Experiential Training Needed for Experiential Education

Teacher training is an important part of many EE providers' programs, but for few programs is teacher training as essential as it is at Expeditionary Learning (EL) schools. In these schools, students are engaged in real-world, problem-based learning that takes them out of the classroom and into the community to learn with a constructivist, experiential approach. The challenge for EL is sufficiently training its teachers, most of whom have never experienced this kind of education for themselves. The authors ask, “how can teachers begin to re-imagine schooling when many of their own educational experiences emphasized rote memorization, compartmentalized knowledge, and surface understanding of content?”

The authors of this paper--a university researcher and an EL regional director--contend that in order to become effective experiential educators, teachers must become immersed in the very activities in which their students will be engaged. In EL's view, experiential teaching requires experiential learning. The authors analyzed EL's approach to teacher training to learn the key components of experiential professional development, its strengths and weaknesses, and how it affects teachers' classroom teaching.

Previous research has established the following key characteristics of effective teacher training:
• immerses teachers in content and pedagogy
• extends over a long term (in total hours and in the span of time)
• provides support materials that reinforce the key concepts
• allows teachers to apply ideas and reflect on what they're learning
• creates a collaborative peer environment

The authors of this paper add to this previous knowledge base two additional theories to guide their thinking about what makes an effective teacher training program for experiential education. First, they looked to the Outward Bound process model, which involves “immersing teachers in a unique experience, creating curiosity or adaptive dissonance by offering challenging tasks that require development of skills, providing opportunities to demonstrate progress and/or mastery of tasks, and applying learning to other situations.” Second, they draw from Putnam and Borko's ideas on social learning. According to these thinkers, the physical and social aspects of learning are important and often overlooked. The authors explain that “location and context--how and where teachers learn--matters.”

The authors used a case-study approach to analyze EL's teacher training methods. While EL has over 140 schools, with over 4,000 teachers and over 50,000 students, this research focused on EL secondary schools in the New York City area. The authors invited all the teachers in the area to participate and selected the first eight teachers to respond to participate in their study. The teachers were mostly female (6 of 8 participants), were in their 20s or 30s, taught a variety of subjects, and ranged from 1 to 5 years of teaching experience. The researchers conducted multiple interviews with each teacher, observed professional development activities, spent two school days with each participant, and reviewed a variety of materials related to EL's professional development program, including monthly newsletters, support materials, curriculum materials, project samples, teacher training agendas and planning materials, and more.

The authors identified four key components of EL professional development that make it successful: immersion in student experiences, creation of discourse communities and networking, opportunities for reflection, and learning general strategies through specific content. The core of EL teacher training is a Secondary School Institute in which teachers are immersed in a 5-day course that mimics the student experience of an expedition. For example, science and mathematics teachers in Portland, Oregon, participated in a program in which they learned about watersheds. The teachers hiked in the watershed, read articles, viewed videos, met with experts and scientists, conducted water and soil tests, and created and presented strategies to help protect watersheds. Most of the teachers named this immersive experience in the role of a student as the most important aspect of their professional development.

The researchers also point to teachers' initiation in discourse communities as a key aspect of success. They define discourse communities as “instances where teachers use EL terminology to describe what they do and how they do it.” This common language is essential in facilitating conversation among teachers about what they do. EL works to foster this common language with direct instruction and by inserting the principles in instructional guides, workshops, and other training opportunities. Although EL was successful with this in many ways, the researchers point to specific examples of teachers using terminology incorrectly. They conclude that teachers need constant exposure to key terms, along with discussions and models of their meanings, to keep their common language consistent.

A third key component is reflection. According to the authors, “Without reflection on the meaning of what happened in a professional development experience, there is a danger that the experiences will be 'misunderstood,' not be applied to classroom practice, or be implemented in ways that are not aligned with EL philosophy.” The authors found that, particularly with an approach such as this one, in which the teachers are immersed in the student experience and specifically urged not to think about how they would teach the material, finding the right balance of reflection can be a challenge. “We urge others using experiential professional development to provide time and structure for teachers to return to the planning context after implementation to further reflect, conceptualize, experiment, and plan.”

Finally, the authors identified the “acquisition of general strategies through specific content” as the fourth contributor to success. As an experiential process, teachers learned about how to teach by learning specific material themselves. And by modeling with actual content, the material teachers learned often became material that they used in the classrooms themselves. This seemed especially useful for teachers with less experience, as it gave them tested, effective material that they could use in their classroom.

Although the method has challenges, the authors conclude that their research “suggests experiential professional learning strategies can be instrumental in supporting teachers in making sense of a teaching model that requires them to rethink conventional methods of curriculum design, pedagogy, and assessment.”