The Silverton Public School follows an Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound (EL for short) academic model. EL provides a comprehensive framework to shape and guide our school’s structure and culture. Through this model, much of our academics are centered on learning expeditions. These expeditions and state curriculum standards provide a framework for study by focusing learning on a specific compelling topic; for example, the water cycle, history of U.S. education, Africa, the 20th Century, or the food cycle.
Given the small and isolated nature of the Silverton community, the fieldwork aspect of our EL learning model has become an important part of learning.

Focused trips are planned by teachers that bring the real world into their expedition topic studies, and take place throughout the four corners region and occasionally beyond. For example, in 2013-14, the middle school completed a year-long expedition on U.S. immigration, studying the historical aspect (Ellis and Angel Island) as well as current immigration issues. Their culminating fieldwork was a trip to San Francisco where they visited Angel Island, worked with students in refugee and immigrant schools, and toured Chinatown. These types of experiences bring a depth to their studies that cannot be accomplished in any classroom setting.

EXPEDITIONARY LEARNING HAS DESIGNED AND REFINED
AN APPROACH THAT ENGAGES AND ENERGIZES STUDENTS, TEACHERS, AND DISTRICT AND SCHOOL LEADERS

design principals
the core values of Expeditionary Learning

1. The Primacy of Self-Discovery
Learning happens best with emotion, challenge, and the
requisite support.

2. The Having of Wonderful Ideas
Teaching in Expeditionary Learning schools fosters curiosity about the world.

3. The Responsibility for Learning
Learning is both a personal process of discovery and a
social activity.

4. Empathy and Caring Learning is fostered best in communities where students' and teachers' ideas are respected and where there is mutual trust.

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.

6. Collaboration and Competition
Individual development
and group development are integrated so that the value of friendship, trust, and group action is clear.

7. Diversity and Inclusion Both diversity and inclusion
increase the richness of ideas, creative power, problem-solving

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.

9. Solitude and Reflection Students and teachers need time alone to explore their own thoughts, make their own connections, and create their own ideas.

10. Service and compassion
Students and teachers are
strengthened by acts of consequential service to others and respect for others.