EL Education Mission

Our mission is to create equitable classrooms where teachers can fulfill their highest aspirations, and students achieve more than they think possible, becoming active contributors to building a better world.

EL Education Vision

We partner with educators in schools and districts who are committed in word and deed to high-quality education and equitable excellent outcomes for all students. By aligning on a shared vision focused on three dimensions of student achievement, we honor students’ full humanity.

We embrace a vision of education as a powerful engine for fulfilling our nation’s promise of equal opportunity for all. Educational equity means that all children experience these pillars of educational equity:

1. Instruction and assessment that challenge, engage, and empower learners

2. Access to standards-based, content-rich, culturally affirming curriculum

3. School culture that fosters positive identity, belonging, agency, and purpose

We want to be clear about our language: the words that we use are important because they allow us to build shared understanding. Diversity means cultivating a wide representation of people, ideas, processes, and experiences. Equity recognizes that we are born into unequal and unjust circumstances—and these factors should not predict our ability to fail or succeed. Inclusion means creating the conditions that foster belonging—harnessing what makes us unique to strengthen our community and amplify our impact. Excellence is defined as transformational impact in EL Education’s Dimensions of Student Achievement. 

EL Education Three Dimensions of Student Achievement

When students enter adult life, they will be celebrated not for their performance on basic skills tests, but rather for the quality of their work and their character. That’s why EL Education builds students’ capacity for three dimensions of high achievement: 

1- Mastery of Knowledge & Skills

2- Character

3- High Quality Student Work

Five Domains of Core Practices

EL Education’s model for school transformation is a system of core instructional practices based on the science of learning and development and refined in partnership with diverse schools over the course of three decades. With the guidance of EL Education core practices, schools empower students to develop socially, emotionally, and academically together. Educators transform their classrooms into engines for equitable achievement, and springboards for students who are ready to build a better world. We’ve organized our 38 practices into five domains: 

1- Curriculum

EL Education’s approach to curriculum promotes both challenge and joy in learning. We encourage educators to use, adapt, or design curricula that allow all students to grapple with demanding, standards-based content and meaningful tasks and produce high-quality work. We believe curricula should elevate student collaboration, voice, thinking, and reflection; should reflect a commitment to developing character; and should empower students to contribute to a more just and equitable world.

2- Instruction

EL Education promotes instruction that is alive with discovery, inquiry, critical thinking, problem solving, and collaboration. Teachers talk less. Students talk and think more. 
Lessons challenge, engage, and empower students with complex issues, text, and problems. They lift up big disciplinary ideas and give students practice with the tools and skills professionals use in the real world as they create high-quality work. Teachers differentiate instruction and empower all students to be self-directed, independent learners. 

3- Culture & Character

The EL Education model fosters and celebrates students’ character development by building a culture in which students and staff work together to become effective learners and ethical people who contribute to a better world. Schools establish Habits of Character—qualities like respect, responsibility, courage, and kindness—and model and discuss them every day. The school is suffused by a spirit of crew: students and staff work together as a team to sustain a learning community where everyone belongs and can succeed.

4- Student-Engaged Assessment

EL Education's assessment practices motivate students to become leaders of their own learning. Students track their progress toward standards-based learning targets, set goals, and reflect on growth and challenges. Students and teachers regularly analyze quantitative and qualitative data that informs goals and instruction. Students regularly present evidence of their achievement and growth through student-led family conferences, passage presentations, and celebrations of learning.

5- Leadership

Leaders build a schoolwide learning community of trust and collaboration that provides equitable education to all students and celebrates joy in learning. EL Education supports school leaders to build a cohesive school vision focused on EL Education’s Three Dimensions of Student Achievement, continuous improvement, and shared leadership. Leaders align resources and activities to the school’s vision and lead a professional culture with a growth mindset.

Learning and engagement is challenging, active, meaningful, collaborative, and public.

EL Education 10 Design Principles

EL Education is built on ten design principles that reflect the core educational values and beliefs of Kurt Hahn, founder of Outward Bound. These principles also reflect the design's connection to other related thinking about teaching, learning, and the culture of schools. 

1. The Primacy of Self-Discovery

Learning happens best with emotion, challenge and the requisite support. People discover their abilities, values, passions, and responsibilities in situations that offer adventure and the unexpected. In EL Education schools, students undertake tasks that require perseverance, fitness, craftsmanship, imagination, self-discipline, and significant achievement. A teacher's primary task is to help students overcome their fears and discover they can do more than they think they can.

2. The Having of Wonderful Ideas

Teaching in EL Education schools fosters curiosity about the world by creating learning situations that provide something important to think about, time to experiment, and time to make sense of what is observed.

3. The Responsibility for Learning

Learning is both a personal process of discovery and a social activity. Everyone learns both individually and as part of a group. Every aspect of an EL Education school encourages both children and adults to become increasingly responsible for directing their own personal and collective learning.

4. Empathy and Caring

Learning is fostered best in communities where students' and teachers' ideas are respected and where there is mutual trust. Learning groups are small in EL Education schools, with a caring adult looking after the progress and acting as an advocate for each child. Older students mentor younger ones, and students feel physically and emotionally safe.

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. But it is also important for students to learn from their failures, to persevere when things are hard, and to learn to turn disabilities into opportunities.

6. Collaboration and Competition

Individual development and group development are integrated so that the value of friendship, trust, and group action is clear. Students are encouraged to compete, not against each other, but with their own personal best and with rigorous standards of excellence.

7. Diversity and Inclusion

Both diversity and inclusion increase the richness of ideas, creative power, problem-solving ability, and respect for others. In EL Education schools, students investigate and value their different histories and talents as well as those of other communities and cultures. Schools and learning groups are heterogeneous.

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. Students learn to become stewards of the earth and of future generations.

9. Solitude and Reflection

Students and teachers need time alone to explore their own thoughts, make their own connections, and create their own ideas. They also need to exchange their reflections with other students and with adults.

10. Service and Compassion

We are crew, not passengers. Students and teachers are strengthened by acts of consequential service to others, and one of an EL Education school’s primary functions is to prepare students with the attitudes and skills to learn from and be of service.

EL Education Website Link:  https://eleducation.org/