OUR PHILOSOPHY

• Constructivism. You are in charge of your own learning. You learn when you participate actively in the learning process. By doing this, you create your own understanding of new information and add it to what you already know.
• Collaborative Learning. You learn better when you have to work together with other students to accomplish a task. Your teacher knows that everyone has a different way of doing things and plans opportunities for you to demonstrate your learning.
• Communicative Learning. You learn more deeply when you have to interact with other students and share the new information you’ve learned. You interact when you listen or speak to someone, read what they’ve written, or write to them.
• Task and Project-based Learning. You won’t know if you’ve learned the new information well until you have to “do” something with it…solve a problem, develop a new way of doing something, or create an intellectual product.
• Integrated Skills Learning. You can’t speak to someone if you can’t understand what they’re saying back to you. You can’t create a sentence without grammar or vocabulary. In the real world, all the skills are used together. That’s how you’ll learn them.
• Learning vs. Teaching. You are the center of learning. The teacher plans a learning activity and guides you through it, step by step, until you can do it yourself. The teacher is there to help and support you, to encourage you and give you feedback. Nobody can teach you; only you can learn.
• Critical Thinking and Reflection. You learn best when you have to judge the work you and other students have created and think about the process you went through to create it. These are the “21^st century skills” that American universities want in their students.