Evaluating the effectiveness of your school forest program is a crucial component in a thriving and growing school forest program. Only by understanding where your strengths and weaknesses are, will your program be able to reach its full potential. The following tools will allow you to collect important data and information from others in your district. Use the information you collect to compile a report about the success of the school forest for your school board.
School Forest Use Tracking Tool
Use this document as a tool to keep track of the number of students, teachers, and community members (including parent chaperones) that use your school forest each year. This is a great tool for gathering information to then share with your school board!
School Forest Use Tracking Tool
School Forest Needs Assessment
A needs assessment can provide valuable information on the opportunities and challenges of using the school forest. Allow teachers, administrators, school staff, students, parents, and community members to complete the assessment to get the greatest diversity of opinions. Use the following example as a guideline to develop your needs assessment to address your specific district’s needs. Don’t forget there are free online tools to help you conduct your survey as well that make it easier to administer and tabulate the results of the survey.
School Forest Needs Assessment
Field Trip Evaluation
After each field trip, have the teachers complete a field trip evaluation. Post field trip evaluations will indicate the success of the lessons and the field trip overall. This will help teachers remember what worked well during a particular field trip and what needs to be adjusted when doing a similar trip again. Use the following document as a guide to develop a field trip evaluation for your school forest. School Forest Field Trip Evaluation
Annual Wisconsin School Forest Survey Results
Each year the Wisconsin School Forest Program sends a survey to each school forest to gather statewide school forest information. The survey asks about school forest educational use, use by community members, and school forest financial spending. A summary of the
statewide survey results can be found here.
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