What We Offer: our services and approach
• Our approach: a two-page outline (PDF)
• Phases of work with Expeditionary Learning (PDF)
• An example of Year 1 with Expeditionary Learning
• Our approach to professional development
• Becoming an Expeditionary Learning School
Expeditionary Learning's program of professional development emphasizes active teaching and learning, student and faculty engagement, and a demanding and supportive school culture. Literacy is central and reading and writing are integrated throughout the curriculum. Character development and teamwork are not just emphasized, but embedded in school structures, practices and rituals and integrated into the academic program. In Expeditionary Learning schools, much of the academic work is done in learning expeditions -- long-term investigations of important questions and subjects that include individual and group projects, field studies, and performances and presentations of student work. Active pedagogy, the type of instruction in an EL classroom, is meant to be the norm whether or not there is a learning expedition underway.
EL's professional development enables teachers and principals to do this work with quality. It happens primarily at the school site, where EL staff and national faculty come to work with teams of teachers and administrators for 30 or more days each year. On-site, direct professional development is complemented with regional and national institutes, conferences, school-site seminars and educator Outward Bound courses where EL teachers and administrators from different schools across the country learn together. Each teacher in an EL school is actively involved, on the average, in 15 days a year of teacher development. According to recent studies, this is roughly three times what the average American public school teacher participates in, but a little less than the investment Japan makes each year in the ongoing development of its public school teachers.
Through a partnership with the Fund for Teachers, teachers in Expeditionary Learning schools are also eligible for summer sabbatical grants for individual and team learning expeditions of their own devising to deepen their knowledge and understanding of a particular area of interest and improve as teachers.
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