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With a grant from the Fund for Teachers through Expeditionary Learning, Ms. Haymond spent a week at the Orff Institute in Salzburg, Austria, and was the music student, not the teacher! Besides learning new approaches to singing, movement, and instrument playing, she gained knowledge regarding how to approach playing jazz with students in an Orff-Schulwerk way. Fourth and fifth graders will play the blues and move to jazz throughout the coming year...Kindergartners will compose music using their "tools of the trade," and answer the questions "are tools instruments?" and "are instruments tools?"
-From Currents, Newsletter of the Genesee Community Charter School, Rochester, NY. August 2004
The aim of Expeditionary Learning's program of professional development is to establish effective instructional practices throughout the school. EL's approach to professional development is distinctive in that it models the kinds of teaching it wants to encourage. And it gives teachers opportunities to renew themselves by undertaking learning expeditions of their own. Two of EL's five core practices -- learning expeditions and active pedagogy -- have to do explicitly with making teaching and learning more active, compelling and purposeful. They are employed whether the subject is reading, writing, math, history, science, citizenship, physical education, art or music. When good practices prevail in one part of the school, the task is to figure out how to get them around to the other parts.
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