DENVER — Downtown Denver Expeditionary School is helping students take ownership of their learning to connect them with real-world issues and needs.
The kindergarten through fifth-grade public charter school opened in 2013 and is part of the Denver Public School (DPS) system. Founded by parents, community members and business leaders, the school of about 250 students practices the curriculum of Expeditionary Learning, where students dig deeper into projects both inside and outside of the classroom.
“In an expeditionary learning school, we do a lot of fieldwork and adventure,” principal Aubrey Wilk said. “We really try to figure out what is an issue that is relevant to our community, looking at the standards and thinking, ‘How can we learn this through a problem that is relevant to the community?’”
DDES is located downtown at 1860 Lincoln Street in the Emily Griffith building. Students work on learning expeditions, fieldwork and case studies as part of the Colorado state academic standards and Common Core standards. Wilk said the downtown location makes DDES different from a lot of the expeditionary learning schools in the area.
“We get out into the city and do our learning outside of the classroom,” Wilk said. “We are located in a place that makes it a little bit easier for us because we have access to a lot of different resources and people.”
According to the school, they are intentionally diverse. They prioritized applicants from low-income families, and said 40% of their population are families of color, 80% work downtown, and 60% live within a three-mile radius.
“We’re probably one of the most diverse in the district because of our location,” Wilks said. “We’re not a neighborhood school. We draw from over 40 different zip codes.”
Wilk said having those diverse voices helps students learn to collaborate. She believes when learning is student-led and is based on rounds of revision and feedback, there’s an entirely different quality of learning that happens.
“I think one of the hardest things about teaching in an EL school is really building leaders of their own learning,” Wilk said. “The foundational principle of EL learning is students should be leaders of their own education and the person that needs to be able to answer why they’re doing what they’re doing.”
The school’s Creation Lab is one way DDES encourages students to take ownership in their education by tapping into their creativity. Wilks said the class isn’t your typical visual art program. Reeves McDonald, the school’s Creation Lab teacher, said the focus isn’t so much on teaching art.
“It’s rather teaching kids how to really exercise their creative selves and sort of demystifying what creativity actually is,” McDonald said. “We don’t do art in here. What we do is answer questions; sometimes we create new questions. We solve problems, and we share our thinking. We just happen to be doing it in other tools besides reading and writing.”
“It’s fun. It’s creative,” second grader Omar Jones said. “Sometimes instead of saying, ‘a mis-take’ it’s a ‘mis-make.'”
DDES is also working on having students be the leaders of their own expeditionary learning through a unique program the school developed for their math classes. According to the school, the entire class works on solving a single word problem. The classes break into groups to independently discuss and attempt to solve the problem using skills they've developed over time. The students come back together and have a conversation about how they solved the problem.
“Their voices are lifted up above the teachers,” Wilk said. “There’s a lot of discovery happening, and we’ve seen our math scores explode as a result.”
The school’s character commitments are craftsmanship, compassion, self-discipline, tenacity and courage. Wilk said with these traits, they want to set their students up for whatever they would like to achieve in their lives.
“I think the key to success is being clear about what we value,” Wilk said. “[If] they don’t own it and they’re not going to transfer it, they’re not going to take it with them into their life.”
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