Curriculum According to F.W. English's Term Paper

Instead, the curriculum development responsibility is placed on the individual teachers, the majority who have less than two years of teaching experience. The result is that the teachers spent most of their time focused on such things as classroom management, that curriculum development is overlooked and no succinct curriculum is used in the school. This will cause problems as the students advance through the grades.

The Curriculum: No

As previously noted, the school is currently operating under numerous curriculums taken from various sources and therefore alignment is non-existence. At one level is the school district's mandated curriculum and testing that does not align with the theory of an expeditionary learning curriculum. On the other hand there is the lack of an aligned curriculum within the school. Instead teachers develop their own curriculum that is vaguely based on the expeditionary learning philosophy and simply provide assessment through the school district's procedures, which do not align with the curriculum used in study.

Tests and Assessments: No

Because of the previously discussed lack of clear curriculum alignment and district/school alignment, the test and assessments used in the school are all too often unrelated to the curriculum taught. Instead, a certain expeditionary curriculum is used, but its success is evaluated using non-expeditionary forms assessment. The result is that the test scores are in no way reflective of the curriculum approaches success or failure.

Budget Development: Yes

Due to its unique status as a charter school, the school is not tied directly into the district's budget. The school has access to numerous outside funding that is to be used to further develop the expeditionary nature of the school. For example, the school realizes its staff and administration lack the needed training to formulate an expeditionary school. Thus, funds were used to provide teachers and administrators with professional training and development throughout the year.

Productivity: Yes

The school's productivity is aligned with its curriculum. For example, numerous expeditions into the community have occurred throughout the academic year.

Bibliography

English, F.W. (2000). Deciding What to Teach and What to Test: Designing, Aligning and Auditing the Curriculum (Millennium Edition). Thousand Oaks, CA.: Corwin Press, Inc.

Expeditionary Learning Schools Outward Bound. Homepage. www.elschools.org.

Hawley, Suzanne W. And Carolyn V. Spillman. Literacy and Learning: An Expeditionary Discovery through Children's Literature. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2003