A Community of Learners
Galilee's clear image of the child invites participation and makes everyone feel they are part of the community of learners.
Learning is a reflective social and collaborative process. Learning is most powerful when children work with other children, their families, teachers and the community. Staff, students, parents and community are therefore partners and co-constructors of learning. Adults and children learn hand in hand and teachers are guides, facilitators and scaffolders of learning.
The curriculum comes from adults listening to and observing children closely; they ask questions in order to discover theories and hypotheses. We want to know what the children think, feel, and wonder.
We believe that the children will have things to tell each other and us that we have never heard before. We are always listening for a surprise and the birth of a new idea. This practice supports a mutual quest for understanding. It is a practice of searching together for new meaning.
Image of the Child
Children are unique individuals, strong and capable. From the moment they are born children use their extraordinary wealth of inborn abilities, strength and creativity to build relationships and mental models for personal, interpersonal, social, cognitive, affective and even symbolic ways of knowing.
Underlying our relationships and interaction is the belief that children are not shaped by experience but rather that they give shape to experience.
Work in Progress
If you look around Galilee you might be tempted to think that the kids had forgotten to pack up their activities. Chess games sit half played; farm animals sit in their wooden enclosures, and in another corner a little house lays quiet, phone still off the hook as if someone left mid conversation.
If you look a little closer you'll notice something you've never seen before the work in progress card. These cards are like treasures to our children. The work in progress card has a student's name and photo and sometimes the words work in progress.
In other places around the school you will see handwritten signs that designate an area as, to be continued.
Hundred Languages
At Galilee we encourage children to express themselves in many ways. It is about observing the whole child and goes hand-in-hand with your image of the child. Then it's about providing an environment that engages learners with thoughtful teacher provocations or with learning that emerges organically from the child.
