Pacifica Announces a Grant from State Education and Environment Roundtable (SEER) to Implement Exciting New Program

SEER, the State Education and Environment Roundtable, is an organization “founded as a cooperative endeavor of 16 state departments of education … to enhance student achievement, improve K-12 instructional practices and help schools achieve their improvement goals by implementing the EIC Model™.”  Pacifica has won a grant from SEER that will provide

The grant provides training for Pacifica’s teachers and administration in the EIC Model™ via professional development workshops and seminars. Our grant provides this training, along with technical support for implementing the model in our school. SEER also provides evaluations of our progress.

New Programs Will Be Based on the EIC Model™

The EIC (using the Environment as an Integrating Context for improving student learning) model fits perfectly into Pacifica’s way of teaching and our philosophy. It is focused on interdisciplinary learning that breaks down traditional boundaries between disciplines by placing these disciplines into the context of a real concept: the environment in all its many aspects.

EIC™ learning is involves community-based investigations (minds-on and hands-on experiences through service learning opportunities), collaborative instruction (teachers collaborate on curriculum and the whole community participates in the learning/instructional process), and a combination of independent and cooperative learning. The model is a learner-centered, constructivist approach to education, adapted to the needs and unique abilities of individual learners, using the local natural and community surroundings as a “venue” for integrating proven pedagogies to improve teaching and learning.

EIC™ investigations vary in scope from individual to school-wide. The school-wide community-based investigations are inquiries based on the relationship between the natural systems and the social systems in our local environment. Each investigation has a focus around which lesson plans are built.

Crucial to this model are six key components, each of which are equally weighted. They are:

• collaborative instruction
• local and natural community surroundings as context
• cooperative and independent learning
• integrated-interdisciplinary instruction
• community-based investigations/service activities
• learner-centered, constructivist approaches

What makes this program so exciting is that it facilitates goals that Pacifica has always been reaching toward. We were an ideal candidate for this grant, and we hope to utilize it to improve our programs and achieve our vision.

 

Watch this space for updates on the progress of the grant and implementation of the EIC Model™ along with tales told by teachers, students and members of our community in how the model is working in practice.

For more information on SEER and the EIC Model™, please see SEER’s website at www.seer.org.