Curriculum design and implementation

Curriculum in my school is based on expeditionary learning, as established by the Outward Bound Program. The school is a charter school for the arts and therefore has a focus on the arts, both visual and performing. However, the school remains as part of the local school district and therefore its curriculum must conform to the district's standards and curriculum.

The school's demographics are lower socio-economic status students, with the majority of students being from a minority race or ethnic group. There is also a significant non-English speaking population. The expeditionary learning curriculum was chosen as this method and approach to teaching has been shown to work the best.

According to the school's mission statement, the curriculum is designed to mature and motivate the whole child, challenging each to learn, to reach individual potential, and to lead a productive life. According to the Expeditionary Learning homepage, the expeditionary approach "combines rigorous academic content and real world projects- learning expeditions- with active teaching and community service." The overall design of the curriculum focuses on teaching in a hands-on and engaging way.

For example, at my school the classroom did an expedition on plants. The expedition lasted approximately three months. Further, the expedition not only involved the classroom teacher, but the theme of plants was incorporated into such specialist instruction as art and physical education. Thus, the expedition begins with the classroom teacher providing a visual clue to the subject in order to get the children's interest. From this clue, the class brainstorms questions of what they want to learn, what they already know and what they think they already know. These questions and knowledge are recorded and displayed on the classroom wall. The rest of the expedition sets out to discover these answers.

The expedition incorporates all subject matters into it. For this reason, literacy, writing, science and math all were somehow related to plants. The children also planted plants and studied the plant's growth through the expedition. The expedition came to a close with a plant celebration, where families and other classes were invited in and the students presented their findings.

The idea of community service was also involved. The students not only got to visit a nursery, they were instructed on the benefit of trees. After their visit to the nursery, the students participated in planting several trees throughout the community.

The basic concept of expeditionary learning is beneficial to the students. However, because the school is still tied to the district, they still must meet various standards and benchmarks. These standards and benchmarks often do not fit into the expeditionary learning curriculum, thus there is often a conflict of two competing curriculums. This does not benefit the students because they end up being stuck between the two and therefore do not get the benefit of the singular curriculum. Further, the general flow of the expeditionary learning curriculum is interrupted, and the main point of teaching the children self-learning and the concept of how everything is connected is lost.

If I were in charge of the school, I would make it an expeditionary learning school and focus solely on this curriculum. The expeditionary curriculum preserves many of the more traditional curriculum's goals, but does so in an approach that is more beneficial to this population of students. I would also make sure that all the instructors had a thorough and intense expeditionary learning background.