Our Way

Children at Neighborhood School are offered “personalized learning within a justice-centered community.”

Personalized

• We nurture students’ confidence, affirm self-worth, and take time to notice and appreciate their uniqueness and our joy in knowing them. This occurs in verbal and nonverbal recognition of each child and deepening relationships. Playfulness is part of the process!
• We recognize that children learn and develop socially, emotionally, cognitively, spiritually, and physically in different ways and at varying rates. At NS, teachers respect and respond to our students’ current development and learning strategies. While providing targeted instruction, we encourage children to make learning choices through both structured and unstructured individual, partner, and small-group experiences.
• Personalization happens as teachers listen to, converse with, and observe children, consider each child’s needs, and keep record of development. Knowing each learner well guides teachers in preparing what and how to teach in order to promote growth.

Learning

• Students at NS are encouraged to take risks and make decisions about their learning. They are given the responsibility and tools to generate their own responses to what they learn. From Level 1 to Level 4, students experience the whole idea of a subject, see themselves as active participants with the subject, and understand why the parts are useful to learn.
• We encourage children’s curiosity and natural enthusiasm for learning about the world while developing skills needed to communicate and show understanding. We emphasize the application of skills to students’ everyday lives both within and beyond the NS community. Teachers demonstrate how to use materials, gather information, ask questions, formulate theories, communicate ideas, and take action. When a student cannot think of a way out of a dilemma, we focus attention on how to move forward rather than providing a solution. We strive to foster joy of learning and commitment to growth without comparison to others.
• At NS, learning takes place
  • in project-based, interdisciplinary units that involve all ages in research, design, question-posing, and communicating.
  • in skill building lessons lessons, activities, and practice – most often in small groups
  • in individual and group discussions of learning strategies; children are encouraged and challenged to talk and examine their own thinking and doing.
  • in play and exploration of nature when children are encouraged to become engrossed in ideas, scenarios, and experimentation.
  • through the arts in weekly music and art classes, drama productions, concerts, and weekly assemblies, as children gain experience and become more confident presenting themselves and their projects before groups.

Within a Justice-Centered Community

• At Neighborhood School, we believe that transformation of our world is possible. Our teaching and learning holds justice at its center—an intersectional view of justice that examines how forces of power and oppression have shaped our world and how forces of resistance are woven throughout history, the present, and the future. We believe in the inherent worth of every person and in creating a learning community where everyone can be their true self.
• People of all ages at our school are learning ways of justice together in community. We learn to notice one another with curiosity and to reserve judgment. We learn to share attention, power, and resources. We make sure each member is seen, heard, accepted, and has the freedom to be their true self. We work towards everyone having what they need to learn, and in that process, we are learning that what we need is each other.
• In practical terms, when members of the NS community notice and accept one another, we are noticing, accepting, and celebrating differences in age, ability, gender identity and expression, language, economic status, neurodiversity, religion, ethnicity, culture, and race. Resources that help connect the work adults are doing at school with home include Understood; Embrace Race; and Learning for Justice: Gender, Sexual Identity. Our school statement of affirmation for LGBTQ+ people and gender exploration is here. Because children regularly experience harmful systems in the world, as well as personal harm, we learn about harm in developmentally responsive ways and highlight peacemakers and equity waymakers, past and present.
• Building relationships at school amidst an array of differences entails a lot of learning; mistakes and harm happen in the learning process. We engage one another in addressing harm and aim to promote healing and set things right using restorative practices. Practices of community care, accountability, and repair of harm are modeled by teachers and integrated into daily rhythms. When children need support in this learning process, including when they cause or experience harm, NS teachers and administrators are responsive. When teachers need support, designated faculty, admin, and board members are responsive. When families and caregivers need support navigating relationships at NS and dealing with harm, Directors and the NS Board Chair can help.
• Within a cooperative learning situation, a positive interdependence develops among students. Students see that they can reach their own goals while they work to ensure that others also reach theirs. Students discuss important topics with each other (including difficult history), help each other understand, and encourage each other to work hard in order to reach their potential and become a world-changer.
• Learning within a community is seen at NS during classroom meetings, school assemblies, family gatherings, student clubs, free time play, and in student exhibitions and performance. Families and caregivers are often integral in community learning. We facilitate and model mutual benefit through activities among all ages in partnership with neighborhood organizations such as City Life/Vida Urbana, Stories Inspiring Movements, Haley House, and the Franklin Park Coalition.