhout said the 11-acre prairie behind the school has been there for over 20 years but really fell out of use until seven or so years ago when the local members of the Izaak Walton League worked to “grub out” some of the trees that had overtaken the area, and replant it to prairie.
Each grade has a different project. Seventh graders build either a bluebird or a wren box that they take home, hang on a tree, and monitor through the rest of their time in middle school.
“They never knew that there was the whole other thing going on … and then all of a sudden they’ve started paying attention to the birds in the neighborhood,” Dorhout said.
Eighth grade students get to work in the greenhouse as part of their curriculum on genetics and climate change. Last year he added sixth graders to his docket and uses the prairie for their lessons in water quality and chemistry.
Dorhout said going out and conducting water quality tests gives the students a real life application of the chemistry they learn in the classroom.
And all of the students get about 50 field days over the course of their time in middle school. Throughout the program, Dorhout has his students gather seeds, add plants into the prairie and analyze what makes one section of the prairie better than another. All of it leads to pretty “rich conversations” around soil quality and biodiversity.
“Kids that you wouldn’t think would like doing prairie work, just totally get into it,” Dorhout said.
Brody Steenblock, a ninth grade student at Panorama High School who went through Dorhout’s program, grew up hunting and farming and said he considered himself outdoorsy, but that Dorohout’s class was “a next level of outdoors.”
Steenblock said he persuaded his parents to plant multiple acres of the prairie grasses he learned about in the class, as part of the Conservation Reserve Program on their farm.
“I don’t think we probably would have planted it, if it wasn’t for the outdoor ed,” Steenblock said.
Steenblock said the class “sparked” a lot of interest in him and he recalls that it was the favorite class for many of his peers as well.
“There was just a whole bunch of kids that either just were not doing the best in school, and couldn’t pay attention in school, and then, you get to Mr. Dorhout’s class, and … kids were just like a whole different person,” Steenblock said.
Cross curricular
Dorhout spoke about his class during a Watershed Talk with the Iowa Division of the Izaak Walton League of America Dec. 17.
Mike Delaney, a member of the league and a prairie advocate who lives near Dorhout, called the outdoor education program “phenomenal.”
“I’ve been thinking about prairie as a teaching tool, and I’m not sure there’s any limits to what you can get into,” Delaney said. “Anything you want to do you can use prairie as an example, and that’s what you’re doing.”
Dorhout doesn’t teach just science in his classroom, but engages students across disciplines.
The middle schoolers each keep a journal where they take down field observations and are encouraged to draw diagrams and doodles of what they study.
Dorhout has also posted the cardinal directions on each of the four walls of his classroom with a corresponding theme. The north wall, for example, faces the prairie and is labeled with “environment”, the east wall faces town and says “community,” South is recreation and West is legacy. He has students write notes about each of these elements and post them up on the wall.
“I always try to get them to understand where we’re at in this world,” Dorhout said.
Students also get about 25 minutes of moderate exercise every time they walk to the prairie, and on days where the school has an unusual schedule, he’ll take his classes to do longer hikes at Lake Panorama, which is walking distance from the school.
Dorhout has also been known to turn a blind eye to some of the fun – like perhaps a friendly snowball fight – that inevitably takes place between 20-30 middle schoolers in the open air.
“Just enough organization so we can have a meaningful lesson, and just enough goof around time that the kids think that it’s awesome,” he said.
Lasting impact
Dorhout said one of the coolest things about the prairie is its visibility from the school and to the community. This means as the students get older, they can still see it and remember the work they did to improve that land.
“I just see that as a really powerful thing, when you look at the life of a prairie and what it looks like now compared to what it did six years ago when you guys first started this reconstruction,” Dorhout said.
This was also Steenblock’s favorite part of the class.
He started seeds in sixth grade and throughout his time in middle school he got to watch them develop through the prairie.
“We can still go back to this day and then see what we had done because we were part of that,” Steenblock said.
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