"Spend a Day" With A Band: Instagram Highlights As A Way to Experience Learning At Long-View
“Long-View develops thinking skills, agency, curiosity, and investment in learning. We focus on constructing robust knowledge structures and facilitating the development of conceptual understandings that promote transfer and connections. “ That’s the big picture of what we are working to do. But what does that look like on a daily basis? If Long-View is a transformative educational experience, one that is built upon a cohesive experience across weeks, months, and years, what does one day look like?
To answer these questions, we’ve put together four highlights. In each highlight, we follow one group of learners for their day at Long-View.
Before you watch these highlights that follow each band, you might be wondering about how bands are formed. Each band typically has a spread of 2-3 grade levels. Mixed-age bands allow us to let go of assumptions related to ages and grade levels and ensure all children are stretching toward the highest expectations. We have four bands, which are created in the beginning of the year and typically have color names (ex. “Indigo Band”). The band operates as a learning community across all subject areas. If you’d like to learn more about how we think about band placement, you can see our most recent blog post.
In watching these highlights, we hope you see a few key points:
The culture of Long-View is not built around compliance and behavior management, prominent elements of most schools. Instead, we work to create a learning community, where children take responsibility for their learning.
There is a large amount of agency throughout the day. Children are immersed in a decision-rich environment where they make choices about the work at hand as well as how about they approach the work at hand.
The environment feels casual and comfortable while everyone is invested in learning.
We don’t waste time. We don’t spend our academic time on busy work. We minimize transitions. We foster a community without the celebrations that often occur at other schools. Most academic blocks are two hours long, and with 2 blocks a day, we have an opportunity for deeper learning and the day has a more productive pace.
Now, we invite you to spend the day with us and click one of the buttons below to “join” a band!
