‘A good thing about this is probably that there’s been more freedom to try some things out’: danish teachers’ experience of teaching outdoors during the COVID-19 pandemic

After a COVID-19-induced lockdown in the spring of 2020 in Denmark, the reopening of schools involved bringing the teaching outdoors. This offered a unique opportunity to study the experiences of teachers not used to working outdoors. In light of Thomas Guskey's teacher development theory, these experiences are investigated in a qualitative in-depth study of 12 teachers. Despite starting with different attitudes towards teaching outdoors, the teachers agreed that the prevailing content outdoors had to be curricular, that the preparation had been cumbersome, and that they could teach more from their own mindset outdoors. Furthermore, all participating teachers expressed that they wanted to continue teaching outdoors more post-COVID than before. However, it is difficult to discern the significance of the outdoor teaching specifically, as there were numerous aspects of the schoolday that were changed in the reopening. The results seem promising for the provision of teaching outdoors post-COVID.