The Uniqueness of the Long-View Experience: An Introduction to Unit Updates
If someone placed in front of me a gift in the form of a very large box in which the contents contained, among many other related items, an Ampersand hardboard panel, a couple of Senso clear primed linen canvases, a box of Cras Pas Expressionist oil pastels, two Princeton flat head brushes, a landscape set of Holbein acrylic paints, and Carlson’s Guide to Landscape Painting, I would assume that a huge mistake was made. It would certainly appear to me that someone received inaccurate information concerning my interests and talents, for I have no talent or experience creating in the medium of acrylic paint. And possessing many of the required tools along with a great deal of information about painting with acrylics is not nearly sufficient for me to even begin creating with this medium. A clear understanding of the medium, practice building skills or attaining proficiency in various techniques, receiving critical feedback concerning my efforts, and time refining my technique are just a few things that would be necessary for me to create with acrylic on canvas.
Over the course of this academic year there are a litany of concepts and ideas in every subject area that we have set for our learners to explore — a metaphorical gift box, if you will. However, we realize that this “gift box” with full of concepts and ideas from each subject area is not what makes the Long-View experience unique. Long-View’s uniqueness, instead, comes with our learner-centered orientation. With this orientation, we possess certain beliefs about teaching and learning that are counter to those that serve as the premise of traditional school models. And because of our unique orientation, we purposefully engage learners differently in order to meet our broad, future-focused learning outcomes.
Being learner-focused, we believe that every learner is innately curious. Children enter the world curious, and we work to help them maintain their curiosity — in fact, heighten their curiosity — and explore the world along with them. We believe that every learner is unique and that the uniqueness of the learner is important to the learning process.
The unique perspective, interests, experiences, and skill levels of each learner brings a richness to the learning experience that cannot be understated. Lastly, we believe that learners are, to some degree, always engaged in the process of learning, and the more that learners hone their learning skills the better able they are to maximize their learning experiences.
At Long-View, we recognize that the information learners explore in various content areas is not the end, but rather a means to an end. The content explored, then, serves primarily as a way of refining or honing important learning skills. Thus, our goal is to ensure that learners are able to access content at the highest possible levels by allowing them to have experiences that are as authentic as possible to the various disciplines. For example, wanting our learners to grow as writers, our learners immerse themselves in a specific genre, thoroughly examine the approaches of professional writers, and are provided the space and guidance to apply these approaches in their own writing. Long-View learners write, receive feedback on their writing, and iterate their works; they simply write, in many of the ways that professionals do, in order to become better writers. And in facilitating these authentic experiences, learners continue to refine the skills of critical analysis, communication, & collaboration, as well as the ability to devise new ideas or design novel works based on understandings they have acquired.
With the content of the various disciplines, our goal is to engage learners in ways that prompt them to think critically about the information. We want learners to recognize that their prior learning has value so that they make every attempt to use their prior experiences in order to help them access or understand new ideas. We want them to actively and deliberately take intellectual risks in order to forge reasonable connections between ideas, draw sound conclusions from data, and engineer or problem-solve based on their understanding of ideas. Mere consumption or memorization of information is far less important in the Long-View learning scheme. For this reason, understanding and using number relationships to compute in mathematics, for example, receives priority over the rote memorization of facts. Being able to recognize and use relationships for sense-making is a skill that can grow, that can be refined. Memorizing disparate facts or the steps of an algorithm, however, has little comparative value in one’s growth as a learner. And as learners are pressed to think critically in their learning experiences, they are also expected to communicate their thinking in a way that is clear and enriches the learning of peers. Thus, learners are coached to appropriately incorporate new discipline-specific terminology when expressing their ideas verbally or in their writing. They are also asked to consider their audience by carefully sequencing their thoughts in order to present their ideas in the most coherent way possible.
As we are ever mindful of the social nature of learning, collaboration is a large and crucial element of the Long-View experience. We believe — and through our practice continue to be wholly convinced — that learning is more powerful when it happens as a community endeavor. When learners are asked to collaborate — that is, create together — they learn the benefit of having their ideas carefully critiqued in order to avoid operating from misconceptions, they learn how considering other perspectives broadens their own view of the world, they learn that reserving judgement until more information is acquired helps to prevent flawed conjectures, and they learn that having to explain one’s ideas can reveals the strength of one’s understanding or effectiveness of one’s communication.
With learners working together to construct understanding of concepts and solutions to problems, they are simultaneously tapping into their creative identities. Creating by collaborative construction is cognitively challenging work and in traditional school models this work is almost solely reserved for the teacher. Teachers plan units and lessons, making sense of the curricular objectives, and then, they simply relay their understanding to the learners — they “tell” the learners that which the learners need to know. At Long-View, teachers, of course, are quite familiar with the terrain that they expect learners to traverse, but their goal is to guiding learners in the process of sense making: recognizing important strands of information and encouraging them to take risks to connect the strands in some reasonable way in order to then make draw a logical conclusion. This gets messy, but it is true to the learning process: deep, meaningful learning is the result of having grappled with an idea — seeing or vetting it through many channels. Again, learners construct their understanding together and they create or continue to build from that understanding. This critical, collaborative experience is the way in which we strive to engage Long-View learners daily.
So, at Long-View our ultimate focus is the development of learning skills for the express purpose of our learners taking an active role in their learning — assuming personal responsibility for their learning by setting their own goals, monitoring their progress, making critical observations, asking thoughtful questions, etc. These are not grade-level specific goals or even school-specific. They are all about learning and being a better learner. And, again, we use subject matter content to achieve this end. Thus you peruse the content objectives of each subject area in the Unit Updates we provide across the academic year, you may find the terrain itself impressive. And while the content may be impressive, it is ultimately the way that learners are engaged on a daily basis that makes accessing such impressive content possible. And it is the way in which the learners are able to express their knowledge and understanding of the concepts that makes the content meaningful.
Click to view the First Round Unit Updates from the 2020-21 school year.
