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A
Kindergarten - Second Grade
California Public Charter School of the Xara Learning
Village
welcome@xaraschools.org
619.820.6188 |
Excerpts from
the Founding Charter of
Xara Garden School
Introduction
Mission
Vision
Background
Educational
Plan
Overview
What it means to be
an educated person in the 21st Century
How learning best occurs
Curriculum
Brain-based Instructional Practices
Culture
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Introduction
A. MISSION
The mission of the Xara Garden School is to:
- align the methods of education to the natural processes of learning;
- draw out the whole and highest potential of each student, teacher and stakeholder; and
- thereby grow a kind and creative community of global citizens, creating the gift of a
just, sustainable, and harmonious world.
B. VISION
The separate strands of the Xara Learning Initiative are all well-established and
well-proven. What is original is a vision for weaving them into something both new and
universal. The vision is utopian without apologies, and result-oriented without excuses.
In the schools of the Xara Learning Village, the skills and commitments to build a better
world will be learned, in a better world-within-a-world that has already arrived.
1. Xara Thematic
Instruction
Inquiry-based, multi-disciplinary, and themed instruction is the backbone of the Xara
Learning Village. The name "Xara" is a literary reference to the best-possible
future world we can imagine - Paradise Possible - natural, nourishing, and sustainable.
And Xara is imagined as a living world: itself learning and growing, getting
better and better still.
Xara thematic instruction challenges students to imagine and create a best-possible
future Earth. It thereby opens instruction to the most fanciful, and the most practical,
flights of imagination. Creating a better world requires understanding of how our world
actually works, how it came to be, and the students’ place in its order. It requires
historical, cultural and global perspectives, it requires art and spirit, it requires
courage and generosity, and it requires dependence on each other. In the schools of the
Xara Learning Village, this imaginary paradise will begin to grow in the children who will
create it in the world. Here, it all starts in a garden.
2. The Xara
Learning Village Concept
The Xara Learning Village is imagined as a world-within-a-world, a living model of a
world we hope to share with everyone. It will grow to a single campus of four charter
schools and a pre-school center, eventually serving students age 3-19. The students,
staff, and families of the four schools work collaboratively to create the learning
community. Multi-age, multi-ability, and family groupings share challenge, support, and
success. Many of the projects created by students and staff are undertaken as improvements
to the Village campus, and the boundaries between academics, art and exercise are always
fluid.
Young learners have very different capacities at different developmental stages.
Project-based learning offers a variety of approaches to differently challenge students at
different ages and levels of ability. The four schools of the Xara Learning Village are
designed to provide a consistent continuum of project-based methods which progressively
challenge students as the grow. There is also a progressive movement in the design,
specificity and rigor of student projects. Projects grow with students from wonder and
discovery toward real-world simulations to solve real-world problems. This progression
also reinforces the Xara Learning Village commitment to service, stewardship, and
citizenship.
Throughout all the four schools, the methods of multi-disciplinary inquiry are applied
- through a progression of investigations, projects, problems and simulations that grow in
challenge, specificity, and actual importance as each student grows. This charter proposal
is only to found the first school of the Village, the K-2 Xara Garden School.
3. Garden School:
Grades K-2
For the young students of the Xara Garden School, the first projects, explorations,
discoveries and associations of their formal learning careers will involve extensive
contacts with the natural world and physical objects, outdoors, and close to the soil.
These young learners will construct their own understanding of languages, numeracy,
history and culture, art, science, health, leadership, teamwork, cooperation, caring,
patience and stewardship - using all the multiple intelligences - within the physical
metaphor of growing their own organic gardens. This thematic instruction is completely
open-ended to follow other interests and avenues, and makes the ideal beginning for the
overall thematic instruction of the Xara schools: conceiving and creating the best
possible world.
Beginning in the youngest years, the information to be learned under the standards can
be discovered everywhere in the world. Standards are addressed through open ended
experiences, driven by interest and curiosity, as incited and guided by the
teacher-leader. The process must be highly individualized because the normal range of
development at this age is so wide. This is the concept of the K-2 Xara Garden School now
proposed in this petition. In the classrooms and gardens and sunshine and greenhouses and
potting sheds of the Village, students will build understanding. They will move, and will
experience all the senses, and will manipulate physical objects in the natural world. At
this age, the world is - and should be - a garden.
The concept of dividing the elementary school years into a K-2 "Garden"
School and a 3-5 "Terrace" School is intended to align instructional methods to
young learner’s developmental abilities. Particularly for young children up to
approximately seven years of age, a range of as much as three years of
developmental differences is considered normal, posing particular challenges for
standards-based programs. Matching challenge to an individual student’s readiness is
necessarily an ongoing process with very high stakes.
The culture of emotional safety, belonging, commitment and personal engagement is
enhanced in the Xara Garden School by "looping" students with their teachers
from Kindergarten through Second Grade. All students will have contact with all teachers
and all other students in multi-class, multi-age, and multi-ability groupings. Every
student serves as a leader and as a follower at different times of the day, and every day
offers opportunities to work against personal challenges and celebrate personal successes.
Objective and compassionate global, cultural, and historical perspectives are learned
and reinforced in all aspects of a HEART/EARTH curriculum: Humanities, Engineering,
Arts, Research & Technology. The Spanish language
instruction of the Humanities element and the piano instruction of the Arts element both
begin in Kindergarten. Throughout the themed instruction of the Xara Learning Village, all
aspects of the curriculum will treat in questions of how to make the world more equitable,
peaceful, and beautiful.
Here, students (and everyone else in the community) learn in order to teach others.
This approach addresses the State content standards and also introduces a broad range of
enrichment experiences to nourish the brain, provide context, and kindle student inquiry.
By addressing the whole person and whole knowledge, students make meaning from information
and develop lifelong thinking and learning skills that apply in all settings. Addressing
knowledge from a global perspective and from an intention of service, students develop the
abilities and commitments necessary to meet the challenges of the world today and
tomorrow.
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BACKGROUND
Xara Learning Village Incorporated ("XLVI") is a California non-profit
corporation, formed by Mark Hinkley, following ten years experience as a Trustee of the
Lakeside Union School District, two terms as President of that board, and twenty years
experience as a California attorney. Its purpose is to manifest a new vision of education
that is concerned with each individual in its approaches, and concerned with all the
planet in its goals.
This vision is also informed by ten years experience as a
working artist and festival producer, eighteen years experience as a parent of three boys,
and another twenty two years experience as a student and consumer of education services.
Its methods are derived from the best researches in developmental, humanist, and
transpersonal psychology, and in cognitive science, and aim to cultivate the best
qualities of competence, character, compassion and commitment in each member of its
learning communities.
Significant theoretical
and practical influences include:
- Recent discoveries in brain-based learning from the field of neuroscience;
- Inquiry-, project- and problem-based learning;
- Multi-disciplinary, multi-threaded and thematic instruction;
- The servant-leadership principles of Robert Greenleaf, et al.;
- The child-centeredness of Dewey, Steiner, Montessori, Krishnamurti, et al.;
- The humanist philosophy and ideals of the Enlightenment and the American Revolution;
- The humanist psychology of A.H. Maslow, et al., the transpersonal psychology of Carl
Jung, et al., the developmental psychology of Piaget, et al., current research in positive
psychology and the science of happiness;
- The comparative mythology and story-telling of Joseph Campbell;
- The art, interactivity, voluntary community, "gift economy," "Leave No
Trace," "No Spectators," and "Do It Yourself" ethos of the
Burning Man Art Festival;
- The global mission, rigor, language emphasis, and whole-child approaches of the International Baccalaureate Organization; and
- Hope in the genius and goodness of mankind1.
From these various strands is woven the tapestry of the Xara Learning Village. The Xara
Garden School is the first step to realizing the whole vision and the whole mission of
peopling the Earth with persons preserving, progressing, and rejoicing in the whole
planet.
1. homo sapiens, homo spiritus, homo faber, homo ludens, homo
socius - knowing man, spiritual man, man the maker, man the player, man the partner.
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Element One
Educational Program
A. OVERVIEW
The Xara Garden School will serve students in Kindergarten
through Second Grade. The school will create a real learning community of lifelong
learners, employing the best lessons of developmental, transpersonal, positive, and
humanist psychologies, the best methods of brain-based, project-based, and problem-based
learning, and the best practices of servant-leadership, here built on the
creative-and-community ethos of a "gift economy."
In project-based learning, information and skills are acquired, applied, and mastered
in the context of doing something practical and engaging. The multi-disciplinary
curriculum is integrated so all the subjects are being introduced at once, as part of a
whole cloth of connected meaning. Curiosity and interest drive learning, and meaning is
individually constructed by each student. New brain research proves this is the natural
way for the human animal to feed the appetite to learn. The rhythms and activities of
inquiry-learning are naturally suited to what we now know about how the brain acquires,
processes, catalogs, stores, and prioritizes memory and meaning.
The Xara schools will structure all this on a "gift economy" - an ethos of
service as the measure of a life. Work is not assigned and due as in some commercial
transaction. Work and learning are gifts of personal pride. Learning happens because it is
part of something fun everyone is doing together, getting ready to share with other people
at upcoming learning fairs and family festivals. These events involve both formative and
summative assessment of the students’ work, and employ the methods of audience-review
used in project- and problem-based learning. Moreover, the projects themselves must teach
the subject matter to everyone else, and must do so in ways that are interactive, fun,
engaging, wacky/artful/playful - and effective.
Servant leadership has been an important concept in management and business since
Robert Greenleaf’s watershed essay in 1970 sparked a movement. Greenleaf, and many
others, demonstrate the merits of distributed leadership and responsibility among those
who will do the real work, driven by personal motives of unselfish service and
stewardship. Xara schools take the idea all the way to the beginning, using it as the
management model for the school’s staff and also with the children themselves as the
self-validating motive for all work. It teaches responsibility to self and others and
links those virtues to our best ethical natures.
The schools will live a culture of radical kindness, creating emotional safety for
celebration of risk, success, and failure. Belonging begets giving. The philosophy is
holistic and ultimately playful. The educational approach will continue the best practices
of the most progressive preschools, adapting them to the developing abilities and
challenges of older children as they grow.
The teachers play an entirely different role in Xara schools, leading students to find
the questions, rather than announcing the answers. Teachers will stay with their classes
from Kindergarten through Second Grade, assuring maximum accountability and commitment.
The teacher becomes a pure artist, constantly improvising to engage a child’s
interest in the whole curriculum. Most importantly, the teacher is a learner right along
with the students, and models the role, curiosity and competence of the life-long master
learner.
The Xara schools will feature a HEART/EARTH curriculum:
Humanities, Engineering, Arts, Research and Technology.
This curriculum will emphasize issues and careers in sustainable development,
environmental studies, resource conservation and management, policy planning, and of
course, engineering, academia, and the arts. Mathematics and science are addressed under
the heading of "engineering," emphasizing their practical and beneficial
applications. Languages and social studies are addressed under the heading of
"humanities" to emphasize their compassionate and universal perspectives.
The campus itself will become a showcase of green building technologies, onsite energy
generation, water reclamation, and indoor-outdoor classrooms. The campus will also feature
the Xara aesthetic itself of technology sublimated in nature, with buildings draped in
greens, flowers, "greenroofs," and hanging gardens. Ultimately, the vision
contemplates exploring onsite housing for faculty and staff, seeking creative new
compensation solutions and enhancing community.
Xara Garden School students will learn Spanish, and piano, and yoga, and a vast
vocabulary - from the first day of Kindergarten. They will go on to learn carpentry and
cooking, soldering and sewing, house painting and oil painting, gardening and welding and
first aid and automobile maintenance and circuit design. They will develop a
Do-It-Yourself mentality, an appreciation of things for the human care and effort they
represent, and disdain for the thoughtless and "storebought." These are taught
as avocational skills for everybody, empowering students with practical skills and
confidence to execute their project ideas in physical reality.
The visual, performing and digital arts are all core curriculum, and so are mythology
and the history of civilization and technology. A core value is the preference for
cooperation over competition, and the Xara Learning Village schools will offer no
competitive athletics. But there is a formal curriculum in manners and etiquette, taught
from the beginning and modeled at all times. Debate is reinvented, not as an exercise in
competition, but rather as an exercise in active listening, constructive engagement, and
collective problem solving. Xara students will be good academics and good workers,
certainly, but they will also be good husbands and wives, good parents, good citizens,
good sports and good company.
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WHAT IT MEANS TO BE
AN EDUCATED PERSON IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Our word "education" comes from the Latin, "educare,"
meaning "to draw out." It does not mean "to forge" or "to
fill." Already, information is universally and democratically available to everyone
at the speed of web servers. What distinguishes rich from poor is what one can - and does
- do with the information. From now on, we must define an educated person in
terms of the ability to understand and apply information. In the 21st
Century, more than ever, education must also cultivate emotional, social, and moral
intelligence. In the 21st Century, education will continue to mean what it
always meant: the beckoning and nourishment of each student’s own potential.
The Xara Learning Village places a strong emphasis on human and natural history to
understand how our present knowledge evolved. The leafing ends of each branch of knowledge
will continue to grow, but they are all connected to the same trunk and all grow from the
same roots. By starting with the soil, and studying the birth and growth and change of
civilizations and religions and arts and technologies, context is always provided for new
learning. With Xara’s thematic instruction, all new learning is placed in the context
of the world the students will soon inherit as their own.
Educated persons in the 21st century will need to view situations from multiple
perspectives and apply high order thinking skills. They must recognize and shape patterns
of ideas. They will require logical skills and communication skills, information literacy
and skepticism, open-mindedness and curiosity, and a broad base of experiences from which
to construct new meanings. They must be both self-reliant and good team members. They must
be good leaders and good followers. They must be creative, courageous, adaptable, flexible
and tolerant in their thinking and action. Most of all, educated persons in the 21st
Century must be intellectually honest, compassionate, self-responsible and accountable,
and must understand their own best interests in the context of all the world around them.
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HOW LEARNING BEST OCCURS
Learning is as natural a human appetite as eating. And yet, the paradigm
of factory manufacturing has stifled the natural joy in education, interfering with
the brain’s own system of rewards and imposing a false economy of inauthentic
motivations. Xara Learning Village and Xara Garden School offer a new paradigm, built on
the best current understanding of how learning best occurs. Like their students, the
schools of the Xara Learning Village are self-reflecting, growing, and improving with new
understanding.
Learning best occurs when long-term goals are served with integrity. The goal of
education is the lifelong well-being of human persons and their world. What shorter term
goal or benchmark is worth sacrificing that ultimate interest?
Learning best occurs when the brain can learn by its own natural processes. The brain
learns through choice and feedback, movement and activity, multi-sensory input, and
through rhythms and cycles of directed attention and undirected reflection, cycling
between the novelty that claims attention for new information, the reflection that
constructs meaning, and the routine that releases stress.
Learning best occurs in a threat-free learning environment. The stress of threats
significantly stunts brain growth and blocks formation of synaptic connections between
neurons. Instructional models built on threat are counterproductive to learning. Natural
learning develops the cognitive abilities - indeed, the very physical structures - of
human brains.
Learning best occurs when the rewards are intrinsic. The brain is built to reward
itself as it processes ideas and information to make meaning, and superimposed rewards and
punishments interfere with the brain’s own system. At best, motivation is not
internalized. At worst, de-motivation is learned. Learning for the sake of making
one’s own relevant meaning is self-rewarding and self-satisfying.
Language and music learning occur best - and differently - during the first ten years
of life. Early language and musical development provides lifelong benefits in brain
function, enhancing memory and reasoning skills.
Learning best occurs in programs that have strong literacy and vocabulary components.
Literacy provides a foundation for most academic success. Learning best occurs in the
context of understanding the history of how things came to be. Learning best occurs in
settings that require students to exercise multi-disciplinary skills and think about their
own thinking.
Learning best occurs in a program that incorporates technology wisely. Classroom
technology now makes every computer a universal textbook, and every teacher’s desk a
worldwide multi-media library. Second-nature fluency with such technology will come as
students grow, but for young children, physical experiences of the natural world are more
developmentally important.
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CURRICULUM
Inquiry-based learning begins with a world of information too big for
any textbook. All the world becomes the laboratory and the library, and focus is placed on
framing the right questions and approaches for the learners to assemble the
"curriculum" required for any particular problem or project. Curriculum
selection to support inquiry-learning is more like stocking the pantry than defining the
recipe to be cooked. Project design is collaboratively undertaken by the faculty and
staff, and supporting resources are identified by the teaching teams.
Many professional education groups and associations support project-based learning with
online libraries of tried-and-tested projects and problems, as well as a range of related
resources to guide project design and assessment. Expertise is also available in tracking
and assessing standards performance in project-based, integrated, and constructivist
classrooms. The International Baccalaureate Organization offers one such world class body
of resources. The Xara Garden School will select from the best, and share in that
professional community by sharing its best lessons, plans and projects.
The Xara Learning Initiative will provide a complete and rigorous course of instruction
exploring the California State content standards, organized around a HEART/EARTH
curricular theme:
- Humanities
- Engineering
- Arts
- Research and
- Technology
"Humanities" includes
languages, history, multi-cultural studies, philosophy and comparative religion.
Instruction at the Xara Garden School will be in English. Spanish language instruction
will begin for every student in Kindergarten and continue throughout their education. It
is envisioned that a third language will be taught beginning in Third Grade in the future
Xara Terrace School.
In keeping with its emphasis in humanities, the arts, and global citizenship, the Xara
Garden Schools will develop a "Great Stories"
literature curriculum, teaching both reading literacy and cultural literacy through the
formative tales, myths, legends and folklore of the world. Students will be exposed to the
gods, monsters, heroes, and vocabulary of world literature, and will develop familiarity
with the great culture stories that have informed the human experience throughout its
history.
Moreover, these stories are "great" because they operate on different levels
with different lessons for different audiences. A myth or fairy tale may be introduced to
the youngest children purely as entertainment and vocabulary enrichment. Several years
later, that same story may be deconstructed to study the elements of writing. Still later,
these now familiar stories may be revisited again for the transpersonal lessons of depth
psychology they have always held for every human. Students will see that ideas and symbols
resonate at different levels and will see that their own understanding builds as a
progressive process - both higher and deeper.
"Engineering" includes
mathematics and the physical and life sciences. Addressing these under the label of
engineering underscores the practical and beneficial applications of these fields of
learning. In the context of project-based learning, the engineering theme is constantly
presented to learn and practice basic skills as students design projects that turn
technology to the service of man and nature.
"Arts" includes both
physical and digital arts in all their forms: music, dance, visual arts, and theatre, from
their most traditional to their most experimental. Piano instruction for all students will
begin in Kindergarten and continue through the Garden School. Puppetry stands alone as an
art form, and also offers methods for students’ reflection, feedback, and role play.
The heading also includes the whole range of physical arts and education. Yoga instruction
will also begin in Kindergarten and continue throughout the school years, providing
behavioral and learning advantages for students during the day.
"Research" involves
learning the skills to discover needed information, and includes facility with information
technologies - old and new. It is also the constant framework for framing questions and
directing inquiry, and for cultivating the qualities of intelligence: curiosity,
open-mindedness, skepticism, logic and creativity. It is a way of getting students to see
situations from multiple perspectives, and it shapes the discipline of the scientific
method. It especially requires students to practice prioritizing and organizing
information collected. This element of the curriculum is present all the time, with a
particular focus on the universal application of the thinking skills learned.
"Technology" includes
expertise in using computer technology in all its various applications. Just as
importantly, it includes an understanding of the historical evolution of all technology
and its effect on civilization. At the Xara schools, it also includes learning the manual
and technical skills to construct projects in a wide variety of materials, empowering
students with new confidence and ability.
This curriculum will provide a culturally and linguistically diverse, academically
rigorous, and socially responsible educational experience for children of all races,
cultures and social and economic backgrounds. Higher level thinking skills will be
developed through foreign language study and the inquiry method of instruction. This
inquiry-based, thematic education model provides an excellent framework to address the
existing California Standards and Frameworks.
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BRAIN-BASED
INSTRUCTIONAL PRACTICES
General instructional strategies will be further refined with the
following practices recommended by research in brain based learning (Jensen 1998):
Learning Readiness: Students learn
about their own needs for sleep, nutrition and hydration, and learn how these affect their
own thinking and states of awareness. The brain’s preparedness for learning is
enhanced by a wide range of emotional, motor, vision, auditory, thinking, music and
nutritional experiences. Students learn about the cause and effect of feelings and empathy
in role playing and group discussion settings. They play attention games, learn to focus,
experience time outdoors, and restrict screen time. They walk, run, spin, tumble, swing,
climb, throw, kick, draw, cut with scissors, dig with their hands and with tools, thereby
enriching the brain’s neural networks for all other learning, thinking, emotion and
activity. Students are challenged with longer sentences, a second language, larger
vocabulary, and a wide variety of contexts. They learn the piano, sing, listen to
structured, harmonic music, and are exposed to an increasing variety of other kinds of
music. Students experience demonstrations, ask lots of questions, and discover basic
principles of math and physics.
Enrichment: The brain and its
capacities are enriched by challenge and feedback. Other learners in the environment are
important resources for both feedback and challenge. Students’ learning is enriched
with reading and language, motor stimulation, thinking and problem solving, arts and the
surroundings. The varieties in student’s needs from moment to moment are met by
choice in the learning process, self-paced learning, and more variety in the strategies
used to engage learners better. Students choose the tools, resources and format of their
projects, and are exposed to wide varieties of methods. Arts, music, dance and movement
are all core curriculum, and all enrich the capacity to learn. Students experience variety
and exercise choice in their use of the environment, and explore it with all their senses.
Attention: Contrast is the key to
getting attention. Variety and novelty of any kind will engage attention. Changes of
location make powerful associations with learning. The art is knowing how to use, and when
to release, attention. A brain can pay attention or construct meaning, but not both at the
same time. The brain needs reflective time right after learning to process it for meaning
and write it into memory. A rich balance of novelty and ritual is provided to allow
learning to follow its own natural rhythms.
Threat and Stress: Threats are to
be completely eliminated from the environment. Embarrassment and sarcasm shall not be used
against children as instructional methods. Students are not bullied or belittled by other
students or by adults in the learning environment of Xara Learning Village. Conflict
resolution skills are taught and applied, and students learn that conflict is a step to
growth and new understanding. Stress, on the other hand, must be managed in the
learning environment. Some stress is involved in meeting any challenge, and is part of the
fun and satisfaction of doing so. But too little challenge is boring: while too much is
distracting and demoralizing. Both excessive boredom and excessive stress harm the
structure and function of the brain. Differentiated instruction keeps each student tuned
to his own proper level of challenge, and self-selection holds students’ interest to
keep striving. Healthy physical activity, including yoga, also assists students in the
daily management of their own levels of stress and challenge.
Motivations and Rewards: Learning
requires relevance, and rewards are not effective as a substitute. When learning is
relevant, the brain rewards itself and does not need further rewards or punishments.
Feedback, in a variety of forms, is the reward sought by brains, and students receive a
steady diet of constructive, individual feedback from teachers and other students. The
motivation to service is self-rewarding and self-validating, and students learn to
associate their academic work with service and giving of themselves.
Emotions and Learning: Emotion is
a critical part of the brain’s learning. Emotions give us a more activated and
chemically stimulated brain, which helps us learn and recall things better. Moreover, all
values are emotional states, and character education is, in fact, emotional education.
Teachers role model the love of learning, sharing their curiosity and enthusiasm with
students. Celebrations are used to acknowledge student work and accomplishments, peer
group discussions positively reinforce belonging and appreciation. Small rituals engage
learners with movements, cheers, chants, songs., etc., as age-appropriate. Controversy is
carefully introduced and managed to vest learning with an emotional component. Asking
students to prioritize a list will generate emotion, and create moments to teach good
listening and discussion skills. Introspection keeps students in contact with their own
emotions, and is reinforced with journals, discussion, stories, and personal reflections
about things, people and issues. Students are encouraged to find emotional connections to
the work they do in class, and link their own work to the broader idea of benefitting
others.
Movement and Learning:
Neuroscience establishes significant links between movement and learning. Learning is
aided by daily stretching and yoga, walks, dance, drama, seat-changes, energizers and
physical education. "Goal setting on the move" is a practice in which students
refresh their daily and yearly goals, ask what needs to be done today and this week to
meet the goals, and remind themselves why it is important to reach their goals today -
while walking outdoors with the class or a partner. Teachers ask "Where were we when
we first learned about...?" Review of material and personal reflections can be
organized around tossing a ball between classmates. Charades and pantomimes internalize
and communicate learning. Instruction is followed by physical activities that help cement
learning in memory. Cross-lateral exercises, coordinating actions on opposite sides of the
body, prime the brain for learning and coordinate communication between hemispheres of the
brain.
Meaning-making: Meaning is made at
the cross-roads between emotion, relevance, and context/patterns. Teachers reveal their
own thinking processes and mental models to help make implicit learning explicit. Students
are constantly asked "how?" "How does this happen?" "How do we
know?" Mind-mapping helps students graphically organize information and concepts.
Topics are introduced generally and globally first, to give a sense of the overall
context, before details are presented. Teachers patiently answer "why"
questions, point out patterns in nature, and introduce skills of grouping objects, ideas,
facts and other key ideas. They read to children and ask for patterns of organization:
cycles of cause and effect, etc. Teachers ask questions that compare and contrast elements
in nature. They help children learn to use jigsaw puzzles, blocks and dominoes, use
stitchery to learn patterns, and use toolboxes to sort bolts, screws, buttons, etc.
Students learn to listen for sound patterns, particularly in nature. At the conclusion of
topics, students consider the pros and cons, discuss the relevance, and demonstrate their
patterning with models, plays and teachings. Children think about their thinking, and
discover the methods by which they learn best.
Memory and Recall: Rhymes, mnemonics,
visualization, peg words, music and discussion are used to encourage accurate memory and
recall of information. Teachers interrupt their own sentences to call on students to fill
in a vocabulary word being learned or reviewed so students practice pulling the word from
memory, through the speech pathways, and into spoken language. Students learn to stop
every quarter to half page to take notes, discuss what is read, and reflect. Key ideas are
repeated within 10 minutes of first learning, again 48 hours later, and yet again 7 days
later. Children age 6-9 are given short chunks of instruction, and no more than 1-3 chunks
at a time. The most important information is discussed first and last in a lesson.
Important ideas are introduced with music, storytelling, props, costumes or other
attention getting activities. Lessons are designed to intentionally interrupt learning and
create cliff-hangers. Research shows the technique works to heighten interest and tie
together whole knowledge from one day to another.
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CULTURE
The Xara schools are most distinguished by their culture of radical
kindness, cooperation, participation, international belonging, and service. Here, as in
all aspects of the program, The Xara Garden School will model the best examples we can
imagine, and in that sense, the school community has already arrived in the better future
that Xara envisions.
Radical Kindness: From top to
bottom, and in every minute, everyone at the Xara Learning Village will conduct themselves
in a culture of radical kindness. Most rules of conduct are prohibitive, forbidding one
act or another. Xara culture begins with a rule of mandate, "Be nice." In these
two syllables are contained all the prohibitions, and something more. They also contain an
affirmative duty to act - to be aware of people and their needs, and to create kindness
that helps and supports them.
Participation and Belonging:
"No spectators!" Everyone is expected to give of themselves and jump in with
both feet. Respect is paid to individual effort and risk in an environment where everybody
is kept working at the edge of their comfort level. Everyone is encouraged to stretch the
bounds of their comfort in learning all the time.
Courtesy and manners: A formal
curriculum of manners and etiquette will be provided, beginning in Kindergarten, and
expanded and applied throughout students’ educational careers. These social graces
provide confidence, poise, and a culture of respectful courtesy. They will also
distinguish Xara students among their peers, and pave the way to adult and commercial
life.
Cooperation and competition: While
competition may drive the evolution of the marketplace and the extinction of species, it
is not the highest form of human relationship. The opportunity to emphasize cooperation
and collaboration over competition exists in public education. The culture world will
teach its own lessons of competition. Xara Learning Village is a place to learn, practice
and apply the skills of setting goals and meeting challenges together. Excellence
is its own reward.
Service and the Gift Economy: The
elements of the Xara Learning Village culture reach their fullest expression in its
commitment to Servant-leadership and a gift economy. "Be nice" internalizes a
self-validating motive of service to others. Research proves that service to others is a
powerful factor in creating personal happiness, and even mandatory taxation "feels
good" if the unwilling taxpayer believes the money will serve a common good.
The Xara Learning Village will carry this idea to fulfilment by structuring instruction
and learning on a "gift economy." Research and cultural practice demonstrate
that people are motivated - very powerfully - to undertake work without any prospect of
commercial benefit, simply as a gift. The Xara schools will apply this gift economy as the
foundation of its instructional program. Work is not assigned-and-due as in an employment
relationship. It is done for the fun, pride and satisfaction of presenting benefit for
others. This approach is particularly well-suited to inquiry-based learning, where
subjects and resources are self-selected. Peer pressure and team commitment effectively
encourage completion of meaningful work. The same work will be done as in a regular
classroom, and the same standards will be applied, but through this switch in intention,
the subject material will be learned more deeply and the student will reinforce the
internal motivations for work and service.
Learning Community: "What did
YOU learn today?" is both an educational strategy for reviewing learning with
students at the end of the day, and also a dinner table game to play with the whole family
as homework. Everybody learns every day, and family members all share something they have
learned. Simply playing the game makes one more conscious of what one does learn, and more
mindful of the joy of learning as it occurs. At every opportunity, every member of the
Xara Learning Village will model the fun and personal satisfaction of learning, with
teachers learning along with their students and applying the same methods of discovery and
application to their own projects. This is the same attitude that drives data-driven
improvement within the school organization itself.
Stewardship and Vanguard: The Xara
emphasis on sustainable development, character, kindness and service compel an attitude of
determined stewardship toward our shared planet and its inhabitants. The culture of the
Xara Learning Village is fiercely green. Moreover, Xara students will understand
themselves as the vanguard of a new generation of global stewards, committed to leading
the way and finishing the job.
2009-2010 Xara
Garden School Student Registration Form
Executive Director,
Mark Hinkley 619.820.6188
welcome@xaraschools.org
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