School Profile

Our Approach

Real World Curriculum - Joyful Learning - Respectful Culture

Real World Curriculum - Our approach to curriculum makes standards come alive for students by connecting learning across subjects areas to real-world issues and needs. Academically challenging, inquiry-based learning experiences prepare students for success in their future academic endeavors. Our school ensures that all students have access to a rigorous curriculum, and regularly analyze that curriculum to align with those standards.

Joyful Learning - Our classrooms are alive with discovery, inquiry, critical thinking, problem solving, and collaboration. Teachers talk less. Students talk (and think) more. Lessons have clear  purpose, guided by learning targets for which students take ownership and responsibility. Student engagement strategies and activities serve to differentiate instruction and maintain high expectations to bring out the best in all students, cultivating a culture of high achievement.

Multiple Performance Measures -In addition to skill-based academic learning and assessment, opportunities for teamwork, feedback, and reflection are integrated throughout the  curriculum.

Respectful Culture - We embrace a Responsive Classroom approach to teaching. This approach to teaching emphasizes academic, social, and emotional growth in a strong school community. We believe that how children learn is as important as what they learn, and that academic success is inextricably tied to building social-emotional competencies. All of our educators have been provided with extensive training and resources to help create safe and joyful classrooms where children can thrive.

The Responsive Classroom approach consists of a set of practices and strategies that build academic and social-emotional competencies. These core classroom practices are the heart of the Responsive Classroom approach:

Morning Meeting—Everyone in the classroom gathers in a circle for twenty to thirty minutes at the beginning of each school day and proceeds through four sequential components: greeting, sharing, group activity, and morning message.

Interactive Modeling—An explicit practice for teaching procedures and routines (such as those for entering and exiting the room) as well as academic and social skills (such as engaging with the text or giving and accepting feedback).

Teacher Language—The intentional use of language to enable students to engage in their learning and develop the academic, social, and emotional skills they need to be successful in and out of school.

Logical Consequences—A non-punitive response to misbehavior that allows teachers to set clear limits and students to fix and learn from their mistakes while maintaining their dignity.

Interactive Learning Structures— Purposeful activities that give students opportunities to engage with content in active (hands-on) and interactive (social) ways.

Closing Circle—A five- to ten-minute gathering at the end of the day that promotes reflection and celebration through participation in a brief activity or two.