Teaching for Transformation – High School Teacher

On October 12-14, four LC teachers and administrators travelled to Kettle Falls as a continued commitment to developing our Teaching for Transformation (TFT) Program throughout the school. Kettle Falls School District is one of 28 Expeditionary Learning Schools (EL) in the world, and they have developed a model educational program that embodies Teaching for Transformations motto: “Real Work, Real Audience, and Real Consequences.”

Expeditionary Learning involves students engaging in work that effects the community, to leave the walls of the school and partner with their community, contributing their gifts and resources in real-time to an audience rather than just their teacher and in addition to state mandated educational goals. “Education can’t just happen in the classroom,” says LC Elementary school principal Don Van Manaan. “It’s our job to develop leaders and make a culture that sees service as the goal of education. God has given us a whole world to explore, and we need to use to teach our students.”

Like EL programs around the world, TFT aims to show that “every school must have an articulate and inspiring student profile that invites every student to imagine how to play their part in God’s story.” They seek to reevaluate school culture, infusing language that establishes our school’s partnership with God to be “Co-Creators” in restoring our culture, our community, and our homes. In the words of Calvin College professor, JA Smith: “The primary goal of Christian education is the formation of a peculiar people, a people who desire the Kingdom of God and thus undertake their life’s expression of that desire.”

Throughout the year, as with our encounter with Kettle Falls, our teachers will be meeting together with other CSI schools, partnering, and exploring, looking for ways to reinvigorate our educational culture, experimenting with ideas and practices that will connect our student body, shape our culture, and transform the world around us.

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