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What Gardner is?
The Gardner School is:
- Experientially based education: learning by doing through hand-on experiences using manipulatives,
field trips, and student-generated ideas.
- Child centered.
- Learning built through integrated thematic units and study.
- Process focused.
- Honors student choice and student ownership of the process of learning.
- Balance between collaborative work, cooperative learning experiences, and individual learning.
- Assessment of student learning through narrative reports and skill checklists.
- Broad liberal arts program.
- Intrinsic motivation.
- Joint goal setting between student, teacher, and family.
- Mathematical thinking rooted in problem solving and multiple solutions.
- Understanding built through making connections and global thinking.
- Risk taking, including an openness to learning from mistakes.
- Flexible arrangements of students in multiage classrooms with variations of heterogeneous grouping.
- Assessment for understanding.
- Community.
The Gardner School is not:
- All pencil, paper, textbook based, classroom contained learning with students listening to lectures and seated at desks.
- Teacher centered.
- Discrete bits of knowledge.
- Product oriented.
- Wholly teacher directed.
- Solely individuals.
- Letter grades.
- Narrow, academic, skill-focused program.
- Extrinsic motivation (grades, rewards).
- Isolated focus established solely by teacher.
- Mathematical focus on only computation with one right answer.
- Unrelated facts.
- Playing it safe, failure stigmatized.
- Homogenous ability grouping.
- Standardized multiple choice tests.
- Solely individuals.
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