Why Expeditionary Learning?

EL Education logo

Core Values and Design Principles

At Columbine Elementary, we LEAP to the stars!

Leadership
Empathy
Ambition
Positive Mindset

EL Education Design Principles

  1. THE PRIMACY OF SELF-DISCOVERY
    • 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 they can do more than they think they can.
  2. THE HAVING OF WONDERFUL IDEAS
    • 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.
  3. THE RESPONSIBILITY FOR LEARNING
    • 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.
  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 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.
  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 their own personal best and with rigorous 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 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.
  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 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 Education school’s primary functions is to prepare students with the attitudes and skills to learn from and be of service.

Expeditionary Learning helps students achieve more than they think is possible through hands-on, fun and challenging interdisciplinary learning that weaves mastery of content, high-quality student work, and learning habits. At Columbine, students are achieving more than they think is possible thanks to our innovative expeditionary learning curriculum. By providing meaningful, authentic class activities and encouraging students to engage across topics of study, our students are transformed from children into historians, zoologists, paleontologists, and sociologists — just to name a few.

Join us for a school tour to learn more!

Expeditionary Learning seeks to boost student achievement by focusing on three learning goals:

  1. Mastery of Knowledge and Skills
    • Students develop a deeper understanding of each discipline and can apply that learning, bringing skill and knowledge to new, meaningful tasks. They think critically: analyzing, evaluating and synthesizing complex ideas while considering multiple perspectives. They learn to communicate clearly, presenting ideas effectively through writing and speaking.
  2. Character Development
    • Students work to develop initiative, responsibility, perseverance, and collaboration – skills that will set them up for success throughout their lives. They also work to become ethical people who practice empathy, integrity, respect, compassion. Students seek to contribute to a better world, putting their learning to use to improve their communities.
  3. Production of High-Quality Work
    • Students are challenged to create complex work; they demonstrate higher-order thinking, consider multiple perspectives, and are able to relay that understanding. They create work that is accurate and beautiful in conception and execution. Create authentic work: demonstrate original thinking and voice, connect to real-world issues and formats, and when possible, create work that is meaningful to the community beyond the school

Academic Program

At Columbine we understand the power of the relationship between teacher, student and content. Therefore, we partner with  an education nonprofit, the Achievement Network (ANet). This partnership helps us boost student learning with great teaching that’s grounded in standards, informed by data and built on the successful practices of educators around the country.  Teachers work alongside leadership to plan and teach standards based lessons that are responsive to student need using the resources mentioned below. Students take three Interim Assessments per year to monitor student progress towards mastery of grade level standards.

Professional Development Goal: To create Master Reading Teachers at Columbine Elementary School through implementation of rigorous, standard-aligned curriculum and reach mastery of guided reading and its myriad components to include: managing the classroom (making the room work), understanding reading behaviors, prompting students to support reading behaviors, selecting leveled text and their utilizing features and characteristics, diagnosing errors to drive instruction, assessing students and responding effectively to assessments, taking and interpreting running records or in a nutshell, understanding the unique characteristics of the early emergent reader, emergent reader, early fluent reader and the fluent reader and how to move them forward.

Expeditionary Learning, Grades K-5: This resource helps get students excited about learning through great books, compelling topics and ownership of their learning. At the same time, teachers get a vision of the instructional practices that support a Common Core-aligned classroom and the tools to create it.

I-Ready: an online program for assessment and instruction used in grades K-5. This adaptive learning software supports student engagement and personalized practice to support demands of Common Core Standards. Columbine uses school wide reports, class reports and individual student reports regularly to inform instruction and to recognize student growth and set goals alongside students. Students spend about twenty minutes a day using this tool.

Guided Reading Plus: The format that our teachers use in Kindergarten-3rd grade small reading groups. Although our teachers platoon (departmentalize) with math/literacy in grades 1-5, we believe that early literacy is important for all teachers to teach in order to know their students as readers and writers in Kindergarten-2nd grades. All of our literacy teachers were trained in GRP during the 2014-2015 school year. Any teachers new to our school are also expected to get trained on this intensive format of guided reading in order to support struggling readers and continue the success of grade-level readers.

Mathematics Instruction: Our workshop increases student engagement and efficacy. Our teachers differentiate for varying abilities and learning styles.

Bridges in Mathematics K-5: The curriculum focuses on developing students’ deep understandings of mathematical concepts, proficiency with key skills, and ability to solve complex and novel problems. Bridges blends direct instruction, structured investigation, and open exploration. It taps into the intelligence and strengths of all students by presenting material that is as linguistically, visually, and kinesthetically rich as it is mathematically powerful