Overview and History: Expeditionary Learning Schools Outward Bound
Overview
Expeditionary Learning Schools Outward Bound (ELS) is celebrating a 15-year track record of establishing good schools in places where good schools are most needed.
Effective professional development for teachers is the engine that drives improvement in teaching, and there can be no improvement in student learning without better teaching. For this reason, Expeditionary Learning aims to involve all teachers at EL schools in at least 15 to 20 days of professional development a year for at least five years.
Since its early years, Expeditionary Learning Schools has endeavored not only to create good schools, but schools that are more adventurous and rigorous than the norm and that cultivate a positive culture. The ELS approach holds that teaching and learning should be active and challenging; that character development should be as important as academic development; and good habits of mind and behavior should be taught and learned in the process of teaching and learning reading, writing, arithmetic and other academic disciplines.
Expeditionary Learning Schools currently works with more than 150 urban, rural and suburban schools in 30 states and the District of Columbia; the majority are in low-income communities. Altogether, there are more than 45,000 students and 4,300 teachers in Expeditionary Learning schools today. Of the schools across the country, about one-third are elementary schools; one-third are middle schools and one-third are high schools.
While the work of Expeditionary Learning is supported primarily with fees paid by partner schools and districts, ELS also attracts grants and contracts from foundations and government agencies and contributions from individuals. In 2003, Expeditionary Learning Schools received a grant of $12.6 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to help create several new, small public ELS secondary schools across the country. With 17 such schools in operation or planned, in 2007, the Gates Foundation made additional grants of $11 million to help establish more such schools, based on Expeditionary Learning Schools' success with the first group. Expeditionary Learning Schools has also received three long-term, site-specific grants of approximately $1 million each from the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City; the Stuart Foundation in San Francisco, and The Barr Foundation in Boston.
History
Expeditionary Learning builds on the educational insights of Kurt Hahn, the well-known European educator and founder of Outward Bound (OB), and other leading educational thinkers, from William James and John Dewey to Howard Gardner. Hahn believed that adventure, community service and other forms of direct and engaging experience could be used to teach and motivate people. At the heart of today's Expeditionary Learning Schools are learning expeditions, "real world," long-term investigations in which students and teachers examine compelling and relevant topics through fieldwork. Each learning expedition ends with a presentation to an audience beyond the classroom.
Hahn founded several programs worldwide throughout the 1930s, '40s and '50s, including the United World Colleges and the Duke of Edinburgh Award. Private school leaders first brought Outward Bound to the United States in 1962. In the '60s and '70s, wilderness-based schools in Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, North Carolina and Oregon did extensive outreach to school-based urban areas and, in the 1980s went on to establish Urban Centers in New York, Boston, Atlanta and Baltimore. Some of the Urban Centers developed effective programs in public schools, bringing the principles and pedagogy of Outward Bound, and its spirit of adventure and emphasis on community service, to schools and other urban institutions.
ELS evolved from an Outward Bound urban education initiative begun in the early 1990s that included the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and was made possible by a grant from the DeWitt Wallace Reader's Digest Foundation. The initiative resulted in a proposal to try a more active and more principled approach to k-12 public schooling. It was called Expeditionary Learning. In 1992, Outward Bound's Expeditionary Learning proposal became one of 11 selected for funding from the almost 800 solicited by the New American Schools Development Corporation (NASDC) for "break-the-mold" whole-school reform.
NASDC provided a series of grants over seven years to support testing, developing, and "scaling up" application of the Expeditionary Learning Schools design. In 1993, ELS was launched with 10 demonstration schools in five very different U.S. cities: New York City; Boston; Portland, Maine; Denver and Dubuque, Iowa.
Over the years, third-party research studies published by the Rand Corporation, the Academy for Educational Development, the American Institutes for Research, and the National Staff Development Council have evaluated Expeditionary Learning Schools and cite positive outcomes, such as improved teacher practice, higher student achievement and participation, and a more positive and productive school culture.
Photos: Crossroads School, Baltimore MD
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