Teaching Methods

• Engage students in creative, contextual problem solving so they may construct and retain knowledge beyond a school setting into real world applications; learners will benefit from both shaping as well as being shaped by each new educational experience.
• Generate learning through actively engaging the students in a manner which requires them to become an integral part of the understanding obtained, and primarily responsible for acquiring their own skills and knowledge.
• Emphasize activities and projects that are interdisciplinary and student-centered, which focus on authentic investigation of personally relevant issues.
• Gear the curriculum toward each individual to allow for the expression of unique learning styles in the self-paced attainment of both personal and common goals.
• Appreciate that students have personalized and varied learning styles though which they best internalize knowledge, as well as multiple ways in which they naturally express what they have learned.

Student Involvement

• Involve students in responsible decision making about their own education (including curriculum and instruction format), as well as about policies which extend beyond the classroom (such as codes of conduct, school calendar planning, and teacher evaluation processes).
• Cooperate with students to develop assessments which are genuine outgrowths of the learning process and measure accomplishments that are consequential, purposeful, and relevant to life-long growth.

Learning Environment

• Encourage personalized and often self-directed learning opportunities which stem naturally from the student’s unique talents, interests, perspectives, passions, and strengths.
• Offer hands-on learning in the outdoors to help students discover how to tackle physical and mental challenges, to promote an understanding of the natural environment in which we all live, and to strengthen students’ appreciation of environmentally sustainable living and the interdependent web of life.
• Structure multi-age classrooms incorporating learners with different abilities in order to encourage team learning and cooperation, and transform individual developmental differences into collective assets.
• Create learning centers where children will work in small groups, both heterogeneously by mixed-age and also homogeneously by similar skill levels, to cultivate growth in areas of strength and of need.
• Evaluate students according to their own developing potential instead of to limiting, static grade level standards.

Social and Emotional Development

• Foster social responsibility and teamwork to achieve collective goals, building both shared trust and individual self-esteem.
• Teach non-violent communication and problem solving skills by modeling them in interactions among teachers, students, and parents.
• Maximize student potential by fostering emotional development, safety and trust first, which in turn will serve to strengthen students’ connection to their work and improve classroom dynamics.
• Reinforce children’s innate desire to become responsible, respectful, and resourceful members of their various communities by guiding them in the necessary social and life skills required to make positive contributions.
• Establish effective strategies for positive discipline that will examine and modify the underlying causes of the conduct instead of only addressing the actions at the surface level.
• Develop mutually respectful relationships with students, focusing on solutions instead of punishments in order to teach children about the natural consequences of their actions.