Our carefully designed structure provides a firm foundation for innovative teaching

For any system to function successfully, all of its elements and processes must be designed to support its mission. We designed each element of the Whole Life Charter School to support the education of its unique student demographic and prepare them to be creative, entrepreneurial, thinkers in a rapidly changing 21st century world. To complete the design of our school, we made the following choices to support our students, our teacher/advisors, and the mission:  

The Whole Life Charter School will be a small school. – A maximum student population of 350 students will be divided into three schools of approximately 108 children, lower (grades 4-6), middle (grades 7-9), and upper (grades 10-12). These schools will in turn be divided into small advisor-led groups (advisories) having a maximum of 13 students each. At this small size, each student will be identified as an integral part of the learning community, known by all other students and advisors in the population. Our small population facilitates many of the school’s activities and is a key element of our design.

The Whole Life Charter School will provide daily professional growth opportunities for our teachers. – Teaching is an exacting profession that requires creativity, tenacity, people skills, intuition, and emotional maturity in addition to familiarity with ones academic discipline. It is said that “creativity doesn't happen in a vacuum” so we have scheduled daily teacher training periods to help us develop teachers/advisors who are truly expert at working with our targeted student demographic. During these periods our cohort will meet to receive instruction, brainstorm as a team to improve teaching practices, school processes, and curricula, identify opportunities for interdisciplinary teaching, share successful practices, identify students dealing with troubling issues at school or at home, and get valuable support from their peer advisors.

Bring the outside world in – To hone our teacher’s skills even more, we have arranged for support from the education departments of several universities including the University of Pennsylvania and Temple University. We have also budgeted for coaching from both the Big Picture Company and the Edvisions school networks upon which parts of our school’s design are taken. These school networks have agreed to send us their trainers, professors, and graduate and advanced undergraduate students to act in the capacity of tutors and researchers. With the constant influx of fresh blood and new ideas, our advisors and our administration will constantly improve in their work and our entire community will benefit. Finally, we have arranged dual enrollment opportunities for our students with Montgomery County Community College. Interested Whole Life Charter School students may take courses that interest them from the college’s diverse range of classes.

Make learning meaningful to the student  – Whole Life Charter School students will have the opportunity to create projects that have real meaning to them. After adjusting to our unique environment and methodologies and a lot of preparation and self inquiry, a student’s personal interests become the focal point around which nearly fifty percent of her/his curricula is designed. The educational program at WLCS will require that students learn how to learn through focused study and hands-on experience in a truly customized curriculum they create with the guidance of their advisors.

We will evaluate to inform and assign grades when necessary. – We designed our approach to student evaluation with the following understanding:

1. When evaluated by a letter grade, most competitive students will do the minimum necessary to “get an ‘A‘” but rarely explore farther or find joy in the exploration. Learning, so as to ”get the ‘A’” becomes a job necessarily completed to get to the next step. That is why so many students forget as much as 90% of what they learned six months after any test.
2. For less competitive students the letter grade becomes a reaffirmation of their diminished capabilities.
3. While a very efficient method for teachers having as many as 150 students per semester, letter grades offer little guidance to students.

We believe that narrative assessment is far more useful and far less punitive than the letter grading system. The small size of our advisories allows our advisors to assess students in narratives that explain their successes and failures. These narratives give our students explicit guidelines that they and their parents can use to improve their performance and rebalance their curricular priorities. Letter grades are retained primarily for the purposes of college placement.

A school day considerate of real children – Research has shown that children need more sleep during a twenty four hour period than adults. Our daily routine will have learning begin later in the morning and permit students to engage in more structured academic pursuits at a time when research suggests they are most receptive. While parents will be able to drop their children of at an earlier time, our day will begin at 9:00 am and will end at 4:00 pm. We will also build flexible time into a school day and allow learners time to practice with concepts they feel they need to fortify and apply them to areas of personal investigation.

Everyone will be “in the loop” – A student will remain with one advisor throughout his or her enrollment in each of the schools (Lower, Middle, Upper) allowing time for the development of strong interpersonal bonds between and among the student, the advisor, the student’s parents, the student’s mentors, and other advisory members. Students will work with their advisor almost every day. Should you need information on your child’s progress, your student’s advisor can bring you up to speed at a moment notice.

Cooperative, project based learning will be a core teaching method. – Students will be encouraged to learn together in project teams, learn through real-world experiences that are tied to their interests with adult mentors outside the school walls, and share their academic mastery, nonacademic skills, and talents as peer mentors so that they may become confident teachers as well as expert learners.