Buzz Bissinger, Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and author of Friday Night Lights, teaching 4th Graders in Spring 2004.

This partnership is key to the school's overarching goal: empowering students to take responsibility for their own education. At RBCS, students are on a journey of self-discovery and knowledge acquisition, and teachers provide guidance for this journey, drawing on experience, compassion, and respect for diverse learning styles, backgrounds, and needs.

Using the ELS model, students are supported in developing new skills and achieving mastery of them. As their confidence grows, so does their natural curiosity—and their desire to try more complex assignments. This active engagement holds students' interest in the classroom and over time, enables an even more important development: it changes their way of being in the world. It turns them into lifelong learners, ever-capable of taking on a challenge.

About ELS
ELS was first developed in 1991 in response to the national New American Schools competition for new educational models.

Core Practices
The five ELS core practices build on one another to support high expectations and high performance in every area of the school. They start with the implementation of the learning expeditions and follow through to how the teachers and staff reviews the school's progress.

The Learning Expedition
A key component of the ELS model, Learning Expeditions are purposeful, extensive studies of a single topic that usually last six to 12 weeks.

Design Principles
ELS's 10 design principles are the program’s basic values for teaching. These are rooted in the Outward Bound experience and reflect the importance of the individual, of civic and personal responsibility, and of learning through activity. They are summarized here.

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