Visiting a comment, Expeditionary Learning Schools

Visiting a comment left on my April 29, 2009 post.
What is Expeditionary Learning?
According to the Expeditionary Learning Schools Outward Bound website (http://www.elschools.org/), Expeditionary Learning Schools (ELS) Outward Bound is a nonprofit organization which works in new schools or implemented in existing schools and works to “improve student achievement; build student character; enhance teacher practices; and instill a positive school culture.” I have never heard of ELS before, but I have heard of Outward Bound. Outward Bound takes students outside on trips, hikes, etc and facilitates learning outside the classroom. ELS seem to be more focused on schools. On the website it states “learning expeditions” and interdisciplinary units are developed from state and district standards. The students work with experts to create original research. Furthermore, the website claims ELS has been proven effective by the Rand Corporation, the Academy for Educational Development, the American Institutes for Research, and the National Staff Development Council.

I like the “design principles” of ELS. (1) The primacy of self-discovery: “learning happens best with emotion” an argument similar to that which I developed in my last post! The principle continues with stating a teacher’s responsibility is to help students overcome their fears and find they can do more than they thought possible. (2) The having of wonderful ideas: time is of central interest to this principle. Students are given time to formulate ideas, experiment, and reflect on the lesson. (3) The responsibility for learning: encouraging students to take charge of their own learning and to realize learning occurs in groups and individually. (4) Empathy and caring: small learning groups, older students mentoring younger ones, the development of a comfortable and safe community. (5) build confidence through success and learn to overcome failure. Develop perseverance. (6) collaboration and competition: group work and students compete not against each other but against themselves. (7) Diversity and inclusion: diversity increases richness of ideas (a point I wrote about collaboration in a paper earlier this week!). Heterogeneous groups. (8) The natural world: “refreshes human spirit and teaches… recurring cycles and cause and effect.” (9) Solitude and reflection: the importance of being alone with one’s thoughts and reflect with others. (10) Service and compassion: people are strengthened through giving and serving others.

It is exciting to know some of my ideas are shared with the ELS principles!

ELS core practices and benchmarks. I found these most interesting in that they include ideas which are surprisingly absent from traditional school practices and benchmarks. In our current ‘accountability’ and testing phase, many schools focus increasingly on meeting test-scores and leave out the goals ELS has maintained. The organization contends the five core practices provide a planning guide for teachers. The practices are: Learning expeditions- designing compelling lessons, incorporating fieldwork, and producing high quality student work. Active pedagogy- reading, writing, inquiry-based math and social studies, art, and assessment. Culture and character- develop a community and engage families. Leadership and school improvement- share leadership and build partnerships. Use multiple data sources to improve achievement. Structures- facilitate knowing students well.

Left wondering whether ELS is effective, I navigated to their ‘See our results’ page. There are too many studies to cite here, but the introduction to the page states that the program is successful in: significant student improvement, improvement to instructional practices and school culture, improves attendance and parent involvement, and reduces ‘need’ for disciplinary actions.

After the positive evaluations, I have several issues that need to be resolved before more schools adopt ELS. Foremost, what implications do the students face when moving on to college? Progressive school reform is often seen as ‘hippie’ or non-competitive. What does it take to dispel these assumptions? Similarly, it takes fundamental reform to transform schools in this way. Are their easier ways which may be more effective?

Addressing comments

I feel it may be time to revisit an older post of mine. Looking back to my first post, I want to respond to the comments.

“So where do we begin to make schools better places for children?”

Since we are looking for a place to begin, let’s consider areas we have most control. This would begin with the teacher relationship with his/her students. The teacher needs to be proactively engaging with the class. The students are not passive individuals coming to a building for a better part of the day. They are promising young minds exploring the world and making sense of their purpose. The teacher needs to learn names, families, characters, and treat the students as if they matter and are unique. All of this can be done without bureaucratic change. However, bureaucratic change can support it by implementing change and allowing teachers to move with their students through the grades.

Another place we can begin to change is with teachers recognizing that students may need to get up and move around. We all remember the pain of sitting at a desk all day listening to our teachers. Learning can be fun. Let’s have lesson plans that pull students out of their seats and wake them up. Students are sponges wanting to absorb ideas, let’s facilitate this while engaging movement. One may respond saying ‘what about the disruptive kids, or those not wanting to learn?’ which brings me to my third idea.

Schools can become better places for children when teachers adhere to expectations of respect and engagement. I am not saying we need strict rules and punishment. We need appropriate rules and consistency. If the rules are appropriate students may internalize them and carry them through life. I argue it is human nature to grow and prosper, and school should work to satisfy this urge. Different circumstances in a child’s life may diminish this urge, but these circumstances may be temporary while the urge is not.

Some have said teachers are performers. In a way it is and as such teachers can benefit from media theories. Think about the role emotions play in drawing an audience into a film or book. The audience is taken on an emotional journey which gives them pleasure. This is in contrast to the classroom where emotions from the lessons are nonexistent. Lessons can draw students in if they were to instigate emotions much like media does. The student and lesson then exists in real-life with real emotions.

One way to accomplish this is to have students encounter a change of an object. Begin with students’ initial thoughts and feelings about an idea. Then progress through a change and investigation. Ending with a state or understanding different than the beginning. Students will respond to the change and may experience gratification in the process. The change doesn’t have to even be completed. The expected change is enough to illicit emotion.

Another approach is to create a demanding curriculum meant to have the students stretch the preconceptions of their limits. The initial emotional response may be passionate disengagement or complaint. However, by maintaining a continuous ‘hardship’ the response and emotion will eventually lose their poignancy and the student will learn more than he/she felt possible.

How can we measure progress?

This is a difficult question with an elusive answer. Tests are not the answer. Be it an IQ, SAT, or GRE, tests only say who is good at testing and who can answer the questions our society has deemed important at this time. They don’t measure skill, at say, repairing a car or laying foundation for a house. They don’t measure these because society has deemed these skills less important than knowing mathematical formulas or the content of an author’s writing. In a few years we may be testing students’ knowledge about sustainability. Additionally, there is no guarantee the tests accurately measure what they say they do. Yet the United States government uses tests scores to influence school funding.

From the online blog www.edweek.org, a member wrote in describing the test gap in America and described a report published by McKinsey & Co recently (http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/2009/04/can_better_teachers_close_the.html). The McKinsey report describes the economic consequence of allowing the test gap to persist. In the Thomas L Friedman article cited, Friedman acknowledges the success of Teach for America. In my judgment, we don’t need teachers spending only a few years in the field then moving on. Yes it can be beneficial, but the US would benefit more from having dedicated professionals good at their jobs, staying in the education profession. Good teachers provided with good resources will help boost student learning.

As far as testing, perhaps we should change the way the tests are used. Let’s not make schools reach benchmarks. Rather let’s help the neediest schools reach proficiency or even beyond. The number one focus of schools should be learning. The tests may help us find areas in which students or teachers need help to accomplish learning.

Theory foundation

Underlining school theory

In Oakes (2003) Teaching to change the world, the authors outline policy theories which have or may form school foundations (p. 440). The theories are: scientific management, systems theory, and free market economics. I often grapple trying to understand why schools function the way they do and how education can be improved. Examining these theories closer may help me better understand the role of school in western society.

Scientific Management outlines a belief that schools function as factories. Inspired by Fordism (developed around and after 1908), the assembly line model had allowed business to mass produce cheap products effectively and with little labor. Supporters felt factory line assembly would revolutionize school much the same way it had for business (p. 431, Oakes, 2003). University professors and school administrators relied on scientific research to form schools and classrooms. Interestingly, Oakes (2003) documents colleges began to list sequences of courses that would prepare students for University education (p. 431). Oakes (2003) argues the factory model is strongly prevalent in schools today (p. 431). That students are separated into rooms by age, grade, and ability is evidence for this. Similarly grades are a quick but not entirely effective way to communicate a student’s learning to his parents.

Systems theory was developed in 1945 and became popular in the 1970s (p. 432, Oakes, 2003). The theory outlines a belief that business is composed of different parts working together to form a whole. In the theory, communication between the parts, ongoing interaction and feedback loops, is important. Oakes (2003) argues the 1983 release of A nation at risk was the catalyst for the theory’s movement into schools. Applying the theory to schools, policy analysts argued states should “set high academic standards, provide schools with the tools, skills, and resources they needed to help students meet the standards…, and hold schools accountable for the results” (p. 433, Oakes, 2003). An apparent flaw in the theory is that officials assumed opportunities to achieve these benchmarks would follow with the goals. However, much of the time, the goals were placed without any means by which to accomplish them. Likewise, Oakes (2003) points out, the systems theory was incorporated without abolishing the old ‘top-down’ management approach established by the scientific management theory (p. 434). Influence of a systems theory approach is still seen today in areas such as the No Child Left Behind Act. The act sets standards and maintains accountability while influencing means by which to accomplish the standards.

Free Market Economics is the most recent influence, just finding popularity in the late 1990s (p. 435, Oakes, 2003). The free market has, in business, been seen to foster excellence and economic prosperity through competition while harming employment benefits, union representation, and contributing to outsourcing (p. 435, Oakes, 2003). A major outcome of this theory is the idea public schools benefit from competition with private schools. This has lead to government vouchers for private school and establishment of magnet and charter schools. Similarly, schools are believed to benefit from moving away from education bureaucracies towards parental and local control (p. 436, Oakes, 2003).

Problems with Charters and Magnets
As I have read in recent articles, Charters and Magnets may perform well, but they have not proven to be beneficial for education. These schools perpetuate racial and class educational inequality. This happens because these schools are often established in middle-class suburbs and tend to receive middle-class children. Not all families will know they have the option to send their children to the better schools. Likewise, not all families will have the resources (transportation, etc) to send their children to a school further away. Similarly, Oakes (2003) says skeptics point out in a marketplace “harmful or wasteful” products do not necessarily disappear (p. 437). They are often the most popular. Similarly, “rational choice” may direct parent decisions to send their children to the school near home rather than to a Charter or Magnet school (p. 437, Oakes, 2003). Free Market economics has shown some success in business, but applying the principals to the educational system has problems. Schools are unlike business in that they are required to provide equal quality of service to all consumers.

The role of grades
I would love to have education discontinue traditional A to F grading structure and replace it with a system that did not focus on the comparison to others in class. However I worry whether adopting a reformed grading structure will put these students at a disadvantage for college admissions. Most education from primary to college and graduate level is entrenched in comparing students to one another. In our society the most important goal is to set one’s self apart from others. Colleges can point out that one applicant may be better than another because of the quantified grade. This is such a flawed system. Grades and test scores fluctuate constantly and are never completely accurate reflections of the student.

Education should be about what the student knows and how well they have progressed. In my romantic view of education, humans use education to grow, learn, and improve. Education should not emphasize how much better one student is than another, it should show how well the students improve.

Umbrella of professionals

In class my professor recently discussed many of the professional development issues for teachers. One issue was the idea that teachers lack a group of professionals considered the best of the field from which others can draw ideas. Many other industries have this. Good medical professionals are known in their field, top business leaders often become executives, and top political figures often give seminars and produce publications. Teaching lacks this structure particularly because professionals are often moving in or out of the field and even those that are in have no promotion to look forward to. Supposedly good teachers may have the option to become administrators, but then they have entirely different job responsibilities which move them away from the children. As my professor pointed out, when a teacher needs to defend a lesson-plan they often can only say “relying on my best judgment, this should work” instead teachers should be able to say “top professionals in my field say this will work.” It would benefit society if good teachers could be promoted in a way that they could dispense their technique and ideas to others.

Similarly, this lead my thoughts towards the flat career structure in teaching. I have often thought I will be in teaching for the rest of my life. It can be disappointing to think that on day one I will begin with a class and on the final day, many years later, I will be doing much the same as I did in the beginning. Yes my approach will be more effective, but I’m still working in a classroom only affecting those children around me. It would be great if teaching had a career ladder not reliant defiantly on seniority. We need to recognize free market economies illustrate the benefit of competition. The outdated approach for finding good teachers is reliant on the false premise that more training and education for teachers is the answer. Teachers earn more money the more schooling they attend. It would be better if the career accepted everyone with the desire to teach, and only kept those most effective. Don’t ask for more credentials and training, take a large pool of potentials and keep only those that can perform. Give pay-raises to those teachers most effective in the classroom.

The difficulty is figuring out how to determine what constitutes an effective or great teacher. Test scores are not the answer. Tests do not reflect the complexity of learning and teaching. Perhaps the answer is measuring the growth of the student. How do other industries determine who is the best, who is worth giving pay raises to? I don’t want to go down this road. It is tempting to discuss inadequacies of pay, but let’s look towards what is important- the effectiveness of teachers.

Teaching is not a passive pursuit. It is a career requiring growth and dedication to your craft. This is important because teachers are meant to prepare children for the world, of which it is ever changing. Perhaps one response is to create an interdisciplinary approach to education.

Interdisciplinary education is one way to target different learning styles and potentially increase excitement towards school. An article I read recently by Simpson (1999) Interdisciplinary and interthematic curriculum designs discussed several types of interdisciplinary approaches. I found the distinction made between content correlation, content fusion, and student driven core curriculum. Content correlation basically means English, math, history, etc teach the same topic on a given day or week. Content fusion means these subjects focus on teaching the same goals. Student driven core curriculum means developing shared content and goals and working together to achieve them.

It seems almost commonsensical that children would learn best if they are covering similar topics in each of their classes. Children would be approaching learning from multiple angles, probably developing a holistic view. On the contrary an argument can be made for the importance of math, English, etc on their own, and that different subjects may suffer from interdisciplinary approaches. However, school is not about the subject. School is about the child/student. If a particular approach promotes knowledge more than another, it needs to be implemented even if some feel it takes power away from a particular subject. It is important to note that basic skills in all subjects would still be developed.