In the tradition of philosopher John Dewey and psychologist Howard Gardner, Mountain Shepherd’s Experiential Education programs provide opportunities for students to engage with their community and environment to make learning real. In his book, Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv reports the State Education and Environmental Roundtable’s 10 year study on the efficacy of “environmental-based education produces student gains in social studies, science, language arts, and math; improves standardized test scores and grade-point averages; and develops skills in problem-solving, critical thinking, and decision-making.”
School Year Experiences
We work with your group throughout the school year. The first experience introduces survival skills at the onset of a new quarter of year. The subsequent experiences review survival skills and address parallels to their current stage in the school year. We will tailor each experience to the season and your student’s needs.
Clubs, Extracurriculars, Leadership Training
Pulling on our experience with corporate leadership, we design experiences to bring your group together. We use survival priorities to give your group common language and experience to motivate them to work efficiently and effectively toward their goals.
Unit and Lesson Integration
We work with individual teachers or grade level teams to create experiences to enrich curricular objectives. With your collaboration, we create and facilitate experiences to wich you can refer and on which you can build for the rest of the unit and year.
Field Experience at Mountain Shepherd
Bring your class to Mountain Shepherd’s property for a single or multiday curricular experience. We have a menu of lessons prepared for Science, Social Studies, Math, and Literature. If you teach another subject or are planning for interdisciplinary lessons and are interested in using our space, we will work with you to develop an experience to meet your needs.