Excerpts from Reflections on Design Principles
Primacy of Self-Discovery
Experiences that engage the emotions generate self-discovery. "Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge," observes writer and activist Audre Lorde. "They are chaotic, sometimes painful, sometimes contradictory, but they come from deep within us. And we must key into those feelings. . . . This is how new visions begin." The thrill of rappelling into a canyon or the sadness evoked by reading Toni Morrison's Beloved can awaken curiosity and understanding students did not know they had. When students discover an idea that moves or excites them, they are inspired to research, reflect, and learn more.
These emotional triggers often reveal passionate interests. Expeditionary Learning places great value on pursuing passions, because we believe it encourages students to be lifelong, engaged learners. Loretta Brady, a teacher at the School for the Physical City in New York City explains, "Outward Bound reminds us that you have to help young people uncover their passions—not just learning styles, but passions. If through their work they start to discover that inner fire, then they are better able to see the possibilities for making an impact in the world." The more students engage deeply with—the more novels they read, physics problems they tackle, artists they meet, community activists they interview—the more they will find to be passionate about. Intense exploration launches countless investigations, for as Voltaire wrote, "The passions are the winds that fill the sails of a vessel."
The Having of Wonderful Ideas
"The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted," wrote Plutarch. Like fires, wonderful ideas need fuel to ignite them. "Intelligence cannot develop without matter to think about," Harvard Professor Eleanor Duckworth observes. "Making new connections depends on knowing enough about something in the first place to provide a basis for thinking of other things to do—of other questions to ask—that demand more complex connections in order to make sense." Rich learning environments provide the raw material that suggest wonderful ideas to children.
Such learning experiences require that teachers and students value the unexpected. Children may have wonderful ideas at any time during the school day, and that might mean that planned activities have to be postponed because a child's thought process leads the class down an unanticipated avenue. During a learning expedition on frogs, for instance, a first grader at Lincoln School in Dubuque, Iowa, came in from recess and recited a poem about frogs she had just made up. The class enjoyed it so much that teacher Lorie Duclos changed her plans for the afternoon so everyone could write frog poems. Duclos says that in the past she might have asked the student to put the poem in her portfolio and returned to her lesson plan. Her experience with Expeditionary Learning, though, inspired her to do something different. "This time I took her motivation and everybody else's excitement in hearing her poem as a whole learning experience."
The Responsibility for Learning
In the context of shared learning, the teacher's role shifts from teacher as purveyor of knowledge to teacher as guide. Teachers instruct students in the skills they need to meet outcomes and standards, but they do not supply all the answers nor dictate the route students must take. Taking the step back can be challenging for teachers. "What usually happens in these situations is that teachers say we're going to let them do it on their own but then we end up doing it for them," says Mary Lynn Lewark, a former teacher at the Rocky Mountain School of Expeditionary Learning in Denver. To prevent this, Lewark says, "I'm always asking myself, 'Am I doing something that my students could be doing for themselves?' "
When students begin to feel a sense of responsibility for their endeavors, they also feel a greater sense of investment and pride. Students rarely get excited about presenting a report when their teacher tells them what to write. But when students discover answers for themselves and create their own products, they become engaged and eager to share them with a larger audience.
Intimacy and Caring
Over time, community circles and small group work create a safety net over which students feel safe taking intellectual, emotional, and physical risks in the company of their peers. When Vivian Stephens, a teacher at Clairemont Elementary School in Decatur, Georgia, presented her class with three different options for mastering reading skills, she was surprised when they chose to use peer mentors. "I think they chose this approach because they had started trusting each other so that nobody was afraid to show his or her weaknesses and ask help," says Stephens. "That moment was a beautiful outgrowth of the team building we'd been doing."
Success and Failure
Kurt Hahn [founder of Outward Bound] appreciated the close interrelationship between success and failure. At Gordonstoun, the secondary school Hahn started in Scotland, students had opportunities to succeed in academics, service, athletics, and leadership. Yet success without the experience of some level of failure, he believed, brought only a limited sense of accomplishment. Hahn "valued mastery in the sphere of one's weakness over performance in the sphere of one's strength." At Gordonstoun, for instance, outstanding scholars were encouraged to work hard on the athletic field, while gifted athletes were encouraged to progress in academics. After experiencing a few inevitable setbacks, students who succeed in the face of obstacles make the greatest strides in their learning.
Collaboration and Competition
It may seem that the principle of competition is out of place in a community that fosters collaboration. Indeed, when competition is turned against one's peers, it can be destructive and alienating. As John Ruskin wrote, "Nothing is ever done beautifully which is done in rivalship; or nobly, which is done in pride." However, when the challenge of competition is channeled toward surpassing one's own personal best, competition can be a positive and inspiring force. Kurt Hahn believed that physical activity—traditionally riddled with rivalry—could demonstrate the process of striving for personal discipline and success. At Gordonstoun, students developed individual training plans and set daily goals for their progress in physical activities. Each student competed with himself and his own self-perceived limits. Slowly, these physical activities became far more than mere exercises; they became an instrument for "training the will for mastery."
Students can compete against an intellectual best in the similar way they strive for a physical best. For instance, Ron Berger, a sixth-grade teacher in Shutesbury, Massachusetts, simply tells his class, "Your best work is what's required of you." Instead of making an "A" student complacent or a "C" student stop trying, Berger's classroom culture demands that every student reach for his or her own best achievement. 'The grading system in my classroom is, it's 'A+' or it's not finished," Berger says. "If it's not their best work, it's not acceptable. And things just go back and back for revision." Clearly articulated standards, peer critique sessions, sustained collaboration, and constant revision help students reach this challenge. Students come to realize that revising work does not mean they "got it wrong." It just means they could continue to improve it. "In fact," Berger says, "some students develop a perverse pride. If you visited my class they'd say, 'I did fifteen drafts of this.' The status is switched from 'who got it right the first time' to 'who took the most care with it.' "
Diversity and Inclusivity
The first step to building an inclusive learning community is realizing that there are many routes to knowledge. In the fields of literature and mathematics, scholars recognize that there are countless ways to interpret a poem and different algorithms for the same operation. Similarly, a visual learner might learn to read by recognizing words, while a kinesthetic learner might learn by copying sentences out of a book. Both students learn to read in the end. Too often, schools assume that there is only one way to arrive at a correct answer. Yet, as Harvard Professor Eleanor Duckworth points out, a variety of approaches enriches the classroom community. "In many cases if a child does something other than what you expected, it's not 'No,' it is another 'Yes.' The more different yes's we have in a classroom, the more everybody learns."
Learning expeditions foster this type of richness. Since their multi-faceted projects appeal to different intelligences, learning expeditions include and challenge students with a wide variety of learning styles. In a high school math expedition at the Rocky Mountain School of Expeditionary Learning, for instance, the students had to design a water fountain, chart the height and width of the water arc, and find the arc's quadratic equations, angles, and water speed. While all the students were accountable for the same project, there was room to excel in different areas. Those who struggled with the precision of quadratic equations could demonstrate their conceptual understanding through journal writing. Those who had trouble creating artful designs could dive into the construction of the class's group fountain.
The Natural World
"Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons," Walt Whitman wrote. "It is to grow in the open air, and to eat and sleep with the earth." Indeed, the natural world is an excellent stage upon which students may learn about self-discovery and risk taking. But the landscape itself has its own lessons to teach. Food chains illustrate how life continually changes hands. Forest fires which burn young trees so larger trees can thrive show that nature strikes its own balance. The impact of carbon dioxide on the earth's atmosphere demonstrates the interplay of cause and effect. It is not necessary to have access to tracts of wilderness to explore these cycles. A seed bursting in a jar or ants working in a sand pile offer equal mysteries to investigate.
As students become more familiar with the workings of the natural world, they can begin to cultivate certain habits of interaction. Attentiveness, for instance, is an essential tool for learning about natural processes. Tatanga Mani, a Stoney Indian from Canada, once asked "Did you know that trees talk? Well they do. They talk to each other and they'll talk to you if you listen." Listening, though, is an art that has to be practiced. In a learning expedition entitled "Natural Reflections" at Central Alternative High School in Dubuque, Iowa, students learned to listen and see. Teacher Katherine Stevens asked the students to keep a daily journal charting the development of a tree from March to June. At first, paying such close attention to one tree seemed like a waste of time to her students. Yet as they started to focus on the tree—to really see it—endless details and changes popped out at them. Their first drawings, with arrow-straight branches and cloudlike leaves, represented an idea of a tree. Later in the year, the drawings took on the exactitude that comes from close observation.
Solitude and Reflection
In addition to fostering renewal, solitude and reflection bolster academic learning. David Kolb, the Harvard psychologist, suggested that learning requires time set aside explicitly for reflecting on experience. If learners are not encouraged to reflect, they will be less likely to derive lessons that redirect and build on their understandings. Expeditionary Learning teachers honor this step in the learning process by incorporating journal writing and silent time into the school day, but these tools are especially useful in helping students build knowledge and understanding from their fieldwork experiences.
Journal writing, for instance, helped first-grade students from the Rocky Mountain School of Expeditionary Learning make sense of their fieldwork in Castlewood Canyon outside of Denver. On their first trip to study the canyon's natural history and the broken dam that caused a terrible flood in 1933, the students garnered general impressions and cursory observations. But each time they went back they noticed more. Their teacher, Peter Thulson, encouraged them to write in their journals about what they saw. Soon they began to write about animal tracks in the snow, interesting plants, heron feathers lying below a rookery. They began to postulate about the strange looking remnants of a dam. Was it an old castle ruined in a war? Were they in the midst of building a new building? These journal entries became the foundation of their understanding of the canyon. They also helped the students write an in-depth guidebook so future visitors could discover the canyon for themselves.
Service and Compassion
Service helps young people see this connection between academic content and the problems people encounter in everyday life. It provides an opportunity to test and apply knowledge they have gained beyond the settings in which the learning occurred. When middle school students at the Rafael Hernandez School in Boston, Massachusetts participated in an architecture expedition, they did not just plan dream houses. Instead, they designed ways to transform a nearby vacant lot into a community space. They had learned in their studies that urban design projects work best when they address community needs, so they surveyed hundreds of community members. They then used their skills of building architectural, scale models to design the community center, park, and gardens requested by the community.
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