What K–12 Teachers Can Learn from National Parks: How Visitor Experience Principles Can Help Create an Empowered, Learner Centered Classroom

The author, James Fester, at San Antonio Missions National Historical Park

Why Classrooms Should Run Like National Parks

Learning environments, such as classrooms, should be run more like national parks. No, seriously, hear me out…

When I think of learning environments that promote individual choice, empower agency, and embrace self-management, I immediately think of our national parks. This incredible learning ecosystem, the first of its kind in world history, consists of 433 individual units that are home to, among other things the, world’s largest living organism, its longest cave system, and many other remarkable natural and culture treasurers that people from across the globe visit in order to recreate, to take sometimes obscene numbers of selfies, but also to learn.

In fact, ever since the establishment of the first national park in 1872, education has been as much a part of our national parks as conservation, which is why early promoters of the national parks like Robert Sterling Yard believed they were destined to become “great schoolhouses of [the] American people.” 

National Parks as Models for Empowered Learning

Given the centrality of education to their prosperity and mission, parks do not leave the education of visitors up to just chance encounters. Learning is a pivotal part of a wider, carefully curated system of policies, pedagogy, and strategy collectively known as visitor experience planning, or VX for short. This system is something that few of us have ever considered, but if you’ve ever visited a park, campground, or the museum in a visitor center, your entire stay, regardless of how you choose to spend your time, is completely choreographed using these principles. 

It first occurred to me that VX could be a useful concept in classrooms as I traveled around the country, working with school leaders and educators, and began to notice striking similarities between VX and how effective and empowering classrooms ran. Before becoming familiar with VX, I would see classrooms with a strong culture of student agency and independence, but couldn’t really articulate why or how they worked like they did for the benefit of other educators interested in following suit. VX provided me the vocabulary I needed to be able to be able to describe the things that needed to change in order to see the same results.     

What kind of classroom would you have if you adopted visitor experience principles? The good news is that you don’t have to wonder and, in the process, come closer to establishing an empowered learning environment where you, your learners, and the classroom itself all play a coequal role in what goes on. 

In this blog post, we will discuss how the same principles of visitor experience planning that parks rely on every day can be utilized by classroom teachers to create a more learner-centered classroom where students—and their teachers —can thrive. 

Visitor Experience Basics: National Park Lessons for a Learner-Centered Classroom

If you are someone familiar with this concept, I apologize for the amount of glossing that is about to occur, but I want to take the time to level set the VX for all.

Let's start with the three components that all park planners take into consideration: 

1. The visitors - how do we fulfill their needs and ensure their safety and satisfaction?  

2. The park staff - how do we best leverage the capacity of our rangers and other staff? 

3. The environment itself - how do we design and utilize space in support of the previous two? 

For park planners, all three have their own important roles in supporting the goals of the other two. While at times one might take a more prominent role depending on the task, none are more important than the others, and none are ever totally absent. Just like a stool with three legs, removing one is a recipe for collapse. 

Let’s take a moment to consider how all of this works during a typical overnight stay at a national park like Yosemite: 

Before visitors even enter the park, they are greeted at the entrance by a staff member who provides them with some basic information and is on hand to answer their questions before they begin their visit. Most guests start their visit by stopping by the visitor center, where they will again encounter park staff who might provide suggestions for where they get started, share some reminders about policies and regulations, and so forth.

The group might then meander through the museum, where carefully curated learning invitations abound, allowing them to select means and modes of learning that resonate with them. They can engage in learning together by discussing what they’re seeing or what they want to learn more about, or they can do so individually. There are also opportunities to participate in programs led by rangers as a way to build knowledge with the support of an expert, provided you arrive on time and don’t mind walking. 

When our group ventures out into the park to get some fresh air, they might see interpretive signs or installations at trailheads that they can use to access helpful trail information or identify any wildlife they might see. They can also rely on information from other groups they encounter or check in with any rangers they encounter. If they’re off in a remote part of a park on their own, hopefully, they are aware of self-management structures like Leave No Trace that help keep them safe and prevent them from impacting the experience of others. 

At the end of their day, as they retire to their campsite and the glow of their campfire, their experience is still completely overseen by visitor experience planning. The park ranger or campground host is on hand if needs arise or if they forget about quiet hours, and the campground itself is peppered with signs, posters, and reminders about rules for conduct and where essentials like water and bathrooms are located. 

Two things that are important to highlight from the example above are that all three elements of VX were consistently involved in supporting the learning of our visitors with different elements taking a lead role at different times. Also, these three elements correlate directly with elements of a classroom learning experience, as shown below

Park visitors ➜ Students

Park rangers and other park staff ➜Classroom teacher, aides, etc. 

Visitors center, museum, campsite ➜ Classroom 

The example illustrates how VX leads to an educational experience that is more responsive to the needs and interests of learners, helping visitors act more independently rather than being dependent on a ranger or another staff member to fulfill their needs. 

What if the same thing were true of your classroom, that your students and the classroom itself could be utilized in different ways to take on roles that were usually your own responsibility? Learning more about VX can provide a lot of ideas about how to do just that, starting with the way in which spaces are designed and used.  

The Classroom as a Third Teacher: Designing Learner-Centered Environments Like National Parks

The idea of the environment itself functioning as a “third teacher” is not a new concept. Practitioners of Reggie Emilio, in outdoor schools, and other child-directed educational approaches have been utilizing what is around the learner to facilitate and manage learning for decades. But somewhat paradoxically, as learners become older and more independent, the utilization of what is around them diminishes significantly. You’d be hard-pressed to find a high school classroom in the US where what is on the walls matters as much to the learning as who is standing.

National parks are intimately familiar with utilizing what is around a visitor to facilitate learning. There is no better way to understand natural processes like erosion than standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon, and few places better suited for reflecting on the cost of freedom than standing among the tombstones and monuments of Gettysburg.

Each of the 433 units within the national park system was set aside because it showcases something better than anywhere else in the world, and to complement and augment each unique resource, parks have visitor centers and museums on site that are carefully curated to facilitate independent and free-choice learning for visitors.  

Designing for Learning in National Parks: Visitor Experience Principles

National Park Practice	Learning Principles	Park Visual Examples
Multimodal and Flexible Learning Approaches	Multimodal means of building knowledge. A variety of approaches, such as direct instruction, hands-on learning, reflection, inquiry, and others, can be utilized even in the absence of staff. There are multiple learning pathways for building knowledge such as self-guided tours. Some elements are required, and there is also a suggested order, but always with room for choice.	Displacement Exhibit: Text, artifacts, and an interactive touchscreen combine to provide multiple entry points for learning.
Intentional Spatial and Visual Design	Shifting physical layouts for more effective facilitation of learning. “Zoning” - the practice of clustering information thematically. Non-textual prompts or organizational symbols for locating and interpreting information such as color coding or iconography.	New Bedford Map Exhibit: A 3D town model shows how buildings and spaces were zoned by purpose, helping visitors see patterns and relationships through layout and design.
Information Accessibility	Textual information follows the rule of 3-30-3: The topic can be determined in three seconds, a high-level summary is accessible within 30 seconds, and deeper knowledge about the topic can be built in no more than three minutes.	Klondike Aftermath Panel: Headings, summaries, and detailed text let visitors engage at different depths.
Behavioral Expectations	Expectations for conduct that are clear, displayed often, and reinforced by staff, as well as the example of visitors.	Trailhead Signage: Posted rules and warnings set clear expectations for safe conduct, reminding visitors of shared responsibility.

As you read through this list of design principles, you might already be seeing connections to learner-centered principles that you integrate into your own classroom, but here are some ideas to get you started below.

From National Parks to Empowered Learning Environments: Applying Visitor Experience to Classroom Practice

National Park Practice	Ideas to Get Started in Your Classroom	Classroom Example Visuals
Multimodal and Flexible Learning Approaches	Creating playlists of resources that can be accessed on demand. Google Docs, websites, and text/articles are all available in formats both engaging to the students and aligned to the learning needs in the room. Make these resources visible and available without you having to be the connector by publishing them to a central website or linking them to QR codes within your room. Emphasize choice where you can, but balance it against your “non-negotiables.” Providing different pathways or learning activities is good, but there are also some things that students need to know or skills they need to have before effective self-directed learning can take place. This can take many forms, such as using a structure like the Workshop Model, where you begin with a required learning experience to build base knowledge before learners complete a more flexible activity like group research or a Hyperdoc-based activity. The environment doesn’t always mean the classroom, as this isn’t always the best place for certain tasks or processes. The teacher shifts the location when possible to better facilitate the learning process.	AP Resource Playlist: A digital collection of videos, texts, and study tools that offers multiple entry points for learning, much like the layered resources in a park visitor center. Interactive Learning Choice: Students engage with a required hands-on mapping activity to build foundational knowledge before branching into more flexible pathways—similar to how parks guide visitors through key exhibits before allowing them to choose their own learning experiences. Outdoor Learning Experience: Students shift outside the classroom to engage in authentic, hands-on learning, just as parks blend physical activity and environment to deepen understanding. These students are at Camp Stella Maris in Conesus, NY.
Intentional Spatial and Visual Design	The layout of your room is intimately connected to engagement (see Rands et al), so don’t make management harder — your layout should shift often to align with the task you have planned for your learners. Group work, gallery walks, independent assessments, partner tasks, and discussions — no two of these tasks are so similar that the setup should look the same. If someone were to enter your room and look around, would they have an idea of what was going to happen during that day's lesson? If not, it's time for a shift. Identifying patterns, themes, or connections between topics can help with overall understanding and cognitive processes. Anchor charts can be helpful, as can things like word walls or blown-up infographics. Zoning can also be an effective tool for self-management by designating skill or content zones, similar to the way station rotations work, allowing for more responsive coaching by the teacher, as they know what is happening in each area of the classroom. Project walls, learning walls, and bulletin board displays are designed to be resources that are used to facilitate learning rather than just be decorative. Room aesthetics always support the unit and are rotated frequently. Information that sticks out is often remembered more deeply (Isolation Theory), so play with design choices like color, size, and placement. But beware — this isn’t an invitation to overload your walls, as too much can lead to cognitive overload	Flexible Layout: A classroom arranged for comfort and collaboration, showing how physical space shifts with the task to support engagement, just as parks design spaces that guide flow and invite exploration. Anchor Chart: A visual tool that highlights patterns and connections in learning, much like park signage uses icons and symbols to help visitors make sense of themes. Project Wall: A living display that evolves with student inquiry, modeled after how park exhibits layer visuals and text to build understanding over time. Vocabulary Wall: A text-rich display that supports quick recall and shared language, like parkwayfinding signs and labels that give visitors immediate orientation before they explore more deeply.
Information Accessibility	Consider displaying readings on walls or other surfaces. While no research yet specifically says that reading from wall displays is better than reading from books or paper while seated, there is evidence that suggests combining reading with movement (active learning see Freeman et al 2014) or reading text that is designed for maximum accessibility (like 3-30-3 displays = best practices and research backed) encodes information differently and leads to better retention and recall. Also, leaving these displays up creates a text-rich environment, which promotes literacy in younger learners. Materials are easily accessible and held in a location that all students can access without interrupting the work or focus of others. Materials corners, shared docs, or other easy to reach locations can all be used to great effect.	Gallery Walk: Students read and reflect while moving through displays, echoing how parks use the 3-30-3 design to layer information for accessibility and retention. Materials Corner: Classroom resources and materials are conveniently placed for easy access, much like parks ensure wayfinding and information are visible to every visitor.
Behavioral Expectations	If there are certain behaviors that you want to happen without a verbal cue or interruptions, integrate visual cues into your room. If it takes the form of a short phrase or sentence on a sign, that’s good. If you can create or use a symbol, all the better for your ELLs or pre-literate learners. Establish their meaning and then use them often. Norms/agreements around behavior are posted, reviewed, and collectively contributed to by everyone who has a part of the environment. They should be revisited, especially if there are violations, not as a way of calling learners out, but as a way of calling them in to the process of improving them.	Visual Cues: Classroom signs that communicate expectations nonverbally, like the posted trail signs in parks that guide visitor behavior clearly and consistently. Classroom Norms Display: A collaboratively built anchor chart of agreements, like the posted rules and guidelines in parks that remind all visitors they share responsibility for the space and one another’s experience.

Implementing the strategies mentioned above doesn’t need to result in scattershot implementation. They can be integrated into existing features or structures you might already utilize. For example, a project wall is one such classroom feature that allows for the inclusion of many of the resources listed above, so consider what other features of your classroom or its culture already exist that could be strengthened with the list mentioned above.  

By reconsidering the way that the classroom itself is utilized as a tool for both learning and management, the responsibilities heaped upon the teacher can be greatly diminished, allowing for more capacity to be shifted from materials and behavior concerns and allocated towards meaningful interactions with the learners themselves. Recognize that this, like establishing any new routine, takes time and needs to be implemented at a gradual pace (go slow to go fast) 

This idea of shifting roles and responsibilities traditionally reserved for a teacher is the same one we will use in reconsidering the learners themselves. 

Empowering Students to Lead: Lessons from Visitor Experience in National Parks

Visitors, like our students, are the focus of every planning and management decision. And if personal and intellectual improvement is at the core of the purpose of our classrooms, then our students should be equal partners in these spaces whenever possible. 

This is especially important within national park spaces because often visitors can go hours without making contact with park rangers or other staff. At New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, for example, there are multiple official entrances as well as unofficial state and county roads that lead into the park. Additionally, there are hundreds of ways that people rafting down the New River can enter, which means that park staff have to put into place VX structures that empower guests to see after their own learning and their own conduct.  

Ask yourself this question: if you weren’t in your classroom, would your learners still know what was expected of them? How long before the “wheels come off” and your students wouldn’t be able to proceed in their learning without you? While a classroom teacher would never expect a classroom to run efficiently without their presence, there are ways that your students can take on greater agency in their own learning that frees up you, the teacher, to turn their attention to other, essential duties that only you can do.  

As teachers, we need to take deliberate steps and actions that expand opportunities for students to take an active role, where they are more interdependent with each other and less dependent on us. Here are some ideas for moving to more empowered models of learning and management:

From Visitors to Students: Empowering Classrooms with Visitor Experience Principles

Visitor Experience Practice	Classroom Application
Make planning visible and predictable. Parks do this by sharing event schedules with their visitors or posting information about the distance between services or facilities so people know when they will be on their own.	Provide greater visibility with all your planning. Share what is coming up and where on the calendar it lands ahead of time, especially when students are taking a greater role. Help connect what you ask them to do to the actual. Students who have access to an instructional calendar—or when you break down the period or lesson into blocks of time (“you’ll have five minutes to turn and talk”)—know what is expected at each stage.
Lean on consistent routines. Parks do the same with a very uniform and predictable set of expectations (don’t feed the bears, stay on the trails, bring extra water, don’t pet the fuzzy cow, etc). If you’ve been to one park, you tend to know the expectations and don’t need as many reminders.	The teacher relies on a small list of core instructional routines and tools to guide student activity in the classroom. Ideally, after being managed a time or two by you, students should be able to utilize these well-worn structures such as thinking routines, protocols, or exit tickets by themselves, saving time on directions and requiring less monitoring by you.
Balance instruction with student voice. Park rangers utilize a set of best practices called Audience-Centered Experiences, with the most important being dialogic participation—the idea that learning is balanced between the ranger and the group in all things (participation, discussion, questions, etc).	Emphasize balanced and dialogic instruction. If you spend 40 minutes in direct instruction, follow it with just as much (if not more) student-directed time to build understanding and meaning making. This re-emphasizes our commitment to shared power in the classroom: learning is a partnership where the teacher has power with their students, not power over them.
Empower visitors to take on real responsibility. Rangers could spend all day picking up trash, or they could empower their visitors to do that through signage and frameworks like Leave No Trace, dedicating their time instead to educational programming or monitoring areas that wildlife frequent.	Identify what only you can do and what your learners could do. Students can perform duties traditionally assigned to the teacher, such as instruction, group formation and management, assessment, or resource gathering. Periodically doing this frees you up to focus on the things that can’t be done by anyone but the expert in the room, like remediation or real-time adjustment.
Know when to pull back. Recent research shows that although park visitors love programs that emphasize participation, there is a “saturation point” where participation drops off sharply.	Don’t overask, especially if learners aren’t developmentally ready to take on additional responsibility. Know your classroom’s saturation point when it comes to activities that require students to be more invested than you. Not everything needs to be learner-centered—sometimes it’s okay to watch a movie.

As you read over the list above, you may be asking yourself, “how do I know what my students are ready to take on and what I should just do myself?” one tip is to consider each role or responsibility that will set your learners up for success, even if they might be challenging at first, and provide support to ensure it doesn’t create more work for you later. Consider campfires, something that most people would agree are staples of any camping experience in our national parks. Parks want to make sure that visitors can build and manage their own fires, especially since their own staffing capacity doesn't allow for a ranger to monitor every fire. However, if the fire gets out of control, it means big clean-up costs and a lot of additional work for the rangers, so what do they do? Do they just ban them? No, instead they provide scaffolds and guidance to empower visitors in building their own fires with things like fire permits, specific regulations, and pre-placed rings in locations that are safe.   

Consider each task or responsibility and try to figure out what they’ll need to do it effectively. If you know that your learners might make poor choices in selecting their research partners, but want them to have this experience as a way of building their collaborative skills, scaffold it so that they can do so more successfully. If it takes too much time for you to create all these scaffolds, then consider another way of empowering your students.   

Having considered what could be done by the student or the environment leads us to the final leg of our stool - how your own role in the classroom could or should shift. 

 

From Ranger to Facilitator: Rethinking the Teacher’s Role in Empowered Classrooms

After reconsidering the role of our learners, we must now turn our focus back on ourselves and consider the implications of the choices we’ve made for what we, as teachers, do in the classroom. How is what we normally do the same, and how is it different? 

Park staff wear many different hats that enable visitors to enjoy themselves during their visit. They answer questions, provide direction, identify issues that need to be addressed, and of course they try to provide helpful reminders to folks who litter or forget to extinguish their campfires.  But most importantly, they are the people responsible for putting the conditions in place and supporting the role of both the environment and the visitor. This doesn’t make them more important, but their choices have more impact.   

While many aspects of what you as a teacher do may stay the same or be affirmed by this concept, there are always opportunities to make changes that help shift or lighten the classroom load, and many of these happen in the moment, such as:

• Facilitation rather than instruction. The priority of the teachers' time should be interaction and student support, and they leverage the other assets in the classroom in ways that allow them to keep those priorities in focus.   

• Support student-led processes with timely clarity. Ensuring that self-directed processes or areas where learners take on a bigger role run smoothly. Timely clarity in support of these processes is key to their success . 

• Extending and adjusting learning experiences based on learner needs. When students struggle, teachers help provide remedial support. When they are ready for more challenge, they are 

• Incorporating feedback from learners into lesson design. Teachers are responsive to the informal and formal feedback they get from students about what was successful and what needed further adjustment. 

• Create closure before moving forward. Making sure that there is a clear end, like closing a book on the project or processes, so that the unit can begin, as only teachers have the full view of the whole instructional calendar.   

First Steps Toward Empowered Learning Environments: Applying Visitor Experience in Your Classroom

Hopefully, you are beginning to see the many possibilities that can come from borrowing from the strategies and approaches used by VX professionals most notable those who work within our national parks and public lands. In reimagining classroom spaces to align ourselves with what is seen in museums, national parks, and the people who manage them we recognize that learning can be inspired and guided by thoughtful design—through the use of concepts like strategic zoning, multimodal resources, visual prompts, and opportunities for reflection and inquiry. The classroom, then, becomes more than just a backdrop for instruction; it transforms into an active participant in the learning process, offering students guidance, support, and structure even in the teacher's absence.

Implementing this vision begins with intentional planning. Teachers should start by identifying the non-negotiables of a unit—what every student must know or be able to do—and then build flexible pathways that accommodate different learning styles, paces, and preferences. Environmental cues, signage, access to materials, and clear behavioral norms can support student independence and reduce the burden on the teacher. Consider rotating displays, embedding QR codes that link to key resources, and creating zones in the room dedicated to specific skills or tasks. Start small: rework one area of your room, redesign one lesson to include student choice, or introduce one new visual system for expectations and routines.

As you shift your classroom toward a more learner- and environment-driven model, your own role evolves from manager and instructor to facilitator, coach, and designer of experiences. This doesn't mean doing less—it means doing something different. Focus your time on interactions that only you can provide: formative feedback, guided questioning, and supporting students at the point of need. Begin by auditing your current routines: what could be taught or managed by the space? What could students take on with some support? By making these shifts gradually and purposefully, you open space for deeper engagement, shared responsibility, and a learning environment that supports every learner, even when you're not at the front of the room.

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Want more about? Check out James Fester's book, The National Park Classroom.

This book introduces the National Park Classroom (NPC) Framework, which helps teachers apply educational strategies used by park rangers—like project-based and inquiry-based learning—to boost engagement across all subjects and grade levels. It highlights how national park resources can support equity, inclusion, and standards-aligned instruction while fostering learner-centered classrooms. Backed by research, the book equips educators with practical tools to connect students to both local and distant natural sites, deepening learning through place-conscious, experiential approaches.

Available on Amazon - https://amzn.to/4kdB9Gk

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