Environmental skills help prevent damage to the natural surroundings and provide a model for environmental responsibility. Organizational skills help leaders plan, prepare, conduct, and evaluate outdoor experiences. But whatever the location, a teacher's understanding of the learning process and child development remain important. An effective outdoor learning experience begins with clear educational goals. After setting goals, the teacher must be able to select appropriate activities, curriculum materials, and instructional strategies.
Outdoor education relates well to many recent educational innovations.
Thus, an understanding of basic education foundations and current educational theories are as important for outdoor learning as for learning in the classroom. Planning outdoor experiences that incorporate an appropriate level of challenge requires teachers to draw on their knowledge of students' physical and intellectual development. Educators need the ability to apply theories of cognition with special emphasis on concept development and cognitive process. In the outdoor setting, teachers can help students use intellectual skills to infer, hypothesize, collect and analyze data, and draw conclusions. It is distinctive in its methodology.