While current research on school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic is predominantly concerned with learning deficits, the exploratory study presented here focuses on the previously neglected question of young people’s concrete learning experiences during this disruptive period, with a focus on how they used their time and how this relates to their individual needs. The authors interviewed German secondary school students via Zoom and used a grounded theory approach and a transformative learning theory framework to derive recommendations for environmental and sustainability education (ESE). Their findings highlight two important insights: first, that the predominant focus on academic learning loss obscures a more comprehensive understanding of students’ learning experiences; and second, that real-world experiments such as the involuntary school closures during the pandemic may hold the potential to start meaningful, transformative learning processes and experimentation with new strategies for needs satisfaction.