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Students are on this bus because they want to be.

Experiences are at the heart of change. We change when we do something, when we interact with the world.

The backbone is a hand-built, peer-to-peer learning environment, not a series of lectures.

Too often bits and pieces are tacked onto curriculum as yet another perfectly-reasonable-sounding-thing to teach.

There is nothing wrong with changes in priority. In fact, this is a signal of awareness and reflection and vitality. But when education—as it tends to do—continues to take a content and skills-focused view of what to teach rather than how students learn, it’s always going to be a maddening game of what gets added in, and what gets taken out, with the loudest or most emotionally compelling voices usually winning.

Skills are things students can “do”—procedural knowledge that yields the ability to do something. This could be revising an essay, solving a math problem, or decoding words to read. Content can be thought of as a second kind of knowledge—a declarative knowledge that often makes up the face of a content area. In math, this might be the formula to calculate the area of a circle. In composition, it could be a writing strategy to form sound and compelling paragraphs. In history, it may refer to the geographic advantages of one country in a conflict versus another. Should schools focus on content and skills, or should they focus on habits and thinking?

sense of inclusion and engagement in a common enterprise can have academic benefits as well as social-emotional ones

each takes responsibility for advising 28 of the house’s students, whom they follow through the end of sophomore year.

houses have not just missions, colors, chants and symbols but also hand signs and mottos—each classroom contains four colored containers.

we should deeply examine student work, and this must include robust student self-assessment.

Unfortunately, many transcripts or report cards simply give course titles and grades. We should have transcripts and final reporting mechanisms that show the whole child, beyond their grades and their work in typical cognitive domains.

Using noncognitive competencies as assessment tools in courses and student projects is often something that teachers don’t have much expertise in. Many teachers have been hired for their content expertise and they are much more invested in, and/or have been trained in, the assessment and reporting of cognitive competencies.