July 2015 - Eagle Rock Blog

Meet Eagle Rock’s August 2015 High School Graduates

With apologies to Sha Na Na, it’s Summertime, Summertime, Sum-Sum Summertime here in Estes Park, and along with the sunshine comes our latest class of Eagle Rock School graduates, including Heather Johnston, Gabriel Hernandez, Daryl Jones Jr. (DJ), Amelia Howard, Garrison Seizer and Ziyad Johnstone.

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These half-dozen students will take the stage at 4pm Mountain Time, on Friday, August 7, here in Estes Park where we’ll celebrate their growth and development while at Eagle Rock and wish them well in their future endeavors.

Below is a little background on each graduate, along with a word of encouragement and advice to students and faculty from these seasoned Eagle Rock veterans:

Heather Johnston has proven herself to be a tremendous leader during her time here within the Eagle Rock community. She arrived in ER 58 (our 58th semester since the early-1990s), hailing from Dillon, Colo., which is just down the road.

Heather has been an active member of Aspen House for the past three years, during which she has added to her resume by leading morning exercises, participating in PeaceJam, acting in our campus production of In the Blood, and becoming a lifeguard. She was also a student co-teacher for the Gender and Violence course and served as a student leader for Spectrum, Eagle Rock’s gay-straight awareness group.

Heather says she was able to conjure up the energy for all these activities with her love of chocolate. She also has a special talent as a unicycle rider. Upon graduating from Eagle Rock, Heather will be attending Marlboro College in Vermont, beginning this fall.

Heather’s parting words of wisdom to Eagle Rock’s educators: Challenge yourself to be Continue reading…

Recapping Our Latest Wilderness Presentations of Learning

Eagle Rock’s 66th trimester (ER 66) brought us 10 fresh-off-the-bus students and a return to the wilderness for our New Student Wilderness Orientation Course. The program remains among the staples of the Eagle Rock School student experience and, in fact, we have been conducting these courses since the school’s founding in the early-1990s.

Three times a year, we gear up and head out to the Superstition Mountains of Arizona, the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico, or the Lost Creek Wilderness in Colorado for a 24-day backpacking course. The trips also include rock climbing, rappelling and a three-day solo experience.

This orientation program places students in unique situations, during which they have the opportunity to gain valuable learning experiences. This learning is made possible by placing students in a new, unfamiliar setting (wilderness) where they must rely on themselves and each other to succeed, and where the usual distractions of adolescent life — smartphones, TV, fast food, drugs and alcohol, cars, malls, cosmetics and hair products — are absent.

Underlying this novel setting and providing the basis for change is a foundation of trust and the student’s perception of the wilderness as a setting riddled with danger and risk. Overcoming the unique problems that a wilderness trip typically presents requires a cooperative effort among all group members.

Putting together the “wilderness puzzle” of problems leads to feelings of accomplishment, enhanced self awareness and self control, as well as a feeling of personal responsibility for self, others and the natural environment. In the end, the skills that students develop on the course will help them successfully contribute to the Eagle Rock community and ultimately to society as a whole.

Courses are 24 days in length due to the fact that it usually takes an individual about three to four weeks to develop a habit or change a behavior. We think 21 days is the minimum amount of time we can spend in the field to effect positive changes. Most students don’t become aware of, or begin working on, changing behaviors until five to eight days into the course, so the task for us is to have students continue the work they started on the wilderness trip back on campus.

While on the wilderness course, students are working on skills related to Eagle Rock’s mission and philosophy (8+5=10) in the following categories: Continue reading…

Meet The Team: Matt Bynum, Eagle Rock’s Outdoor Education Adjunct Instructor

The one place you’ll seldom find our latest featured Eagle Rock educator is in the classroom. Matt Bynum is our outdoor education adjunct instructor and you can’t do all that much hands-on teaching about the Great Outdoors when four walls topped by a ceiling surround you.

Matt starts each trimester either instructing or directing our Wilderness Orientation course, and then, if time permits, he teaches an Explore Week course. The second half of each trimester finds him busy managing the wilderness gear, developing curriculum for our outdoor offerings, coordinating the Veteran Pin system, serving on our Risk Management Committee, and teaching the occasional wilderness class.

We sat Matt down — not an easy task — and quizzed him on his background and interest in progressive education. Here’s what he had to say:

Eagle Rock: Where did you receive your college degrees?

Matt Bynum: I graduated in 2006 from Western State College in Gunnison, Colo. I majored in outdoor leadership and minored in environmental studies. The classes I took there helped get me really excited for outdoor education while building a solid base from which to work. I loved the hands-on approach and small class sizes. I can’t thank those professors enough.

ER: What did you do prior to coming to work for Eagle Rock?

Matt: Before my Public Allies fellowship in 2009, I worked as an instructor and course director at Outward Bound in Colorado for five years. These were predominantly mountaineering courses. I also did a summer of trail work, taught environmental science, and guided outdoor trips at my college. Immediately before coming back to Eagle Rock in 2013, I was teaching at a public school in Commerce City through Goodwill. When I was not instructing, I spent time traveling and climbing in Patagonia, Ecuador and Asia.

ER: What attracted you to Eagle Rock?

Matt: A friend in college first told me about Eagle Rock. A few years later, I was Continue reading…

An Outdoor Education Fellow’s Perspective of The Eagle Rock School Wilderness Orientation Course

Since Eagle Rock’s inception, a new student wilderness orientation course has been an unconventional tradition that sets ours apart from other learning habitats. As an Outdoor Education Fellow, I continue to be blown away by how Eagle Rock engrains — and then celebrates — the wilderness experience as a right of passage for new students.

The moments they first step foot on campus, new Eagle Rock School students find themselves surrounded by veteran students and the first topic of conversation is inevitably, the wilderness course. These more experienced students talk about how much they enjoyed it or hated it. They offer the newbies tips and tricks on staying clean, or the best way to snag some extra toilet paper.

And soon, these fresh new faces hear about circles — a restorative process that is used frequently while in wilderness. Like the name suggests, students and instructors form a circle in order to create an emotionally safe space for discussions. Interestingly enough, there has been an evolution in how students reminisce about their experience with circles.

It was often described as a negative experience, but over time, something has changed. The concept of circles, and the perspective of them, has changed. I’ll explain why I think this change has occurred in just a moment.

I often tell students near the end of the 24-day wilderness expedition, that one of the many reasons we go out into the backcountry for two dozen days is because there’s really no place to hide. Wilderness forces us all to step up to the plate, to embody our strengths consistently, and it exposes areas with which we are struggling.

Sometimes, it exposes problem areas we didn’t even know we had. But the one thing 24 days gives us is time. We have time to stop, time to contemplate, time to discuss what’s going on. And time to figure out how we can move forward in order to curtail, contain or take the power out of a conflict that might impede the functionality of the group — our community.

Of course, conflict is unavoidable. We like to think it is a healthy approach to developing a positive group culture that correctly, and appropriately reflects the vast values and perspectives of its community. An introductory way that we do this is with affective statements and questions. These tools are incorporated into circles and the progression of questions the facilitator uses. One-on-one coaching is an essential tool of the wilderness instructor. Students often need support in how they bring up issues or frustrations with affective statements.

For instance Continue reading…

Here’s an Online Library Selection of Our Favorite TED Talks

Most everyone associated with Eagle Rock — and in particular those who work within our School and Professional Development Center (PDC) — have always been big fans of TED talks. Run by a nonprofit organization devoted to what it calls “Ideas Worth Spreading,” TED talks have been delivered at conferences around the globe since 1990.

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In fact, PDC staffers and students recently shared a TED connection at TEDxABQ2015 in Albuquerque, N.M. — an event that focused specifically on education (see: Eagle Rock PDC Lends an Experienced Hand at TEDxABQ Education). And while merely attending a TED event may appear on the surface to be a passive act, the listening aspect is huge to our PDC’s theory of action.

That theory begins with the edict that we don’t just drop in on an educational institution and impose our process on that entity. Instead, we begin by listening — embedding ourselves in the context, conducting interviews and most important, observing and hearing from students and educators local alike. We get a better understanding of what’s going on by listening to what local school leaders value and observing those values in the school setting.

Our recent attendance at TEDxABQEducation reflects this first step. We had already been engaged to help Albuquerque schools better document and scale their approach to personalized learning (see: New Metrics Initiative Taking Shape in New Mexico). So we sent our Director of Professional Development, Michael Soguero, along with a PDC Fellow Kelsey Baun and four Eagle Rock students to Albuquerque where they embedded themselves in four local schools to conduct focus group interviews.

As a result, we are currently developing processes that support local wisdom to solve local problems. We take advantage of the best local thinking rather than impose a generic framework that may be completely foreign to the local school district.

So whenever the topic of TED talks surfaces, we’re all in. If you’ve never experienced what TED offers educators, click on one of the videos below — just for a taste. We’re thinking you’ll probably end up watching each of them.

When 13 year-old Logan LaPlante grows up, he wants to be happy and healthy. This talented teen discusses how hacking his own education is helping him achieve this goal. From Feb. 2013:

Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures — rather than undermines — the creative process. From Feb. 2006: Continue reading…

Researching Eagle Rock’s Moral and Ethical Social Networks

Editor’s Note: You may recall Rebecca Fenn. She was a 2013/2014 Eagle Rock Public Allies Fellow who initiated a study to better understand moral and ethical code development here at Eagle Rock. One year removed from her Fellowship and Rebecca is back (in a literary sense) with a summary of her findings, which suggest among other things that bridging the gap between school and family might be the first place to look in the study of moral and ethical curriculum.

By Rebecca Fenn

Relationships matter. They matter in school, in life, with students, with co-workers, leadership, policy-makers and even with the elk that share your back yard.

No matter the organization, relationships shape climate, and at the Eagle Rock School and Professional Development Center in Estes Park, Colorado, I found community members use their relationships to fuel education through daily gatherings, social-emotional graduation requirements, moral and ethical code development and residential life.

When Eagle Rock students develop their moral and ethical codes every trimester, they draw on information they learned from relationships with other people.

Whether through observation, friendship, love, trust, respect, or proximity, the relationships that students develop in and outside of Eagle Rock help form the way they think morally. And each moral and ethical code is a combined reflection of all of a student’s moral and ethical relationships.

This transference of knowledge and beliefs through meaningful relationships continues to fascinate me. So much in fact that in the year following my time spent as the Life After Eagle Rock Fellow, I attended graduate school where I conducted a qualitative research study on moral and ethical code development at Eagle Rock School.

In my study, I used social network analyses — a research method that quantifies social relationships into maps — to determine where it was exactly that students were receiving their moral and ethical advice and how the Eagle Rock community could use this information to better understand its own moral and ethical code program.

The research began with a survey in which each student was asked to list up to 10 people to whom they turned for moral and ethical advice. From there I created a sociogram, or map, of these relationships and looked for trends. (It is important to note that because this study only looked at students who responded to the survey, the sampling was self-selected and no broad claims can be made about trends in the school as a whole. However, confining the analysis to the data provided, it still lends insight into the moral advice-seeking behavior of this self-selected group of students.)

I found one of the most important findings of this study to be the fact that Continue reading…

Princetonians at The Rock: A Tale of Two Eagle Rock Interns

We’ve had dozens of college students participating in internships here at Eagle Rock, and many of them consider that time of service a highlight in their educational lives.

One such person was Sarah Bertucci, our very first Princeton University student to perform a summer internship here at the Eagle Rock School and Professional Development Center back in our very first year. Our most recent Princeton intern is Alexandria Robinson, whose Eagle Rock experience began in June and will conclude in late August.

We thought it would be fun to let these two Princeton alumni share their experiences in an alternating, back-to-back format. Both have favorable memories of their stay here, even though a 21-year gap separates their experience.

Let’s get started…

Sarah Bertucci: Back in the spring of 1994, I applied to Princeton’s Summer Service Program, a program that placed college students in summer service jobs, mostly in urban nonprofits. I wanted to learn new things, be part of a new community, and make a contribution.

I had never been interested in teaching, but by a stroke of good luck, I was placed at Eagle Rock during its first summer in operation. It sounded like a great opportunity to be part of a brand new school. On top of that, I’d never been out West or seen mountains up close. So, I accepted the position and began counting the days until my arrival at in Estes Park.

Alexandria Robinson: Similar to Sarah’s experience, my application to Eagle Rock fell under an umbrella program. Revamped with a new name — Princeton Internships in Civic Service — the program is designed to place students in service jobs based on different sectors, such as health, education, science and more. After receiving a ”callback email” and then scheduling and participating in an interview via Skype, I was offered a summer internship starting in June 2015.

I was excited, but nervous. I was given two days to make a decision. It was only January and I couldn’t fathom making a firm commitment for something that wouldn’t affect me until June. I knew I wanted to teach, but at that point, the bulk of my experience in education had been with much younger students than the high school age ones at Eagle Rock. What would it be like with older students? Will they like me? That’s when I realized that all of these questions were petty, and I knew the benefits of this internship far outweighed any anxieties I might have. I confidently said yes, and never looked back.

Sarah (1994): Michael and Cynthia Soguero picked me up at the airport. Michael was the instructional specialist for math and science, and he was my mentor teacher. On the way to the school we stopped to pick up a rocking chair for the Sogueros, who were expecting a new baby. That made me feel more like I was becoming a part of a larger family. I settled into one of the student wings in Ponderosa House — staff housing didn’t exist at that time. Only two houses had students (Pinon and Spruce), so staff members lived in some of the other houses. I quickly met some of the 30 or so students who were on campus at that time.

Alexandria (2015): When I arrived at Eagle Rock, I was at a loss for words. I knew that this place was probably going to be pretty nice, but when we first drove in, I couldn’t stop staring at the mountains. I couldn’t believe that people actually got to live and go to school here. I soon met both Dan Condon and Kelsey Baun from the Professional Development Center team, and was given a tour of the campus. I learned about the academic buildings and the residential life/house system, and it was immediately evident that a true community exists here.

After getting settled into Willow (the Fellow/summer intern housing), I quickly began to meet lots of people. I tried my best to remember every name I heard, but this day was tougher than most. I do remember Continue reading…

Eagle Rock School Holds a Trio of Accreditations

Accreditations are a form of quality assurance — an endorsement of sorts that confirm, in our case, that the learning institution in question has met the standards necessary to be considered at or above industry agreed upon standards.

And here at Eagle Rock School, we have acquired three such educational accreditations, all of which combine to serve as a testament to our approach, add credence to our curriculum, and provide recognized approval to our approach to reengaging youth in their own education.

To begin with, Eagle Rock has receive accreditation from the Association of Colorado Independent Schools (ACIS), a nonprofit that serves the purpose of ensuring the improvement — on a continuous basis — of member schools. To do this, ACIS offers professional development, advocacy services and of course, accreditation. The Colorado association is closely tied to the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS).

Another nonprofit organization that has seen fit to accredit Eagle Rock’s educational program is AdvancED, a non-partisan organization that is known for its intense and on-campus review of schools from pre-kindergarten all the way through 12th grade. Its goal is to ensure that the schools it researches place a major emphasis on attaining the full potential of their students. AdvancED was created through a 2006 merger of the PreK-12 divisions of the Continue reading…

Eagle Rock’s New Director of Public Allies Has Walked These Hills Before

Our new director of Public Allies is no stranger to our mountainside campus, having served as the curriculum fellow back in 2008 and 2009.

In fact, for the past 15-plus years, Christi Kelston has worked with nonprofits that challenge traditional concepts of education and youth development. At Eagle Rock, she will be supporting and overseeing a dozen Public Allies fellows through their year of service, leadership and personal development. And with her guidance, we expect these fellows to become members of a new generation of leaders in education reform, inspiring change in educational and non-profit organizations across the nation.

As director of public allies at Eagle Rock, Christi also serves on the Professional Development Center (PDC) team reporting to our director of Professional Development (Michael Soguero) and to Public Allies’ Chief Operating Officer (Cris Ros Dukler).

Prior to rejoining the Eagle Rock team, Christi was the program director of quality improvement at Family League of Baltimore, where she oversaw the quality, implementation, evaluation and tracking of professional development and technical assistance. Family League provides its services to community partners from Baltimore City public schools, afterschool programs and community organizations.

Working with Baltimore community schools, Christi said she was fortunate to be able to dedicate her experience and talents in support of Continue reading…