Build Week 15 Takes Off

It was 9am on Monday of Build Week 15, and learners were already saddling up to head for the park – not yet sure what they’d be making across the week. When they arrived at the park, teachers handed each team two model gliders: one larger one made of foam and one smaller made of balsa wood. Then, equipped with a clipboard, three strings of varying lengths, basic information about gliders and two blank data tables, teams set off to run three test flights on each glider, measuring the distance of each trial and observing the differences in the designs of the gliders. By then, they’d gotten the picture: this week, they’d be designing for flight.

The “bird’s-eye-view” of our plan for the week might be helpful for readers: Teams design, build, and test small-sized gliders to maximize flight distance and an aerodynamic ratio, applying their knowledge of fluid dynamics to its role in flight. Teams walk themselves through the entire engineering design process, from brainstorming to drafting, including team-driven research (physics of aerodynamics and glider components that take advantage of that science), creating materials lists, constructing, testing and evaluating—all within constraints, and concluding with a final launch day/competition.

build weekLisa ZapalacMay 13, 2023Long-View Micro Schoolbuild week, science, math, engineering, park

Learning for the Long-View

It's time to start Learning for the Long-View. We wanted to share an exciting project we have been working on this summer. We have created a new platform to support educators (and interested parents!) called “Learning for the Long-View.”

Learning for the Long-View is a subscription-based website focused on elevating learning and transforming thinking in mathematics. Members will have access to a dynamic library of videos, guides, graphics, scripts, as well as weekly chats and live events with the Long-View team. This is all in addition to weekly lesson plans.

Our math team is continuously working to spread the Long-View approach. In this new web platform, subscribers have an innovative way to develop content knowledge for the teaching of mathematics, while also exploring how advanced pedagogy can elevate and impact learning….

generalLisa ZapalacAugust 3, 2022Long-View Micro Schooleducators, math, professional development

Long-View Teachers Travel to North Carolina to Support School District's Math Teachers

One of the interesting things about Long-View Micro School is the financial model. Our financial model stands apart from the financial models of most independent schools in which tuition is set to cover about 90% of costs, and then funds are raised to manage the “gap.” In the typical independent school, dollars are raised from within the parent community through the annual fund and a gala or other social event. For the most part, it is expected that parents contribute to both of these events, and thus the true cost of attending the schools exceeds tuition. The annual fund and the gala occur during the fiscal year and thus there is significant pressure to raise funds from these events because the budget assumes these dollars will be procured. The dollars must come in lest the school end up in a difficult situation by Q3 or Q4.

At Long-View, we do not depend on fundraising to fund the gap between tuition and operating costs, and the gap is strategically tighter than in most schools….

"Odd" Challenge in Computer Science

Our learners in Navy Band and Auburn Band are learning to read, analyze, write, and debug Python programs. As part of their experience, the kids spend a significant portion of each Computer Science block creating programs to solve coding challenges.

Creating a program to solve a challenge often takes significant cognitive work. It isn’t just the syntax of Python that one needs to know….

CodingLisa ZapalacNovember 18, 2018Long-View Micro Schoolpython, math, spicy challenge, program

The Culture of a Long-View Math Classroom

At Long-View, we spend a significant amount of time investing in the learning culture of our school, with particular attention paid to how this translates within our mathematics classrooms. As Harvard educator Dr. Richard Elmore has so often made clear, the “default culture of American instruction” contains “certain robust patterns of instructional practice that are unique to the US and that are highly destructive to higher level student learning.” From our standpoint, these highly destructive instructional patterns are easily observed within American math classrooms and at Long-View we seek to disrupt these and nurture…

mathLisa ZapalacOctober 24, 2018Long-View Micro Schoolculture, math, studio time, integers, subtraction, navy band

Watch Your (Mathematics) Language!

If you step into a Long-View mathematics class, you’re apt to hear students reading mathematics expressions using language that seems a little different.

In reading an addition expression such as 41 + 17, for example, you’d hear a Long-View student say “forty-one and seventeen” rather than “forty-one plus seventeen.” While this may seem like a subtle substitution, there is a great deal of deliberate thought underneath this use of language that supports our young mathematicians as they develop strong conceptual understandings that will transfer across all of arithmetic to Algebra. Language is actually one of the most under-utilized models in school mathematics. Not at Long-View....

mathLisa ZapalacJanuary 25, 2017Long-View Micro Schoollanguage, math, models, manipulatives, addition, integers