Our Learning Model


Curriculum and Assessment
The Quest to Learn curriculum is organized around four integrated learning domains: The Way Things Work, Being, Space and Place, Codeworlds, and Wellness, as well as a media literacy/design course called Sports for the Mind, and a number of electives. These integrated domains are interdisciplinary and integrate the traditional domains of math, science, history, and literature to form practice spaces for students to gain experience in different ways of knowing. Each learning context is concerned with helping students develop a game design and systems-perspective of the world, by which we mean students being able to see and understand the world from the perspective of the dynamic relationships between parts of a whole.

This approach to understanding resists customary methods of analytic problem solving, which ask learners to break-down problems into component parts for discrete examination—a skill that is no longer sufficient in today’s complex global society. By examining the interrelationships of elements within whole systems via a game design pedagogy learners are better equipped to recognize patterns that offer critical insights into the nature and complexity of systems (social, technological, natural, and imaginary) shaping their world.

domains

Domain Descriptions
The Way Things Work (integrated Math/Science)
Students practice taking different kinds of systems apart and modifying, remixing, and inventing systems of their own. Students learn about system structure and dynamics, through hands-on work with concrete applications, such as breaking down small machines in science. Students design systems and make measurements that are relevant to improving the quality of their lives. Through the use of different systems like games, models, digital simulations, and stories, students learn to engage with their world holistically, providing strategies for participating and creating change in the world.

    Core Values of the Domain:

  • All systems can be taken apart and reduced to set of component parts;
  • Students gain a particular perspective of the world when they are given opportunities to take apart, modify, and invent systems;
  • 21st C inventions are necessary to a sustainable world;
  • Emphasis is on helping students to recognize patterns, identify structure, and formulate general principles;
  • Work in the TWTW should reflect current needs in innovation (e.g., green technologies);
  • TWTW supports connective thinking and creativity across physical, social, technological and cultural systems. Connective thinking and creativity are key literacies of the 21st century;
  • Creating models of systems is a concrete way to give physical description to complex phenomenon.

Being, Space and Place (integrated ELA/Social Studies)
Students consider with time, space, and human geographies as forces shaping the development of ideas, expression, and values. Within Being, Space and Place students are challenged to see themselves in relation to the spatial and social world around them, focusing on the interaction between the individual and a web of systems they influence and inhabit. Students explore personal, socio-cultural, physical, living, and imaginary systems as contexts for learning, seeking to understand the nature of the individual and how the identity of that individual shapes their world. POV and perspective-taking are core tools in this domain; by responding to viewpoints, debating, and taking a stand, students become aware of systems of relationships: empathy, cooperation, reciprocation, ethics, tolerance, and citizenry in a global world.

    Core Values of the Domain:

  • We travel within multiple cultural systems;
  • Humans are agents who can influence the world around them;
  • Students mindfully take apart, create, and analyze personal, socio-cultural, physical, living, and imaginary systems;
  • A person’s identity informs the way he or she interacts with the world;
  • Understanding and taking on diverse perspectives leads to deeper levels of complex thinking;
  • The design of the curriculum should offer students opportunities to take a stand on issues they care about while exhibiting empathy, cooperation, reciprocation, ethical standards, and tolerance for diverse points of view;
  • Agency is developed out of membership and influence ability within and across communities;
  • Learning is anchored within a framework and understanding of what it means to be an active global citizen;
  • Students understand and appreciate multiple perspectives when using strategies as dramatic role play, literature response, and debate;
  • The continuous interplay of contextual factors— such as being, space, and place—influences how we experience and make meaning of the web of systems we study and inhabit in our daily lives.

Codeworlds (integrated Math/ELA/Computer Programming)
Students practice decoding, authoring, manipulating, and unlocking meaning in coded worlds, to meet shared needs or for their own purposes. Work in this learning context requires students to practice with the concept of language and literacy across disciplines, from math to ELA to computer programming. Codeworlds draws on games as learning environments that produce meaning through the interpretation of symbolic codes ordering our world. As students reflect on how the underlying rules of a system shape expression and communication, they gain experience in comprehending the world as a meta-system made up of multiple systems, each containing a set of values, assumptions, and perspectives.

    Core Values of the domain:

  • All codes convey meaning;
  • Need for literacy across systems: code is key to that literacy;
  • Math is a language that describes the world;
  • Students will gain literacy in multiple languages;
  • Code is a symbolic system that is predictable, repeatable, and interpretable;
  • Code is a material for the representation of ideas;
  • Code is a common way of making meaning between people (shared);
  • Code is a foundation for innovation;
  • Code is organized by rule sets;
  • Code is a dynamic system;
  • All language is constructed & can evolve and change;
  • Ordering, sequencing, patterning (novel);
  • By manipulating language you can create worlds;
  • Meaning can be translated across symbolic systems;
  • Students will re-imagine worlds through code;
  • Code demonstrates the power of language.

Wellness (integrated socio-emotional learning, PE, nutrition, health)
At Q2L Wellness is a domain and school-wide practice where students appreciate and know what it means to be healthy. Wellness situates personal, social, emotional, and physical health within larger systems, including peer groups, family, community, and society. In 6th grade Wellness, for example, students will learn to see the body as a complex, dynamic system affected and changed by systems that are both internal, and external to it. Through practice in the Wellness domain students will develop strategies for keeping their bodies running at optimal physical, social, and emotional levels, while learning to make healthy choices. Wellness expertise is distributed across disciplines such as exercise science, human sexuality and personal health, nutrition, youth development, expressive arts, mindfulness, interpersonal and group dynamics, life coaching, conflict mediation, and movement. Q2L students cultivate ownership of wellness practices that have an impact on all interactions in their daily lives and the communities of which they are part.

    Core Values of the domain:

  • Integrative health exists across physical, social, and emotional systems;
  • Wellness is a strategy by which students can learn to recognize and manage emotions, care about others, make good decisions, behave ethically and responsibly, develop positive relationships, and maintain the wellbeing of their community;
  • Students understand and respect self, self and others, and self in community;
  • Wellness is dynamic, emergent and changing over time;
  • With responsibility for and ownership of wellness practice, students gain and sustain lived, ‘true to you’ health;
  • Health reflects energy and balance – equipoised states of being;
  • Mindfulness and reflection support well-being;
  • Wellness happens with active, engaged, ‘can do’ participation;
  • Wellness philosophy informs the Q2L model of being in a community of learners;
  • Wellness domain supports learning well and learning to be well in mind, feelings, and body.

Sports for the Mind (integrated game design and media arts)
The fluent use of new media across networks has become an essential prerequisite for a productive career, prosperous life, and civic engagement in the 21st century. Sports for the Mind is a primary space of practice attuned to new media literacies, which are multimodal and multicultural, operating as they do within specific contexts for specific purposes. Work in this domain introduces students to tools that are foundational to the curriculum, starting with game design platforms in the 6th grade, moving into programming tools in the 7th grade, onto work with virtual worlds in the 8th grade, toward immersion in data visualization and knowledge management tools in the 9th. The selection of toolsets is achieved in coordination with the rest of the curriculum.

    Core Values of the domain:

  • Productive and prosperous citizens in the 21st century need to posses a fundamental understanding of the various modes of new media communication;
  • Students learn and exhibit new media literacies most powerfully when they take on multiple tasks in the creation of new media artifacts;
  • Toolsets organize and support specific forms of literacy;
  • Game design, media arts, computer programming, and urban design are applied contexts for the acquisition of new media literacies.

Assessment
Our assessment program is driven by the following principles:

  • Assessment is situated in learning—located in the discourse, actions, and transactions of individuals, peers, and groups.

  • An assessment program should be designed to allow learners to eventually assess themselves.
  • Assessments should measure the extent to which students can innovate within a domain.
  • Understanding students’ learning and the school’s effectiveness is best facilitated by data.
  • Smartools are a primary form of assessment: Students use data provided by smartools they themselves create to understand and use to meet their own learning goals.
  • Students are accountable to themselves, to their peer community, and to the school.
  • Success is mediated by continual reflection and evaluation of the school’s goals and mission.
  • Knowledge to be assessed emerges from engaged participation, reasoning, and resolution of Missions and their Quests.
  • Assessment tools support valid inferences about learning. Assessment tools must facilitate answers to the question: “What does a particular performance reveal about how students know, reason with, and use their knowledge?”
  • Assessment is dynamic: equitable and inclusive, meeting student needs before, during, after, and in between learning experiences.
  • Participatory assessment requires that expectations, co-constructed and delivered criteria, and documentation be ‘open source’ for all participants.