Core Practice 26

Promoting Courage and AdventureThe spirit of courage and adventure that permeates the EL Education model is a clear expression of EL Education’s roots in Outward Bound. Leaders and teachers encourage students to work on building their courage across multiple aspects of their academic and social lives, to develop, for example, “fractions courage,” “poetry courage,” or “friendship courage.” Similarly, adventure can be any physical, artistic, or academic experience that involves risk, challenge, and discovery. Adventure bolsters student engagement and strengthens students’ courage.

EL Education promotes the kinds of adventures that create opportunities for leadership and collaboration as groups of students and teachers face challenges both alone and together. Reflection is a vital component of such adventures, so that each experience is a rich opportunity for learning about oneself, one’s peers, and the world. Teachers take care when planning adventures to ensure physical and emotional safety, while at the same time promoting risk-taking and courageous action.

A. Learning through Adventure

1. Leaders and teachers build community and provide opportunities for student leadership and teamwork through school adventure traditions. These traditions scaffold through increasingly challenging physical and academic adventures (e.g., a first-grade campout in the gym, a sixth-grade bike trip, a ninth-grade mural project, a high school service project).

2. Leaders and teachers sometimes facilitate outdoor adventures in which students investigate the natural world in open spaces near the school, local parks, or through school-organized wilderness and nature experiences. Leaders and teachers offer outdoor adventure opportunities with the following features:

a. Leaders and teachers ensure that such adventure experiences are accessible to all students regardless of ability to pay, physical ability, or experience in the outdoors.

b. Leaders and teachers challenge students to stretch their comfort zones, work together to accomplish a difficult goal, and gain confidence in their individual skills in the face of challenge.

c. Teachers embrace their own challenges and model healthy risk-taking. They learn and grow alongside their students.

3. Leaders and teachers structure multiple opportunities for students to reflect on and learn from successes and challenges in their physical and academic adventures. They circle up and debrief frequently, focusing on topics such as healthy risk-taking, collaboration and leadership strategies, and how the culture of crew supports individuals to do more than they think possible.

4. Teachers explicitly frame challenging tasks in lessons, case studies, projects, and learning expeditions as opportunities for academic courage, grappling, and risk-taking. Students embrace academic courage through challenge in the classroom.

5. Teachers help students to identify new challenges as learners and to choose tasks that are both meaningful and challenging, such as conducting original research, collaborating with professionals, and revising products multiple times for authentic audiences.

6. Leaders and teachers craft experiences and debriefs that help students understand that taking risks—with support—is often when the most powerful learning takes place.

a. Teachers promote fieldwork in the natural world or in a city environment as an opportunity to embrace courage and adventure.

b. Teachers frame student leadership roles (e.g., peer mediation groups, mentoring younger students) as opportunities to embrace courage and adventure.

c. Leaders promote collaborations between schools or between their school and a local nonprofit with different context (e.g., pen pal relationships with a school in another country, a joint service project between students in different neighborhoods) as opportunities to embrace courage and adventure.

7. Leaders and teachers explicitly connect the school’s Habits of Character to academic and physical adventure experiences (including individual and team sports) through the following actions:

a. Supporting students to reflect on their success, challenges, and personal growth on such Habits of Character as perseverance, problem solving, and collaboration

62 | Core Practices | Culture and Character

b. Providing constructive feedback to students who take risks and encouraging them to learn from mistakes, rely on their Crew, keep trying, and celebrate small victories as they work toward their goals

c. Celebrating and publicly acknowledging students’ courage and growth as the path toward achievement and meeting personal goals

8. Students use reflections from adventure experiences as artifacts or evidence in student portfolios, passage presentations, or other documentation of growth in Habits of Character.

B. Teaching Adventure Skills and Ensuring Safety

1. The school has policies, protocols, and regulations to ensure that physical education classes, sports programs, physical adventure programming, extracurricular programs, and fieldwork are safe. For off-campus adventure programming, they may contract with a professional organization like Outward Bound.

2. Leaders provide professional learning and ongoing coaching to ensure that teachers, Crew leaders, and adventure trip chaperones have the structures and skills to guide adventure activities. Professional learning includes:

a. Developing norms and expectations for collaboration, conflict resolution, monitoring safety, and supporting all students to do more than they think possible

b. Aligning adventure activities with the school’s Habits of Character to help teachers and students understand their purpose and value through appropriate framing, implementation, and debrief

c. Giving teachers opportunities to experience and reflect on their own adventure activities and to practice framing and leading adventure-based activities with other adults before they do so with students

d. Training in social and emotional safety (e.g., communication, countering implicit bias, when to defer to professional counselors or therapists)

e. Training in first aid and protocols for emergency situations (e.g., CPR, Wilderness First Aid or Wilderness First Responder medical certifications)

| Core Practices | Culture and Character 63