Expeditionary Learning (EL) is an acclaimed national model for school reform that emphasizes high achievement through learning that is active, challenging, meaningful, public and collaborative. The EL Network has over 160 schools, including Presumpscot Elementary and King Middle School. Please visit elschools.org for more information. In 2006, Portland became the nation's first city with a K-12 Expeditionary Learning option for its children. Since 2011, Casco Bay has been one of Expeditionary Learning's twenty “Mentor Schools.”
“Expeditionary Learning’s Mentor Schools stand shoulder to shoulder with some of the highest performing schools in the nation because of their students’ academic achievement, college readiness skills, and deep engagement in learning.”
~Scott Hartl, President and CEO of Expeditionary Learning
Expeditionary Learning Design Principles
Expeditionary Learning harnesses the natural passion to learn and is a powerful method for developing the curiosity, skills, knowledge and courage needed both to imagine a better world and to work toward realizing it. Expeditionary Learning is built on ten design principles that reflect the educational values and beliefs of Kurt Hahn, the founder of Outward Bound:
1. The Primacy of Self-Discovery: Learning happens best with emotion, challenge and the requisite support. In EL schools, students undertake tasks that require perseverance, fitness, craftsmanship, imagination, self-discipline, and significant achievement. A teacher's primary task is to help students discover they can do more than they think they can.
2. The Having of Wonderful Ideas: Teaching in Expeditionary Learning 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.
3. The Responsibility for Learning: Everyone learns both individually and as part of a group. Every aspect of an Expeditionary Learning school encourages both children and adults to become increasingly responsible for directing their own personal and collective learning.
4. Empathy and Caring: 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 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.
5. Success and Failure: 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.
6. Collaboration and Competition: 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 personal bests and with standards of excellence.
7. Diversity and Inclusion: Both diversity and inclusion increase the richness of ideas, creative power, problem-solving ability, and respect for others. In Expeditionary Learning 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.
8. The Natural World: 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.
9. Solitude and Reflection: Students and teachers need time alone to explore their own thoughts, make their own connections and create their own ideas. They also need time to exchange their reflections with other students and with adults.
10. Service and Compassion: We are crew, not passengers. Students and teachers are strengthened by acts of consequential service to others, and one of an EL school's primary functions is to prepare students with the attitudes and skills to learn from and be of service.