Direct mail advertising and word of mouth alerts the attention of public and private schools to the Nature's Classroom Institute program. School participation begins with a school board that recognizes the value of a short-term residential environmental experience that takes children from the confines of a tradition school building. The Nature's Classroom Institute program depends upon the willingness of teachers to donate time and energy beyond the expectations of regular classroom teaching.

Geographic area, cost, and date availability comprise the general basis by which schools determine the Nature's Classroom Institute site they plan to attend. Nature's Classroom Institute personnel provide floor plans of site housing for the arrangement of accommodations. Dining room seating assignments are left to the discretion of the school, as are field group assignments. Nature's Classroom Institute guarantees a one to twelve ratio of staff to students.

Nature's Classroom Institute provides an on-site Program Coordinator, winterized housing, three hot meals a day in ample supply (enough for second and third helpings), a medical person on-duty or on-call twenty-four hours a day, and a highly qualified teaching staff.

Progressive education theory and the educational theory of Bruner present a framework for the continuing development of the Nature's Classroom Institute program. "Progressive education seeks to discover the essential child and to aid to that development which is normal to its own individuality" (Cobb, 1928). Bruner in "The Relevance of Education" (1971) indicated that educational philosophy should be concerned with knowledge as well as how the individual has acquired that knowledge. He stated that learning is self-rewarding if it satisfies innate curiosity. If the child is actively learning, what he is learning becomes relevant to the child. Relevance is an important factor for the cognitive development theorists.

Elaborated in terms of contemporary psychological theory, the philosophical foundation for cognitive and sociomoral development used to present the framework of Nature's Classroom Institute is that of John Dewey (1930). His approach to education stressed the central role of thinking and organization of thought, and proposed that both cognitive and sociomoral education are the stimuli for the child's development of his experiences.

Based philosophically on Dewey's theories, and based psychologically in the theories of Piaget and Kohlberg, Nature's Classroom Institute attempts to create situations that enable children to become good citizens.