Curriculum Principles

Our Goal: A Student Who Flourishes as a Joyous Child Today, and as a Successful Adult Tomorrow

At LePort, we help our students acquire the essential knowledge, thinking skills, and strength of character required to be successful and happy, both now and for the rest of their lives. Our unique program emphasizes the relationship between the academically challenging material presented in the classroom, and the breadth of experience children have in their lives outside of school. With the knowledge they gain at LePort, students are able to understand and delight in both the wondrous world around them and their burgeoning personal identity within.

We Raise Questions That Arouse A Child's Interest, And Then Answer Them With Real, Step-by-Step Evidence, Not Just Words to be Memorized

Young children—preschoolers and second-graders, say—are inherently curious and eager to learn. By 8th grade, though, this eagerness all too often gives way to cynicism and disengagement. Central to our unique approach to educating children is the goal of kindling the flame of curiosity, so that it grows, not atrophies, as your child advances through our program.

We implement this approach through the detective story principle of teaching, which builds upon the child's natural curiosity. First, we spend time raising a question in the child's mind—a question that leads each child to be sincerely interested in learning, and that is personally relevant, given his unique context of background knowledge, skills and interests. The questions come first, the content, second. For example, in math, we puzzle the students by asking them to calculate "5 + 10 × 3", allowing some to come up with 35 and others with 45 as the answer. They argue about which answer is correct and eventually realize that the answer depends on the order in which one goes through the calculations. Now the students are puzzled about this issue, and are thereby primed to learn a lesson on the rules for stipulating which order of operation is correct. Imagine how much less exciting and interesting it would be if, rather than going through this exercise, the teacher started off the class by simply stating what the rules are regarding the order of operations.

Our answers are always about the world, not words: We offer our students systematic, sequential instruction so they can build knowledge upon knowledge, and always know why they are learning something, and how it ties to the world. This is what makes learning motivating: being able to understand the world! In contrast, memorizing floating constructs such as the process of photosynthesis, without understanding the deeper what and why, turns eager learners into reluctant students. What could be more boring than being asked to memorize "2n CO2 + 2n H2O + photons → 2(CH2O)n + n O2 + 2n A" without being presented with a clear explanation of why the process described by this equation even matters?!

Throughout, we add a personal touch: to engage the child's interest, we take his full context into account—i.e. his background knowledge, his skill level, his values and interests. A student who comes to us with a weakness in foundational math will struggle in class, so rather than ignore the problem we offer him dedicated tutoring to remedy his unique skill gaps. A creative child who loves writing, but lacks organizational skills, will fail in writing class, so we take the extra step of providing her with focused coaching on project planning and time management. A child who has experienced history at another school as dry recitation of dates and figures may not give the subject a chance, so our history teacher puts forth an extra effort in tying the historic events to things that he knows about the child.

We believe in mastery, not just empty grades based on memorization or pattern-recognition: to keep knowledge meaningful and fun, we create real application opportunities in each subject all the time. Our students write creative stories with vocabulary words (instead of checking off multiple choice answers by rote); they work through challenging word problems in math (instead of applying a memorized process to solve plain equations); they draft a letter inviting immigrants to Jamestown or the Puritan colonies (instead of memorizing a disconnected list of names and dates). Our student think about the content we want them to remember, and thus make the knowledge their own and retain what they learn.

Throughout, our academic approach takes the student's personal development into account: we create a prepared environment which facilitates each child's choice to learn. Because we expect each student to apply himself, to revise his work, to develop organizational and time management skills, and because we emphasize that success is within his control, our approach helps the student to develop a mastery-focus and a growth mindset which serves him well throughout his life. Our students aren't discouraged by a bad performance or a low grade—they persevere, because they have learned that with effort, they can make good things happen.

A Purposefully Selective Curriculum of Essential Knowledge, Thinking Skills, With An Integrated Approach To Personal Development

At LePort, our goal is not just to churn out erudite scholars—but to enable our students to develop themselves into young high-minded individuals. LePort students grow into individuals armed with the knowledge, thinking skills, character traits and practical life skills that they need to become mature, capable and happy adults.

Our core curriculum focuses on the trunk of the tree of knowledge: the thinking skills and essential content that every young person needs to master in order to live as fully developed individuals.

• We teach language arts, with separate classes on spelling, vocabulary, grammar and writing to enable our students to think and communicate with clarity and sophistication.
  
  
• We teach literature so students can enter exciting worlds, meet heroic characters, and contemplate what's possible in life. As our students study classic works of fiction, they not only improve their thinking and communication skills, but also learn important moral lessons, lessons that they can use to guide their own choices.
  
  
• We teach history so that students remember the past, lest they repeat it today. We enable our students to discover the colorful cultures of the past, to follow the steps of heroes and villains throughout time, to understand the sequence of events that have created the world we inhabit today, and to learn to draw larger conclusions about the successes and struggles of man based on solid, factual evidence.
  
  
• We teach mathematics so children learn to measure the world. We equip our students with the practical math skills and the conceptual training they need to function as adults. We provide them the rigor they need to succeed in demanding math classes in high schools, and to open up the opportunities of careers in the sciences, business and technology.
  
  
• We teach science so children discover and appreciate the wondrous world we live in. We teach them about the world, not words: our science program starts with observation, and is guided by the scientific method. Our children acquire a structured breadth of observational data enabling them to really understand the more advanced, theoretical lessons of high school and college science.

We complement this core with a deliberate program of personal development, which at LePort is not a sermon on virtues delivered in a classroom, but is integrated and applied inside every classroom and practiced throughout the day, from recess to homework at night. Our extracurricular activities and school-wide events complete our offering, enabling our students to develop a strong sense of personal identity.

Passionate Professionals—With Deep Expertise In Our Subjects, and a Love For Learning and Teaching

At LePort, we understand that excellent, motivated teachers are critical to delivering our unique program each and every day, to each child and family. We hire and develop Passionate Professionals to deliver the excellent education you have come to expect from LePort.

We have developed a clear approach to hiring: we don't rely merely on teaching credentials, but instead hire to our own very high standards. We select aspiring teachers with both deep subject matter expertise and genuine passion for their subjects. Our teachers are also people who have demonstrated a love of working with kids, and who are great individuals themselves—that is, honest, high-minded adults who can model upstanding character, and a passion for life.

Our teaching approach combines subject-matter expert teachers, homeroom teachers and mentor teachers.

• Subject-matter expert teachers ensure we teach deep academic knowledge, and integrate what we teach in a cognitively appropriate sequence across grade levels. Each LePort teacher thus has an area of expertise, which he knows and loves deeply.
  
  
• Homeroom teachers integrate a child's development across all subjects, and facilitate the growth of academic, personal and organizational skills that cross subject lines (such as using our planner system, improving note taking, or confronting an impulse to cheat).
  
  
• A mentor teacher is assigned to each student upon joining LePort, and serves as a personal contact who stays with the student throughout his stay at LePort. As a student moves from grade to grade, from subject to subject, his mentor will be a constant. His mentor assists him with his academic and personal development across a longer time frame, and serves as another independent check to ensure no child falls through the cracks.

We expect the best from our staff. Our teachers are not "just" responsible for their student's academic success, but also for maintaining our prepared environment, getting to know each student so they can support her personal development and take her context into account in their teaching, and ensuring regular communication with parents. For example, our teachers contribute to our "Tuesday envelopes", our weekly communication to families. They routinely share highlights of your child's experiences with you via e-mail. They don't just give letter grades on report cards, but instead provide very detailed paragraph-length descriptions of what your child learned each semester, and her personal academic development.

To help our teachers and administrators meet our high standards, we extend our "prepared environment" approach to our staff. In contrast to many schools, where teachers are in large part on their own, we provide systematic training, feedback and development to each staff member.

Our in-house training program. The goal of our training program is to help teachers develop to the highest standards while ensuring top quality instruction for our students. At LePort, new teachers always receive training before taking on a full course load. We generally recruit teachers in the spring, and have them observe, co-teach, and get training for several months before we assign them classes in the fall. In their initial year, depending on their past experience, new teachers will typically have significantly reduced class loads to ensure that they can thoroughly learn and apply the LePort method—both what we teach (the subject curriculum) and how we teach (our pedagogical approach). During their initial year, new teachers meet weekly with the Head of School and the head of their department to review lesson plans and to discuss observational feedback. (Each LePort teacher's class is observed by other teachers at least once a week. The observing teachers complete detailed feedback forms, which are reviewed by a member of our academic leadership team, and then discussed with the teaching teacher.) We also help new teachers address any specific challenges, such as a student with organizational problems, or a new child in class.

Our ongoing support program. Even experienced teachers need help to keep growing, and at LePort they receive it! Our approach to supporting the teaching staff models the very same growth mindset we want to instill in our students: everybody, no matter how advanced, can always improve. We support each teacher with ongoing class observations, regular staff meetings and training workshops to address such things as classroom management skills, techniques for motivating students, etc. We also hold "morning meetings" three times a week: these short, all-staff meetings ensure, for example, that everyone knows if a child has a special personal circumstance that might affect his learning (such as a death in the family) and can take this context into account in class and on the playground.

The goal of our hiring, training and communication systems throughout is to enable each teacher to consistently offer his best to your child, so that the quality of education meets our high standards each and every day.

Upper Elementary/Junior High Department Head Profiles