Curriculum: Educational Philosophy

What Our Classrooms Look Like

The single most important organizing and visible principle of children's education at Bank Street is that in order to learn in school and to become lifelong learners, children must interact with their physical and social environments and interpret their experiences of them. When you enter our classrooms, the sights and sounds of children's active and industrious engagement with language and materials is immediately apparent. It's fairly common now to see younger children learning by experimenting with materials and resources in most schools. What's unusual is to see this kind of learning extended through the upper grades, as it is at the School for Children. Our commitment to these principles means that we organize our classrooms with an abundance of attractive and challenging materials and furniture that encourage individual and group study and interaction. We use teaching strategies that encourage children to make discoveries and, perhaps most obvious, but more unusual, provide children with the time to make meaning. Consequently, we choose fewer topics than traditional schools, but we organize and develop them thoroughly and in depth. A unit that might take one month in a more traditional curriculum might last as long as three months at Bank Street.

Learning is just as often a social process as a solitary one. Much of the time, children collaborate with each other or share individual responses about an artifact, a story, a historical document, or a shared experience. A small team of students might be challenged to make up a short skit that explains to the rest of the group the water cycle and why it rains. A class might be asked to read about and then debate how society might respond to people without homes. A group might operate a fruit market and sell fruit to other children and adults in the school and college building. In the block area, children eagerly meet the challenge of constructing buildings that reflect their ideas about their urban environment. Children often respond to their own reading and writing by meeting together in small groups and talking about it. Adults act as guides, facilitators with expectations, as they plan for and implement experiences from which children construct meaning with increasing depth and complexity. The integrity of each child as a learner, teacher, and classmate is valued and reinforced.

The development of the child as a social being, a major aspect of schooling, is strongly tied to the child's intellectual development. Children not only need to learn about living, working, and playing together, they learn by living, working, and playing together. It is important to the school that children communicate their ideas, share their experiences, pose their questions, and solve their problems in many different group settings because learning occurs, not only when one mind tackles one problem, but also when many minds tackle the same problem. Learning to solve problems together may be the single most important task we face as a society; it is a vital part of life in our classrooms.

Developing a sense of community and of social responsibility are recurring themes in our classroom curricula from the threes to the thirteens. It extends from small work groups or play groups to the larger group of the class itself, and then out of the classroom into the school community as a whole. Helping children learn to strike a balance between their needs as individuals and the needs of the group as a whole is an important part of our work. Children share and learn from each other's unique abilities and needs. They become social individuals who care for, respect, and contribute to the well being of others.