Student Lead Field Study

Dear Escalante Middle School Community,

A guiding principle of our educational philosophy at Escalante Middle School is to make learning authentic. One of our primary strategies to increase authenticity is to place an emphasis on field work, expert speakers, service, and studying content that has a local connection.

In traditional educational models, students go on field trips, in which students are spectators. We aspire to conduct field work, in which students are active investigators and applying their research and classwork. A great example of field work occured in our Forestry and Fire Ecology exploratory class last week. Students partnered with professionals in the community to create a virtual map of tree species on Molas Pass, using software and tree identification techniques used in the professional world. Throughout the year, all of our teachers will be finding creative ways to conduct field work, and it is truly part of what makes our school unique.

As we improve our instructional design to make lessons more authentic, student learning isn’t the only thing that will increase. Our budget will be impacted as well. The Escalante Parent Organization (EPO) has decided to use our fall fundraiser to offset anticipated costs of transportation and innovative resources to allow our students to complete meaningful field work.

We are going to select our fundraiser strategies at our next EPO meeting on October 10th at 8:00 AM. If you are interested in joining the group to help us meet our fundraising goals, we hope to see you at the meeting. Otherwise, please keep an eye out for our fall fundraising push as we strive to improve the authenticity of our lesson design at EMS.

As always, thank you for your support.

Jeremy Voss
EMS, Principal

Published September 27, 2018 Print