Past Events from Mar 07 – May 04 – Page 5

Students engage in SOAR’s core academic classes – reading, writing, math, science and social studies –where we teach a healthy balance of content understandings (what is the work?) and process skills (how do I do the work?). Each lesson starts with direct whole class teaching, and is followed by daily opportunities for assessment-driven, individualized teaching and learning experience.

Commitment to the Arts

All students participate in SOAR’s one of a kind, high-quality visual and performing arts enrichment program.

Social & Emotional Learning (SEL)

SEL is a process through which children develop fundamental emotional and social skills that help them be content, competent people who can have positive experiences in a shared community. The SEL “process” can take many forms for students. At SOAR, SEL means:

*Creating and using an SEL assessment to inform classroom and individualized instruction in the core SEL competency areas: self-management, self-awareness, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision making.
*Having a full time School Social Worker to work with small groups and individual students to support social and emotional learning and to create individualized learning plans with teachers in the area of SEL for children who need it most.
*Partnership with an on-campus, fully operational school-based health clinic that includes physical and mental health services and health insurance enrollment.

Community of Learners

Community of Learners: “…A place where all participants – teachers, principals, parents, and students – engage in learning and teaching. School is not a place for important people who do not need to learn and unimportant people who do. Instead school is a place where students discover, and adults rediscover, the joys, the difficulties, and the satisfactions of learning. In a community of learners, adults and children learn simultaneously and in the same place to think critically and analytically and to solve problems that that are important to them. In a community of learners, learning is endemic and mutually visible.”
– Improving Schools from Within, Roland Barth

Community of Leaders: “One definition of leadership… is making happen that in which you believe. A school can fulfill no higher purpose than to teach all of its member that they can make what they believe in happen and to encourage them to contribute to and benefit from the leadership of others.”
– Improving Schools from Within, Roland Barth