By Communications Staff
MacLaren’s highly sequenced curriculum and passionate educators work to equip students at every age to be active participants in their own learning.
“We start by developing skills and build to a place where students are prepared to have serious discussions about sophisticated topics, like philosophy and political theory and physics,” MacLaren’s Associate Executive Director, Bridget Rector, explains. “We want to equip students with basic ordered knowledge that serves as a foundation for ongoing learning.”
Awake and Alive to Learning
In Lower School classrooms, students are encouraged to take responsibility for their education by being awake and alive to learning. As one student put it, “It's okay when I don’t know the right answer. I am learning to ask for help and to use all the resources available to me to find the answer.”
By encouraging thoughtful and imaginative participation in every subject area, teachers help students to learn and think on their own. By the time students are in high school, they can articulate the value of learning not as something they have to do but as something that is enjoyable and will improve their lives.
Andrew LaFountain, a high school student, reflects, “Before this year, I enjoyed learning, but I see more clearly the way our teachers present material so that we come to love it.Mr. Kelly brings our Humane Letters texts to life. He encourages us to wrestle with the text and be impacted by it. These words written thousands of years ago are applicable to our lives today and they shape me. It matters what we love and how we interact with learning.”
Student Reflection and Evaluation
Reflection plays a significant role in students becoming agents of their own education as well. Lower School teachers introduce the idea of narrative feedback, demonstrating for each student how to begin evaluating their own work and presence within the community of learners.
Whether approaching an academic exercise or a student’s attitude toward a classmate, teachers weave feedback throughout the school day, demonstrating how to offer kind, concrete observations and building student skills of self-awareness and self-evaluation.
Once in the Upper School, this model is reinforced during annual student evaluation conferences. The evaluations continue the conversation about a student’s effort in learning and understanding of subject matter while adding observations on preparation for class, depth of inquiry, and sense of wonder.
This emphasis on narrative feedback and conversation honors students who work hard and are excited about what they are learning. This also encourages students not to pursue learning to accomplish a certain letter grade, but to approach each subject with a desire to grow in understanding.
Parents don’t often have a front-row seat to the day-to-day role MacLaren teachers play in nurturing and coaching students to be agents of their own education. In their junior and senior years, Maclaren students take the lead during their evaluation conferences, and here this dynamic is fully on display as they reflect on their progress as learners and converse with their teachers about their challenges and goals in each class. Mrs. LaFountain says, “I found it a joy to hear my child evaluate himself, in the presence of his teachers, with maturity, discernment, and perspective. I saw a young adult, speaking to other adults about topics of significance. It was powerful to witness the teachers’ care and concern for him. He was doing well already. They want to see him be his best.”