Childhood Obesity Articles
Weight Loss Academy's Academic Approach Helps Overweight Kids Get on Track with School while Losing Weight
By Jess Clarke
Before classes began last fall, students at Wellspring Academy of the Carolinas may not have expected they’d spend a day in an outdoor classroom, writing beside a lake and identifying plants and animals in the woods. But a two-day, team-teaching experience at the start of school gave students those opportunities in the innovative approach to academics and experiential learning that Wellspring Academies offer.
Wellspring Academies in California and North Carolina offer a renowned approach to weight loss, fitness and a healthy lifestyle for children and young adults.
The four core teachers at the North Carolina campus taught math, English, science and social studies units and will repeat the exercise next spring. Academic director and social studies teacher Billy Porter had done team-teaching elsewhere. “It always works to the benefit of students,” he says. “You have many different avenues available to reach a student…This is really just about opening them up to the learning experience.”
With all the Wellspring students participating, there were more kids than the school’s average class size of eight. But “It was really a good experience for us to kind of get to know each other, for teachers to learn which students already trusted us,” Porter says. “When you’re in such an intimate, small setting, it really is a great relationship builder.”
The first day included a presentation on the area’s natural history, geography and cultural groups. The next day, students took notebooks to a lake on the campus, and each teacher led a segment. In a writing exercise at the end, kids separated and circled the lake to write on their feelings about Wellspring and what they wanted to accomplish. Some wrote about the geese on the water and missing home, too.
“It worked well. Students bought into it,” Porter says. “We wanted them to learn without knowing they were learning.”
For teachers, “I think this was a really good learning opportunity for them to see how you can incorporate academics outside the classroom in an experiential way,” Porter says.
Experiential learning helps kids. “That provides the student with a more holistic approach where they can bring everything around full circle and see how everything is connected,” English teacher Katie Busch says.
The team-teaching exercise is a complementary approach that enhances the learning experience. With multiple teachers offering instruction outdoors with relevance to all core courses, “I don’t think you’re going to see that in many school places,” Porter says. “These things aren’t hard to do. They just take a little bit of creativity and getting outside your comfort zone and latitude” for teachers. “You have to be able to roll with what’s going on.”
Another Wellspring approach to learning enhancement is learning-style assessments, given at the start of classes. The questionnaires for students help gauge how they best learn, through hearing, seeing or other means. Staff members use the assessments to teach pupils learning strategies. A student who learns best visually may watch a video to supplement a lesson. An auditory learner may tape a lecture to listen later.
The assessments are helpful for teachers, too, because they can use methods to help maximize a student’s learning experience, Busch says. She might incorporate a visual component to a lesson if she knows a student learns better visually.
