Student-Driven Learning
We believe that children should take ownership of their education and social-emotional well being.
Units of Inquiry
Students in grades K-3 participate in units of inquiry, an exploration of high interest topics that are chosen by the students themselves. Each topic incorporates both social studies and science. Students have explored toys and games around the world by interviewing students via zoom in other countries to discover what toys they play with, while during the same unit study, they learned how mechanical toys using levers and catapults function. During a unit on natural disasters, children studied what creates an earthquake, and performed experiments to determine which types of buildings are most earthquake resistant; they simultaneously explored the reasons why some communities around the world lack the resources to protect themselves better against earthquakes and all forms of natural disasters.
Student-Driven Learning
In addition to granting students the ability to choose their units of inquiry, we follow their questions and interest in helping us shape those units. In a similar fashion, student interest and curiosity guide components of our older students’ World History/Social Studies and Earth Science classes. We help each student at TBIS establish individualized learning goals and teach them to monitor their own progress as they work to achieve those goals. We grant students in grades one and higher the freedom to carry out and present “passion projects” — projects that can take virtually any form and that allow our students to select, research, and bring to fruition a project on a topic of their own interest.
Four times each school year, students share their projects with our community, during events that provide our students with valuable public speaking and presentation practice. And rather than traditional “parent/teacher conferences” we hold family conferences that intentionally involve our students, so that they can learn to become active participants in conversations about their own education.
Social-Emotional Learning
It is our school’s fundamental belief that humans learn best when they are happy and relaxed. We believe that to optimize academic performance, we must do all we can to ensure children are mentally present for each lesson; that they feel seen and heard and that they know they are loved by their teachers.
For this reason, we start each school day not with academics, but with morning meetings. Held within each child’s homeroom — and often outdoors beneath the shade of our towering oak trees — morning meetings grant children opportunities to engage in fun games and activities, participate in team building exercises, and learn to express feelings – both their joys and their disappointments – in healthy ways. School days end with closing circles, in which students reconnect with their homeroom classmates and teacher to end the day in a similar fashion.
On a regular basis, our guidance counselor visits our students to engage them in age-appropriate social-emotional lessons that address everything from being a good friend to dealing with conflict to learning to set healthy boundaries that protect ones mental health. Transition time, breaks, meditation, mindfulness moments and quiet time are all additionally built into each school day. Yoga has also been a part of our program for some of our students.
We want our school to be a happy place. We want children to enjoy being children. And we want our students to excel academically. This is why we prioritize social-emotional learning.