Learning Outcomes

After an incredible, collaborative year-long process (which I've blogged about here, here, and here), the TBS faculty has arrived at a set of learning outcomes that both capture what we have already been doing, and give clarity for our intentions about the future. We're thrilled at this list, even as we recognize that it is a "working document" that may be modified as we live with it next year. For example, we'll be asking the four faculty who are attending the Guggenheim Institute on Creativity in Teaching this summer to help us refine our definition of the #4 below.

Through their learning experiences at TBS, students will develop:

1. Autonomy: their qualities and skills of reflection, perseverance, confidence, patience, initiative, self-knowledge, and metacognition.

2. Interdependency: their understanding* of cooperation, compassion, empathy, mutual respect, commonalities and differences, diversity, active citizenship, community, and systems.

3. Critical thinking: their ability to conceptualize, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate information; to reason, to pose questions, to test assumptions, to consider alternative viewpoints, and to derive conclusions and consequences.

4. Creativity: their curiosity and imagination to identify and resolve problem-solving opportunities that are of relevance to their personal lives and experiences across all academic and artistic disciplines.

5. Communication: their understanding* of effective written, oral, visual, physical, and artistic communication, active listening, non-violent interaction, and conflict resolution.

6. Health and wellness – their understanding* of the ways that nutrition, exercise, rest, and external environment factors influence their well-being, and will develop habits that promote physical, emotional, social, and intellectual well-being, as well as the ability to monitor and maintain that well-being.

7. Technological proficiency – their understanding* of modern technology as a means to communicate with others, to express ideas, and to search for relevant information, and their ability to choose, use , navigate, and evaluate new media carefully, responsibly and ethically.

8. Discipline understanding: developmentally appropriate abilities and awareness in each area of study – academic and artistic – as determined by intentional, rigorous, and inclusive processes of observation, assessment, and evaluation.

9. Learning habits: their understanding* of individual learning profiles, and their ability to use that understanding to identify, choose, use, and reflect on deliberate approaches to their work in school and at home that maximize engagement and learning, leading to the production of high-quality and satisfying work. *at TBS, “understanding” comprises motivation, ability, and awareness. After we shared these with the faculty yesterday, we immediately merged into a conversation about the big questions that will guide the curriculum review process that we're now designing. The questions we posed included:

1) How do we review and revise Section VI of the TBS curriculum guide for grades K-8 in specific disciplines of Cultural Studies, Language Arts, Math, Science, and Spanish, to ensure a) that the “taught” curriculum in the classrooms and the printed curriculum align, b) that the curriculum aligns with the learning outcomes, and c) that there are no major gaps in knowledge and skills in our curriculum?

2) How do we create a plan for developing the printed K-8 curriculum in Art, P.E., mindfulness, music, Seed-to-Table, and other areas or disciplines?

3) How do we create a first draft of a comprehensive curriculum for our Early Childhood Campus?

4) How do we codify the roles of Teaching for Understanding, Montessori, Reggio Emilia, balanced literacy, inquiry learning, project-based learning, and other frameworks in the curriculum at TBS? What are the formal components of our program that shape our work within these frameworks (Positive Discipline/Responsive Classroom, Facing History and Ourselves, Reader's Workshop/Writer's Workshop, TERC: Investigations, Words Their Way, etc)? Does this look different at different divisions?

5) How do we revise Sections I-V of the K-8 curriculum guide to more accurately reflect the TBS philosophy and approach?

6) How do we create a plan for ongoing curriculum review?

Stay tuned for more about the curriculum review process this spring and next fall!