Escondido, California’s Conway Elementary School struggled as one of the lowest-performing schools in its district for years, until a new approach to learning focused on character development helped to turn things around.

“We want students to be in charge of their own learning,” principal Cristina Meglich told The San Diego Union-Tribune.

Over the last three years, Conway partnered with EL Education to revamp the way teachers educate students, through a $100,000-per-year district grant. The “expeditionary learning” approach sets aside 20 minutes at the beginning and ending of each day for students to hone in on their progress as part of a research-based program that pushes students to “master rigorous content, develop positive character, and produce high-quality work,” according to the EL Education website.

“Every Friday, the students reflect on their learning for the week, and give themselves a score,” Meglisch said.

Students also “set goals based on (state) standards,” she added. “They will identify their reading level, and what they need to work on next.”

The EL Education framework helped Conway meet its academic goals over the last two years, and 5th-graders “pretty much doubled their scores in math and language arts,” the principal said.

The Union-Tribune reports:

A big part of EL Education’s approach is character development. At Conway, that means emphasis on the school’s “EPIC” norms—Excellence, Perseverance, Integrity and Compassion.

“Suspensions went from 18 to four last year,” Meglisch said. “That character piece is essential to what they’re doing.”

Conway’s progress with the program so far also helped the school land a $5,000 grant this year from EL Education to help fund a 4th-grade project—“Protecting and Serving Our Local Watershed.”

The grant was awarded to only 18 schools nationwide as part of EL Education’s “Better World Project,” which will document the school project to serve as an example for other schools.

“My job is to help teachers do these things, and bring the community in,” EL Education’s Adam Krusi-Thom told The Union-Tribune. “That’s what the Better World Project gives to the community—the kids get a sense of something greater than themselves.”

Three 4th-grade teachers designed the project to allow student to explore the local watershed alongside experts at the Escondido Creek Conservancy. Teacher Bonnie Diamond said cement culverts have degraded the creek’s trout habitat, and students are investigating “the ramifications of humans . . . on the creek.”

The project also tasked students with rearing trout fingerlings from eggs, which they released into Miramar Lake as part of an “expedition” that involved lessons in reading, writing, science, and math, according to the news site.

“They created a field guide, they made informative trading cards,” 4th-grade teacher Lana Brady said. “There is more buy-in . . . It’s giving them real-world skills—talking to adults.”

That excitement has also infected parents, with 90% attending a recent event—far more engagement than in the past.

“Students are communicating the importance of them (parents) coming” to see what they’re doing in class, Meglich said.

While many low-performing schools turn to test preparation to improve academics, Conway’s EL approach relies on character formation to push students to take control of their own education and apply it in their own community.

Jeffrey Guhin, a scholar with the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, recently conducted research in urban public schools around the United States for the Institute’s School Cultures and Student Formation project and observed a striking pattern.

“Self-actualization was by far the most important moral idea in any of the schools, on both an aggregate and individual level,” Guhin wrote. “It represented what schools were supposed to do according to administrators and to district, state, and federal programs. It was what the teachers and principals wanted for the students, and what the students themselves wanted.”

The EL approach to character formation moves the focus from self-actualization to deep learning by helping students to “master rigorous content, develop positive character, and produce high-quality work.”

At Conway, students studied their own local watershed, and then they “wrote letters and presented their findings to city officials.” Academics are improving because “the students are excited about something and actually feel like they have a voice,” Brady said.

Guhin’s research into character and citizenship formation in U.S. high schools will appear in the new book The Content of Their Character, to be published in February. Preorders are now available at a discount from CultureFeed.