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Design Principles & Core Practices
What is EL Education?
SELS is an EL Education School. EL Education, originally known as Expeditionary Learning, was founded in 1991 as a collaboration between the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Outward Bound. It's an educational model focused on character growth and academic learning, emphasizing that students should be able to make a difference in their communities through project-based learning. The model was designed to integrate academic excellence with real-world problem-solving, aligning with the principles of Outward Bound's experiential education.
EL Education has been credited with improving test scores and increasing student motivation and achievement with a 28-year track record of success in schools nationwide. The 30+ year network comprises 1100+ EL Education Schools across 30 states while serving 30,000 teachers and 440,000 students. There have been over 12 million curriculum downloads to date.
EL Education Design Principles
EL Education is built on ten design principles that reflect the educational values and beliefs of Outward Bound. These principles also reflect the design's connection to other related thinking about teaching, learning, and the culture of schools.
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Learning happens best with emotion, challenge, and the requisite support. People discover their abilities, values, passions, and responsibilities in situations that offer adventure and the unexpected. In EL Education schools, students undertake tasks that require perseverance, fitness, craftsmanship, imagination, self-discipline, and significant achievement. A teacher's primary task is to help students overcome their fears and discover that they can do more than they think they can. -
Teaching in EL Education schools fosters curiosity about the world by creating learning situations that provide something important to think about, time to experiment, and time to make sense of what is observed.
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Learning is both a personal process of discovery and a social activity. Everyone learns both individually and as part of a group. Every aspect of an EL Education school encourages both children and adults to become increasingly responsible for directing their own personal and collective learning.
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Learning is fostered best in communities where students' and teachers' ideas are respected and where there is mutual trust. Learning groups are small in EL Education schools, with a caring adult looking after the progress and acting as an advocate for each child. Older students mentor younger ones, and students feel physically and emotionally safe.
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All students need to be successful if they are to build the confidence and capacity to take risks and meet increasingly difficult challenges. But it is also important for students to learn from their failures, to persevere when things are hard, and to learn to turn disabilities into opportunities.
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Individual development and group development are integrated so that the value of friendship, trust, and group action is clear. Students are encouraged to compete, not against each other, but with their own personal best and with rigorous standards of excellence.
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Both diversity and inclusion increase the richness of ideas, creative power, problem-solving ability, and respect for others. In EL Education schools, students investigate and value their different histories and talents as well as those of other communities and cultures. Schools and learning groups are heterogeneous.
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A direct and respectful relationship with the natural world refreshes the human spirit and teaches the important ideas of recurring cycles and cause and effect. Students learn to become stewards of the earth and of future generations.
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Students and teachers need time alone to explore their own thoughts, make their own connections, and create their own ideas. They also need to exchange their reflections with other students and with adults.
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We are crew, not passengers. Students and teachers are strengthened by acts of consequential service to others, and one of an EL Education school’s primary functions is to prepare students with the attitudes and skills to learn from and be of service.
EL Education Core Practices
Sierra Expeditionary Learning School offers a hands-on EL Education curriculum that adheres to district and state standards. The goals of EL Education are to foster academic achievement and character growth while instilling a love of learning and a sense of community. EL Education has been recognized nationally as an innovative, research-based, school improvement model and has been credited with producing high- performing public charter schools, promoting high achievement through active learning, character growth, and teamwork.
The EL Education model emphasizes Five Core Practices within its schools; these core practices help frame how we implement the ten design principles:
- Curriculum: Academically rigorous learning expeditions, case studies, projects, fieldwork, and service learning inspire students to think and work as professionals do, contributing high quality work to authentic audiences beyond the classroom.
- Instruction: In EL Education schools, teachers use active pedagogy to help students become engaged and collaborative learners: to make connections, to find patterns, to see events from different perspectives, to experiment, to go beyond the information given, and to develop empathy and compassion for events, people, and subjects.
- Assessment: Staff members engage in ongoing data inquiry and analysis, examining everything from patterns in student work to results from state testing. Students continually assess and improve the quality of their work through the use of models, reflection, critique, rubrics, and work with experts. Standards-based learning targets drive achievement.
- School Culture and Character: EL Education builds shared beliefs, traditions, and rituals in order to create a school culture which is characterized by a climate of physical and emotional safety, a sense of adventure, an ethic of service and responsibility, and a commitment to high quality work.
- Leadership: EL Education schools build professional communities that focus on student achievement and continuous improvement. Leaders celebrate joy in learning and build a school-wide culture of trust and collaboration.
The EL Education model emphasizes Five Core Practices within its schools; these core practices help frame how we implement the ten design principles:
- Curriculum: Academically rigorous learning expeditions, case studies, projects, fieldwork, and service learning inspire students to think and work as professionals do, contributing high quality work to authentic audiences beyond the classroom.
- Instruction: In EL Education schools, teachers use active pedagogy to help students become engaged and collaborative learners: to make connections, to find patterns, to see events from different perspectives, to experiment, to go beyond the information given, and to develop empathy and compassion for events, people, and subjects.
- Assessment: Staff members engage in ongoing data inquiry and analysis, examining everything from patterns in student work to results from state testing. Students continually assess and improve the quality of their work through the use of models, reflection, critique, rubrics, and work with experts. Standards-based learning targets drive achievement.
- School Culture and Character: EL Education builds shared beliefs, traditions, and rituals in order to create a school culture which is characterized by a climate of physical and emotional safety, a sense of adventure, an ethic of service and responsibility, and a commitment to high quality work.
- Leadership: EL Education schools build professional communities that focus on student achievement and continuous improvement. Leaders celebrate joy in learning and build a school-wide culture of trust and collaboration.