Academics
What if a high school has no grades? No Advanced Placement (AP) classes. No International Baccalaureate (IB) program. To most parents in Northern Virginia, this is profoundly unsettling information. They ask, “How will my child get into college?”. The current model is not working for many students, but parents are afraid of the unknown. What they don’t know is that a progressive high school like The Sycamore School (TSS) may be precisely what they need to get into college. The college admissions process has changed dramatically since most parents were in high school. More students than ever are applying to college and acceptance rates have dropped considerably. In 1970, 152,000 students were enrolled in college, by 2000, that number had increased to 382,000 students who were enrolled in college in Virginia. [EducationData.org; July 2021] This is a particular challenge in Northern Virginia, where nine out of the top ten top…
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“Is your school accredited?” Since opening The Sycamore School, that has been one of the most common questions. Answering that seemingly simple question was not easy and required some explanation. Schools can only apply for accreditation after they have been open for at least three years; some accreditation organizations require five years. As soon as we could, we started the accreditation process. We had a successful pre-accreditation visit in August of 2019 and had our accreditation visit scheduled for spring of 2020 when COVID hit. Our visit was re-scheduled for the fall of 2020 and then pushed back to April of 2021. It has been a long two years of hurry up and wait, but I can now proudly say, “Yes, The Sycamore School is fully accredited!” What does Accreditation Mean? Accreditation agencies ensure that educational institutions are providing quality education to students and a positive experience for their families.…
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Summer: a time for barbecues, swimming pools, and some much-needed R&R. The weather outside may be slowing everyone down, but here at The Sycamore School (TSS), we’ve hit the ground running. The staff has been hard at work to get set up for the 2021-2022 school year, planning experiences and electives, re-organizing the school, and taking on those projects we didn’t have time for during the school year. Students can expect to see re-organized cabinets, spotless classrooms, and refreshed teachers come August. Teachers have been working with their cohort partners and in content teams to create the trans-disciplinary curriculum that TSS is known for. Starting with the essential question and the final project, teachers reverse engineer an experience that’s designed to be as entertaining as it is instructive. We don’t want to spoil anything just yet, but this year’s showcases are looking to be a lively and entertaining return to…
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How do I fit into my community? How does my community affect my identity? What about my environment shapes my point of view? These are the questions we pondered this past year in the Middle School experience class, Let’s Take a Walk (LTAW). At The Sycamore School, instead of separate core classes, our students engage in transdisciplinary experiences each semester that incorporate content from english, science, history, and math under a unifying theme. For our LTAW experience, our youngest learners did a deep dive across several disciplines to better understand our community, our environment, and where we all fit into these respective communities. At the beginning of the semester, we focused heavily on identity and how we perceive ourselves. We studied the poetry of George Ella Lyon and wrote our poems based on her acclaimed poem, ‘I Am From.’ We used Lyon’s writing as a catalyst for our identity poems,…
Read MoreAt The Sycamore School, we take a different approach to math instruction. As an independent private school, we are unencumbered by arbitrary year-end standardized tests. Students are free to follow their choice of math concepts throughout the year in a manner that makes the most sense to them and a timeline that works for their brain. At TSS, our students learn at their own pace. In a traditional school setting, teachers typically introduce one new math concept per class. The idea is that this pace will be appropriate for the majority of students in the class. The problem is, students don’t all learn at the same rate. Some concepts they might pick up quickly and other concepts, they may need to work with longer. In a traditional classroom, some students understand the concept right away and are bored for the rest of class. Other students struggle with the lesson and…
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Our education system is getting derailed, and as parents, we are unwittingly becoming part of the problem. Somehow, we have lost what education and school are all about: learning. We want our kids to love learning and thrive in school. However, as a culture, we’ve become obsessed with achievement and accolades. Grades serve as academic cliff notes, becoming an easy and frankly inaccurate measure of how well our students are learning. What grades really measure is how well our students follow the rules. Our kids are smart and have figured out that good grades lead to praise and attention, which become their goal. So, they figure out how to maximize their time to get the best grades. Sadly, learning is not prioritized. Linda Flanagan writes about the pitfalls of grades in her article The Emotional Weight of Being Graded, for Better or Worse by Linda Flanagan, Mindshift 2016. She makes…
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Ecosystems Experience Blog – by Jon McKenney At The Sycamore School, instead of separate core classes, students engage in transdisciplinary experiences each semester that weave together content from english, science, history, and math under a unifying theme. Past themes have included Identity, Civilizations, Motion, and Forensics. This year, our Middle School 2 cohort (6th and 7th graders) is participating in the Ecosystems experience. Some central questions of the experience include How does climate change impact ecosystems? How do humans, animals, and plants all interact? How can I as an individual make a positive impact on my local environment? These are all big questions, ones that professionals can devote years or lifetimes to studying. They are also questions that the Middle School 2 cohort wrestles with on a daily basis here at The Sycamore School. Transdisciplinary Learning At TSS, we like to do things differently. From our mixed cohorts to our…
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Over the summer, we created a comprehensive COVID reopening plan which offered our students the choice of full time in-person or remote instruction. The vast majority of our students chose in-person and it has gone incredibly well. We certainly had our share of adjustments but overall the fall in-person instruction was quite successful. I think being able to offer in-person learning had significant positive effects on our students’ mental health. It also gave us an opportunity to onboard new students, establish rapport, and get our students comfortable with our routines and approach to learning. Read more about our first week of in-person instruction on our blog “First Week of In-Person and Remote Learning.” An essential feature of our reopening plan was having a planned switch to remote learning from November 30th-January 18th. We anticipated that COVID rates would be high, it would be the height of flu season, and that…
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We strive to do our best as parents and teach our children how to grow up to be self-sufficient adults. We also want them to become kind and generous adults. Good people. I recently read an article titled For Families: 5 Tips for Cultivating Empathy which reminded me that raising kind and generous adults is not an easy task. How do we cultivate empathy in our children? Our children learn from our actions more than our words. They pay attention to what’s important to us, how we spend our time, and how we treat others. If we want to cultivate empathy in our children, we need to model that behavior ourselves. How do we treat others? Not just our friends, co-workers, and family members who we deem to be our peers, but also the many individuals that make up our community, including waiters, cashiers, custodians, solicitors, and mail delivery people?…
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At The Sycamore School, we regularly participate in professional development training. They cover a wide range of topics over the course of a year from familiarizing staff with our on-line platforms, authentic assessment, and executive functioning supports, to anti-bias training and social-emotional skill-building. Last week during our teacher workday, we had professional development training on Mindfulness, specifically Mindful Educators. This was the third workshop in a series facilitated by Erin Sonn, M.Ed, ERYT, YACEP, who is a yoga instructor and mindfulness coach. In this workshop, Erin introduced the idea of a beginner’s mind, a Zen Buddhism concept, which is similar to a growth mindset or having a blank slate – opening up our mind and freeing it from past experiences and preconceptions. When applied to learning, it’s the idea of approaching learning with openness and curiosity. For example, sometimes we approach a subject with preconceptions that color our experience; for…
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Back to School 2020 has necessitated months of creativity and planning. The hard work paid off when our in-person learners walked through the door Monday for their first day of school. Simultaneously, our remote learners were logging on to start their first day. Each was exciting and eventful in their own unique way. But we all started this school year together as a community. It was an exciting, busy and eventful week. We were reminded that while proper planning and preparation are important, maintaining a positive and open mind is equally important. We have put in the months of planning and now we need to execute our plans being mindful of the current environment. Flexibility is our mantra for the year. Masks Not a big deal. Despite all the worry and anticipation around wearing masks, all the students wore their masks and didn’t complain. They seemed happy. Over the course…
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It’s one week before we open our doors (literally) for the new school year at The Sycamore School! It’s been a wild ride since we had to switch to a virtual model this past spring and as we’ve been preparing to resume class in-person next week. Every summer at this time, staff wish for an extra planning week to get just *one* more task done. Even though our core team works all summer preparing for the upcoming school year, it never feels as if we have enough time. There is always more we want to do to prepare for the upcoming school year. This year is no different. While there are still those little items on our to-do list that we are scrambling to finish, the hard work is done. We are ready. There is always excitement in the air the last week before school starts. This year the excitement…
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