What is Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound?

Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound is a design for comprehensive school improvement that

Expeditionary Learning extends the experience of Outward Bound, an adventure and service-based education program founded by educator Kurt Hahn, into public schools where students learn to take responsibility to achieve their personal best. In 1993, New American Schools, a nonprofit coalition of teachers, school administrators, community and business leaders, policy makers and experts from around the country, designated Expeditionary Learning one of its designs for comprehensive school improvement. Expeditionary Learning is built around ten design principles that grow out of the work of Hahn and other educational thinkers.

At the heart of the design is the learning expedition. Expeditions in every tradition and culture are journeys conducted for a definite purpose by individuals employing a range of skills and talents. Learning expeditions are purposeful, intensive and extensive studies of a single topic such as insects, Idaho history, flight, or independence. They involve challenging projects, fieldwork and service, and culminate in exhibits, performances and presentations to audiences that go beyond the classroom and may include parents or the larger community. With assistance from Expeditionary Learning staff and national faculty, teams of teachers design their own learning expeditions and align them with district and state standards. Harnessing the power of adventure and discovery, expeditions are intellectual journeys that lead students to become more motivated in their academic work and develop perseverance and self-discipline. These investigations inspire and compel students to learn the skills and content they need to produce high quality, original work and to do well on the standardized tests by which student and school performance are regularly measured.

Currently, Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound is working with one hundred schools in twenty-eight states and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Teachers, students and school leadership in these schools build a culture of respect, continuous improvement and high expectations for all. Time, space, financial and human resources are examined and reallocated. Flexible grouping replaces tracking, and students stay with the same teacher or team of teachers for at least two years. Teaching teams meet regularly to plan expeditions, critique each other’s plans and discuss portfolios of student work. Parents and community members are included as visiting experts and as audiences for demonstrations of student learning. Five core practices, benchmarks and an annual school review drive each school’s overall improvement plan.

The Design Principles of Expeditionary Learning

1. The Primacy of Self-Discovery: Learning happens best with emotion, challenge and the requisite support. People discover their abilities, values, “grand passions, “ and responsibilities in situations that offer adventure and the unexpected. They must have tasks that require perseverance, fitness, craftsmanship, imagination, self-discipline and significant achievement. A primary job of the educator is to help students overcome their fear and discover that they can do more than they think.
2. The Having of Wonderful Ideas: Teach so as to build on children’s curiosity about the world by creating learning situations that provide matter to think about, time to experiment and time to make sense of what is observed. Foster a community where students’ and adults’ ideas are respected.
3. The Responsibility for Learning: Learning is both a personal, individually specific process of discovery and a social activity. Each of us learns within and for ourselves and as a part of a group. Every aspect of a school must encourage children, young people, and adults to become increasingly responsible for directing their own personal and collective learning.
4. Intimacy and Caring: Learning is fostered best in small groups where there is trust, sustained caring and mutual respect among all members of the learning community. Keep schools and learning groups small. Be sure there is a caring adult looking after the progress of each child. Arrange for the older students to mentor the younger ones.
5. Success and Failure: All students must be assured a fair measure of success in learning in order to nurture the confidence and capacity to take risks and rise to increasingly difficult challenges. But it is also important to experience failure, to overcome negative inclinations, to prevail against adversity and to learn to turn disabilities into opportunities.
6. Collaboration and Competition: Teach so as to join individual and group development so that the value of friendship, trust, and group endeavor is made manifest. Encourage students to compete, not against each other, but with their own personal best, and with rigorous standards of excellence.
7. Diversity and Inclusivity: Diversity and inclusivity in all groups dramatically increases richness of ideas, creative power, problem-solving ability and acceptance of others. Encourage students to investigate, value and draw upon their own different histories, talents and resources together with those of other communities and cultures. Keep the schools and learning groups heterogeneous.
8. The Natural World: A direct and respectful relationship with the natural world refreshes the human spirit and reveals the important lessons of recurring cycles and cause and effect. Students learn to become stewards of the earth and of the generations to come.
9. Solitude and Reflection: Solitude, reflection and silence replenish our energies and open our minds. Be sure students have time alone to explore their own thoughts, make their own connections, and create their own ideas. Then give them opportunity to exchange their reflections with each other and with adults.
10. Service and Compassion: We are crew, not passengers, and are strengthened by acts of consequential service to others. One of a school’s primary functions is to prepare its students with the attitudes and skills to learn from and be of service to others.

 The above principles are based on ideas in urt Hahn’s “Seven Laws of Salem,” Paul Ylvisaker’s “The Missing Dimension,” and Eleanor Duckworth’s “The Having of Wonderful Ideas and other Essays on Teaching and Learning” (New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 1987).