Academics
Guest Post by Current TSS Parent If your 5-10th grade student isn’t thriving at their current school and you are considering other options, I highly recommend The Sycamore School (TSS). Our daughter transferred in November, and it’s one of the best decisions we’ve made. She went from having terrible school anxiety and refusal, to happily skipping inside the building and being incredibly proud of her school. She had horrible math anxiety, and now signs up for extra math classes to try to improve her math. She tells me that she now likes math! What makes TSS different is the small, personalized, engaging, and experiential learning. There is a lot of choice, and with that comes personal accountability and responsibility. TSS recognizes all students don’t learn the same way. They accommodate a variety of learning styles by offering a choice-based learning model with personalized instruction. In their words: “TSS is for students who would…
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A Conversation with Karyn Ewart, Ph.D. on Radio Hotline with Dennis Price Why can’t school be fun and engaging? When did school become all about worksheets? Why does learning stop at the walls of the school? Founder and Head of School Karyn Ewart discusses these topics and why she started The Sycamore School on the Radio Hotline with Dennis Price. This interview was recorded live on December 4, 2018.
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Educators and clinicians across northern Virginia are seeing a significant increase in the number of youth who are experiencing some level of anxiety. We’re also seeing the onset of anxiety start at a younger age and many children are significantly compromised by its affects. There is an increased prevalence of school avoidance, school refusal and somatic complaints. Anxiety can take many forms and some students are very good at masking it. Some students wear their emotions on their face. For those students, the anxiety is quite apparent. A student might have a look, their cheeks get red, their speech quickens or their expression changes. Other students hide their anxiety quite well, but parents report that when their child comes home, he or she falls apart. Some students start to exhibit physical symptoms, such as headaches and stomach aches. Other students start having difficulty sleeping. The question weighing on our minds…
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Summer is a good time to reflect on your child’s school and think about whether it’s a good fit. Did your child seem happy at school? Have friends? Enjoy learning? With back-to-school upon us, is your child upset about going back? Here are five signs your child’s school is not a good fit: School avoidance: Does your child not want to go to school? Does he/she struggle to get to school on time? School avoidance is a good indicator that something is not right at school. It could be academic, social or both. Unhappy: Does your child come home unhappy? Many parents report that their child is able to hold it together at school but when they come home, they fall apart. This is a signal that they feel anxious or stressed and are using a lot of energy trying to keep it together at school. Other children complain about…
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We don’t want perfectionists, we want risk-takers who will fail and learn from their mistakes. I want our students to make mistakes and [gasp, shudder,] even fail. Making mistakes is a great way to learn. Learning is disorganized, perhaps messy, and not linear. And yet, mainstream education presents curriculum in a manner and sequence that presumes a linear path of learning, leading students to seek perfection. At The Sycamore School, we regularly present students with challenging problems or tasks and ask that they go outside of their comfort zone to try something new. For example, one student is making a water wheel out of two LPs, lots of carpenters glue and a pencil. One of our teachers often warns, “the first model will be rough, but the next time you do it, you’ll know what to avoid and the process will go much more smoothly.” We teach students to value academic feedback.…
Read MoreLast year, when our school was being developed, we blogged about the SOLs. Now that we are are open and our students are thriving, and we have practical experience in authentic assessment, we felt the subject deserved another post. The Virginia Standards of Learning (SOL) are the Virginia public school’s standardized testing program that sets learning and achievement expectations for core subjects. The SOL Test is a minimum competency test designed to assess whether students have mastered the basic concepts of a core subject area. The evolution of the SOLs is a story of how a well-intentioned educational tool has undermined authentic learning. The SOL learning strands themselves are not “bad.” SOL standards can serve as a pacing guide, to ensure that teachers cover the basic tenants of biology, algebra or Spanish I. It’s the SOL test that is problematic. Many school systems mandate teaching to a test. Schools have…
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What to do when a fun activity turns into a gripe fest? Turn to leadership. I’m not sure if it was due to spring fever, or typical adolescent waxing and waning maturity, but our students’ behavior reminded me of children who get dessert every day and then start to complain about the flavor of ice cream being offered. But instead of dessert, our students were griping about field trips. Since we are committed to experiential learning, we aren’t going to take away field trips; instead, we put the students in charge of running the trips. At the beginning of each week, we ask for a volunteer student leader who is responsible for organizing the logistics of the trip. We’ve already chosen the destination (which correlates to our curriculum) but how we get there and the details of how we organize our group are up to the trip leader. Our leader…
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by Karyn Ewart, PhD. “He used to love school,” is a common refrain I hear from parents. Too many students are falling out of love with school after elementary school, when school transitions from hands-on learning to rote memorization, layered with a lot of homework and a culture of acceleration. Schools are holding college preparedness workshops at the end of elementary school; middle schoolers are taking numerous high school credit courses; then, in high school, students are encouraged to take as many AP classes as possible, so that they can earn college credit. The result of this acceleration? Students are constantly worried about how to get ahead instead of being present. How do we stop this vicious cycle of stress and help our kids learn how to learn? Parents are afraid to ask this question. They need to understand that we can’t engineer a good life for our kids by…
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It’s SOL testing season, a time where teachers are stressed out and kids are wishing school was done for the year. What are SOLs? SOLs are the Virginia Standards of Learning. They describe the commonwealth’s expectations for student learning and achievement in grades K-12 in English, mathematics, science, history/social science, technology, the fine arts, foreign language, health and physical education, and driver education (Virginia Department of Education, 2017). The SOLs include curriculum frameworks, scope and sequence guides and standardized tests that determine minimum competency in a subject area. Unfortunately, the SOL testing pass rates impact school ratings, school funding and are one of the criteria for obtaining a Virginia high school diploma. The Negative Impact Virginia public schools are increasingly resorting to scripted teaching, requiring teachers to teach in a prescribed manner, with identical scope and sequence. In short, teachers are not trusted to independently teach and assess their students…
Read More“I learned more in two hours than I do all day at school!”* *Incoming TSS student Students and their families are invited to participate in our hands-on open house on June 14th from 6pm-8pm. The Sycamore School is an experiential, problem-based learning secondary school with no homework for our middle schoolers! Explore The Sycamore School’s innovative, experiential approach to education at our June family open house. Students and families curious about how we do school differently can explore problem based learning in 3 consecutive 30-minute “pop up” classrooms – giving prospective students a taste of what it’s like to learn at The Sycamore School. Parents will have ample opportunity to observe student activities as well as hear from staff about the school and our curriculum. Families are encouraged to attend for the entire event. Please register so that we can accommodate all participants. Please note: the open house is held…
Read More“I learned more in two hours than I do all day at school!”* *Incoming TSS student Students and their families are invited to participate in our hands-on open house on June 14th from 6pm-8pm. The Sycamore School is an experiential, problem-based learning secondary school with no homework for our middle schoolers! Explore The Sycamore School’s innovative, experiential approach to education at our June family open house. Students and families curious about how we do school differently can explore problem based learning in 3 consecutive 30-minute “pop up” classrooms – giving prospective students a taste of what it’s like to learn at The Sycamore School. Parents will have ample opportunity to observe student activities as well as hear from staff about the school and our curriculum. Families are encouraged to attend for the entire event. Please register so that we can accommodate all participants. Please note: the open house is held…
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This article first appeared in early March 2017 in the Arlington Sun Gazette and InsideNOVA. The 2017-18 school year will bring the arrival of a new option in local education with the opening of The Sycamore School – a nonprofit, independent secondary school in Arlington. The inaugural class will include students in grades 6 to 8, eventually growing to 12th grade. Learning will be self-paced, and the school is “a good fit for students who are bright, curious and may not be thriving in their current school environment,” school officials said. The Sun Gazette recently queried Dr. Karyn Ewart, the founder and head of The Sycamore School, about how the institution will stand out among public and private education in the community. Questions and answers are below. One Arlington political leader used to always ask, when tackling an issue, “What problem are we trying to solve?” What problem, or challenge, in…
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