A New York School Teaches Teamwork by Camping

By David M. Herszenhorn
The New York Times

After four days and nights camping in the Rockland County woods, Donnell Tribble, a baby-faced 15-year-old from Brooklyn with tight cornrow braids, learned to trust and depend on his classmates and his teacher.

Along with 13 other boys and girls from James Baldwin High School in Manhattan, he struggled through moments of misery. The students pitched tarps for shelter, shuddered and whined in the cold and rain, ate strange foods like muesli, griped about the lack of comforts, and worried about meeting a bear outside the safety of the Bronx Zoo.

But Donnell said he looked back on the trip in November as the "best highlight" of what is shaping up to be his best year in school for simple reasons: The classes are interesting and the people around him care.

"I've gotten so close with the people in my crew that we're almost like a family," Donnell said. "It gets you more involved in school. It makes you want to come to school. It makes school more fun."

Baldwin, a small Manhattan public school that opened in September in partnership with Outward Bound, embraces the group's Expeditionary Learning model, which treats school as a hands-on, even grueling, adventure. Like campers on Outward Bound wilderness trials, teachers and students at Baldwin are taught to regard each other as crew mates, who are only as strong as their weakest member, who move forward only if they do so together.

"Everything you do has a consequence, good or bad, for you and the group and the environment," said Baldwin's principal, Elijah Hawkes. "That principle that is so stark and naked in the wilderness setting, to apply the same principle, is what we're trying to do in the classroom."

Baldwin is part of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's aggressive push to downsize high schools, which has made New York the leader in a national effort to create small schools. The hope is that a more intimate setting and strong partnerships with community groups can reverse generations of failure.

Baldwin, in a second-floor wing of the Bayard Rustin High School for the Humanities building on West 18th Street, is a spinoff of Humanities Prep, an older small school that has also adopted the Expeditionary Learning approach.

Two other Outward Bound Schools are in the Bronx — Bronx Expeditionary Learning and Validus Preparatory Academy — and last month, the mayor announced that another such school, Washington Heights Expeditionary Learning, serving grades 6 to 12, would open in September.

Still, the long-term effectiveness of the approach remains to be seen. The School for the Physical City, which opened in Manhattan in 1993 as one of the 10 original Expeditionary Learning schools, has since dropped its relationship with Outward Bound.

And measuring success is difficult. Like Humanities Prep, Baldwin hopes to be exempt from most of New York State's Regents examination requirements and instead have students judged on their class work and an end-term project or paper in each class.

Typically, the most immediate benefit of small schools has been better attendance. Baldwin's average attendance so far this year is 87.7 percent, ahead of the city average of 82.4 percent for high schools. But the other Outward Bound schools trail the citywide average and officials are not sure why.

While some of the new small schools have struggled in their relationships with community partners, Outward Bound's core mission of building character seems to fit into the workings of modern urban high schools. (Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of The New York Times, is chairman of the New York City Outward Bound Center, which works with the public school system to help create and operate schools.)

Donnell Tribble, for one, said the close-knit environment had helped him. Last year, as a ninth grader at Boys and Girls High School in Brooklyn, a traditional large neighborhood school, he was assigned a truncated schedule called "mixed academy." His four classes were over before lunchtime, and his grade point average for the year was a failing 55.

But this year, after his aunt, who is his guardian, arranged for him to transfer to Baldwin, Donnell is taking a full load of courses, including "Revolution in Latin America" — the mere mention of which can launch him into a monologue comparing Che Guevara with Malcolm X and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

His grade average is 88.4. And he is a leader among his peers, who voted last semester to give him the Respect for Humanity Award, essentially singling him out as the most admired boy in school.

The students, emblematic of New York City, are super-wired, hip-hop-inspired, liberally pierced teenagers. They typically wear jeans and assorted headgear. They call their teachers by their first names. They question authority. They value respect. And slowly, they are adopting the culture of Expeditionary Learning as their own.

Homeroom is called crew, in Donnell's case, led by an English teacher named Marie LeBlanc. Some classes are called academic expeditions, which involve in-depth study of a particular work of literature — Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man," for example — or a given period in history. Other courses are called urban expeditions and involve extensive field trips and research outside school. The school staff includes a social worker and an adventure coordinator.

The school also favors a multidisciplinary approach. This fall, for instance, the course "Crime and Punishment" was offered for both social studies and science credit. It focused on a central question — does the United States need so many prisons? — and sought to examine criminality from historic, social and biological perspectives.

When Baldwin opened this year, it had freshmen, sophomores and juniors. Applicants do not need to meet any physical fitness requirement; school administrators instead look for motivated students likely to benefit from the school's approach. And while students can apply for the ninth grade through the regular admissions process, Baldwin is also a transfer option for students, like Donnell, who were struggling in more traditional schools.

All 82 students attend a weekly town meeting to discuss issues of schoolwide or worldwide import. Students from various grades are mixed in class, which requires teachers to emphasize the individual attention that, philosophically, is the rage among experts on teaching but that often does not actually take place in classrooms.

Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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