What is a Learning Expedition?

At XP Trust, we deliver our curriculum predominantly through cross disciplinary Learning Expeditions.

These are standards based projects that are specifically designed to make connections between, and across, subjects and subject concepts to encourage deep, purposeful and memorable learning experiences for our young people. These Expeditions are tightly structured through careful mapping of standards, skills and content and designed by teachers to ensure that all students:

produce beautiful work and through this are agents for positively improving themselves, their community and the wider world;

grow their characters in readiness for the challenges they will encounter in the world;

make better than expected academic progress to allow them to access next steps in their learning.

We call this our three dimensional curriculum. Our students strive to produce beautiful work, grow their character and, as a result, they achieve academic success. It is important to note that each dimension is reliant on and symbiotic with the others. 

Clearly, our curriculum is much more ambitious than a narrow pursuit of public examination success. Therefore, our ambition, and emerging reality, is that:

students develop as agents for positive social change;

students are independent, inquisitive, curious and creative; 

students lead their own learning; 

students are empowered so they can question perceived truths and challenge injustice;

students achieve well so that increased opportunities are open to them and;

students can grasp and build knowledge and the application of knowledge (as skills), which is powerful knowledge because it can affect their place in the world and enables them to become the best version of themselves.

Watch the film below to see how we learn through Expeditions at XP.