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1. Learner-centered, Inquiry, and Constructivist Approaches
- a. Take into account students' individual learning styles, multiple intelligences and cultural background
to insure effective instructional design and practices in the context of the local community;
- b. Assist students as they initiate self-directed courses of study;
- c. Allow students to construct their own understandings;
- d. Support students as they define specific learning goals and objectives.
2. Experiential Learning
- a. Support and monitor students as they undertake experiential learning activities;
- b. Require students to reflect on their experiential learning activities and communicate their findings to classmates, teachers and other appropriate audiences both inside and outside of their community;
- c. Create a continuum of learning that crosses grade levels and allows students to conduct multi-year research and service-learning projects that contribute to their community.
3. Engagement in the Natural Environment
- a. Use local natural and community surroundings as a context for interconnecting all of the educational practices into a comprehensive school curriculum strategy;
- b. Use local natural and community surroundings as a context for standards-based instruction;
- c. Help students develop understanding of natural systems in the local environment;
- d. Help students develop understanding of social systems and their community's cultural characteristics;
- e. Help students develop understanding of interrelationships and interactions among natural and social systems and their components.
4. Integrated, Interdisciplinary Instruction
- a. Provide students with opportunities to explore connections among subject area disciplines and among natural and social systems;
- b. Coordinate students' learning between subject areas and class periods;
- c. Cross traditional disciplinary and grade-level boundaries to develop comprehensive understanding of natural and social systems;
- d. Create opportunities to learn multidisciplinary perspectives for questioning.
5. Community-based Investigations
- a. Offer students opportunities to apply skills and knowledge in local surroundings;
- b. Provide students with opportunities to investigate real-world community problems and issues;
- c. Encourage use of higher-level thinking and creative problem-solving skills to achieve comprehensive understanding of the complexity of real-world problems and issues.
- d. Offer students the opportunity to realize how natural surroundings interact with diverse cultural, economic, and political perspectives and interests;
- e. Provide students with opportunities to pursue authentic issues of personal interest to them.
6. Cooperative and Independent Learning
- a. Facilitate students as they form teams to work on projects and investigations;
- b. Facilitate Socratic/dialogic seminars;
- c. Assure that student teams include a wide range of learning styles and ability levels;
- d. Help students develop group membership skills, leadership, and team member responsibilities;
- e. Help students develop negotiation skills;
- f. Develop students’ skills and confidence in self-directed learning;g. Create opportunities to select and pursue goal-relevant activities.
7. Collaborative Instruction/Parental Involvement
- a. Involve students and community members in planning and instructional delivery;
- b. Provide opportunities for teachers to model positive team relationships;
- c. Allow teachers to have regularly scheduled team meetings;
- d. Provide means for students to become actively involved in local community projects;
- e. Create opportunities to acquire and develop workplace skills;
- f. Encourage and pursue parental involvement in the educational process.
8. Personal Awareness and Interpersonal Dynamics
- a. Apply current brain-based research of developmental psychology and mind/body connection;
- b. Offer opportunities to explore individual learning patterns and make self-directed choices for learning;
- c. Model and foster a culture of healthy interpersonal dynamics and communication;
- d. Coordinate with the school counselor who is willing and qualified to direct this milieu.
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