Academics

"Guided mastery is the most powerful form for enhancing beliefs of personal-efficacy,
reducing anxiety, and restoring behavioral functioning"

- Albert Bandura

Our teachers mentor and guide students to master new behaviors by overcoming social-emotional fear, gaining creative confidence through hands-on learning, and by mastering academic content and concepts. This approach is measured using standards-based assessments, allowing for real-time continuous improvement.

This approach supports continuous improvement by allowing us to immediately apply and assess the latest reasearch in education thereby connecting evidence to student outcomes. We assess the following three domains:

Social Emotional Learning (SEL)

SEL is the process through which children and adults acquire and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions.

Project Based Learning (PBL)

PBL is a dynamic classroom approach in which students actively explore real-world problems and challenges and acquire a deeper knowledge. In this process students use empathy to connect with an iterative human centered design approach that gives them freedom to practice applying a growth mindset while developing grit.

Skills Based Curriculum

We believe that students learn best when their school experiences have a context that is connected to real life. Skills based learning focuses on equipping students with required knowledge and appropriate life skills to help prepare them for the world they will enter as young adults.

As a lab school, we monitor existing and new findings in education research and learning science to inform our programmatic choices. We continuously reflect on our successes and challenges, student outcomes, and stakeholder feedback. We commit to agile iteration to improve our program and share our learning broadly.

Goal Tracking

To support the development of student agency, students learn how to set meaningful goals and hold themselves accountable for their learning and personal development. They meet one-on-one with Advisors each week for guidance in setting, meeting, and supporting personal goals.

Students learn to meaningfully reflect on questions such as, Did I reach this goal? Why or why not? How far did I get? What were my successes? What were my challenges? Will I change anything about how I did this next week?

We believe in creating a platform for students to develop their ability to take action and assume responsibility for their behavior in a safe learning environment. Students own their learning and have a voice in their school experience.

Parent-Teacher Conferences

Our parent-teacher conferences are student-focused. There are two conferences (October and March) each year. The purpose of these conferences are to discuss individual students' leadership, academic and social development.