![]() While ELS’ leadership knew the organization was making progress in almost all of its schools, they were concerned that it wasn’t enough to fulfill ELS’ mission: helping to create a network of good and excellent elementary, middle, and high schools that bring out the best in students, teachers, and administrators.Īs noted, multiple research studies had shown strong student outcomes when schools implemented the ELS model with fidelity. What steps should ELS take to maximize its impact?īefore formulating a growth plan, the ELS-Bridgespan project team needed to get really clear about how well the organization’s current initiatives were working.If there were schools that were not adopting the model fully, what was getting in the way?.How successful were ELS’ efforts to implement its research-based model with schools?.Key Questionsįrom January through May of 2004, a project team consisting of Expeditionary Learning Schools/Outward Bound’s President and Chief Executive Officer Greg Farrell, Director of the New High Schools Project Jane Heidt, Chief Financial Officer John Clarke, key field directors, and five Bridgespan consultants collaborated on ELS’ business plan. ELS’ leadership then teamed up with the Bridgespan Group to develop a business plan to guide that growth in the context of continuing to improve its overall program. These impressive results caught the attention of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which made a $12.6M grant to extend ELS’ work with new small high schools in needy areas. All together, almost 40,000 students were attending ELS schools.Įvaluations by seven independent researchers attested to the power of the ELS model: the culture and instructional practices of an ELS school changed for the better student attendance and parent participation increased the need for disciplinary actions decreased and student learning and performance improved. Over 90 percent had a high percentage of low-income students. By spring 2004, the organization had contracts with 126 schools, three-quarters of which were traditional public schools with the remainder public charter schools. Schools from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon actively sought to work with ELS. After just six years in operation, it was hailed by Congress as a national model. Children learn because they have a need to know, and they create high-quality products because there is an authentic audience who will benefit from them.ĮLS was one of the first comprehensive school reform designs that the New American Schools Development Corporation supported. Content and skills are taught in the context of projects that have meaning for the students. Started in 1992, Expeditionary Learning Schools (ELS) guides educators to teach through active pedagogies, with a particular focus on learning expeditions: long-term investigations that are keyed to state academic standards and include individual and group projects, field studies, and presentations of student work to audiences beyond the classroom. Joey attends an Expeditionary Learning school. His teacher had used the standards to define the criteria for the book project. ![]() “Is this noun’s gender right? Is this the correct verb tense? Have I used all the vocabulary words we were supposed to include?” It was no accident that he was learning exactly what his state board of education’s frameworks for Spanish instruction prescribed. Joey’s Spanish class was making Spanish-language books to help.Īs Joey worked on a story about a fisherman, he asked the three other students in his group for advice. The speaker had shown slides from her recent visit to the village and explained how learning Spanish was virtually the only chance Ixil children had to escape the poverty of their tribe. Three weeks earlier he had learned about Guatemala’s Ixil Indians from a guest speaker. He wanted every word to be perfect in the book he was making-a first reader for children in a Guatemalan mountain village. ![]() Eleven-year-old Joey eagerly flipped through the English-Spanish dictionary. ![]()
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