Expedition Planning

XP East’s Teachers and Learning Coaches have been really busy planning our first learning expedition. As you will be aware, we don’t have a traditional Secondary school curriculum of separate lessons. Instead, XP School and XP East have lessons incorporated into Humanities (RE, Geography, History, and English) and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths). Whilst we do have some distinctive lessons for Spanish and PE, other subjects like Art, Drama, Music and Computer Science appear within ‘XBlock’.

Whilst we don’t want to spoil some of the surprises that we have planned for our first expedition, I wanted to explain some of the processes involved.

Last week, the team visited the site of our first immersion which is in a city somewhere in the North of England. This stimulated lots of great ideas for Humanities and STEM. In fact our first expedition will be a blend of both disciplines with aspects adapted from 2 of XP’s existing expeditions, and with new ideas taken from the expertise of staff from XP East. The product from our first expedition will be a published book made from every Y7 student’s work around different aspects of their learning. In addition to this, all students will read extracts of their work in a presentation of learning evening on a date to be confirmed.

The expedition will also have an anchor text (a book which is studied throughout the expedition), and students’ learning will revolve around 3 different in depth case studies. Teachers and Learning Coaches have made contact with several experts who will wither visit us at XP, or we will visit them on mini immersion trips.

Other teachers from XP have been fine-tuning our expedition plans around strict protocols which have been designed to answer any burning questions that we may have, and offer advice and expertise. We have had 2 rounds of this, and a final fine tuning process will take place next week by a panel of Year 9 students from XP.

As you can see, all of this is very exciting and I’d like to thank the staff and students from XP school for their fantastic welcome and support so far.

Mr Portman