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Learning

Giddens School is committed to graduating students with a deep foundation in academics and learning, an awareness of their own and others’ social and emotional well-being, and a commitment to advocating for themselves and the world around them. For over 40 years, Giddens, a preschool through 5th grade progressive independent school, has been dedicated to developing students’ subject matter knowledge while supporting them to be curious, socially responsive, and creative young people well prepared to affect change.

We know from research that teachers and the quality of teaching is one of the central elements to student success. At Giddens, we leverage knowledge from practice and research to engage in ambitious teaching. Ambitious teaching is grounded on four principles and guide our decisions about how best to support student learning:

Equity in Action
Equity in Action

We challenge inequity within and beyond the classroom and school.

Deep Dives, Big Ideas
Deep Dives, Big Ideas

We engage students in rich content learning that is rigorous and deep.

Knowing the Whole Child
Knowing the Whole Child

We know students socially, emotionally, and intellectually.

Thinkers, Not Vessels
Thinkers, Not Vessels

We treat students as sense-makers.

Every aspect of the curriculum and instruction at Giddens School is designed to be excellent – providing students opportunity to gain content and skills of the highest quality. We also feel it is essential to include learning in any discussion of academic knowledge. We provide an academic program that is rigorous, supporting the development of deep understanding through strong instructional practices. At the same time, we recognize that students must also develop skills for learning to prepare them for the content of the future. The world that our students will enter as adults will not be the same one we live in now. We focus on developing learners to assure that our students will be prepared for that world. Giddens graduates enter middle school knowing many things, but they also enter it knowing how to gain and apply new knowledge.

The Giddens Way

Progressive education grounds our work at Giddens. Always at the center of our decisions is the perspective that we are educating the whole child—all of who a child is and can be. Always at the center of our decisions is the perspective of how we support students to be and become citizens who actively engage in advocating for themselves and others. Always at the center of our decisions it the perspective of what do students need to know about the content in order to engage intellectually in school and beyond.

A Community for All. Reflecting the rich ethnic, economic, and social diversity of the urban Seattle area, Giddens is dedicated to creating a space where students from all backgrounds belong and each student is celebrated for what they uniquely bring.

Confident Sense-Makers. Through effective academics, emotional growth, and multi-disciplinary inquiry-based learning, Giddens students build the skills to confidently make sense of, challenge, and solve problems in the world around them.

Advocates for the Future. Rooted in social justice, at Giddens School, students become capable and conscientious advocates - for their own learning and experience, for their peers, and for marginalized voices and communities.

Integrated Academics

Since its inception, Giddens School’s approach to teaching and learning has been steeped in the educational philosophy promoted by John Dewey and commonly referred to as progressive education. Progressive education is grounded by the following tenets:

  • respect for diversity and a commitment that each individual should be seen for their ideas, interests, needs, and identities, and
  • the development of a critical stance that allows individuals to participate fully and intelligently in a democracy.

Schools that adhere to a progressive philosophy prepare children to become citizens who fully participate in democratic institutions and ways of life. They do this by attending to the development of children’s intellect and also to their social and emotional development. Progressive educators understand children as whole beings that need support, care, and challenge to thrive in all the ways they are able. In short, progressive education focuses on the whole child and the development of that child to become a productive citizen in a democracy.

The Three Pillars

While grounded in progressive philosophy, over the past 40 years Giddens has adapted the tenets of progressive education to reflect the most up-to-date innovations in curriculum and pedagogy. At Giddens, our academic approach is grounded in three core pillars that support excellence in learning.

  • We prepare students with deep knowledge and understanding of the core content areas of schooling: mathematics, science, social studies, and literacy. Additionally, the process of learning to learn is central at Giddens. We support students to understand who they are as learners so that they can advocate for themselves.
  • We support social and emotional learning by working with students to develop their own understanding of who they are in relation to learning, to their communities, and to the world.
  • We engage students to understand the world through a social justice lens. This lens provides Giddens students with guideposts for understanding and actively participating in a democratic society.

This is an integrated academic approach. None of these three pillars stand alone at Giddens. They are not separate pieces of a pie, but rather the weft and the warp that is woven by teachers and students as they collaborate to learn.

Multi-Age Classrooms

Our model of grade band learning provides children with a multiage experience, whether they retain the same teacher over two years or they experience a new classroom community. The principles of diverse skill exposure, interaction with a range of individuals, and a pattern of leadership opportunities are in place throughout the grade band. The multiage approach, along with a two-year cycle of academic content, social-emotional learning, and social justice development provides children opportunities that cannot be found in other environments. A multiage classroom allows each child to develop their diverse skills within a broad range of learners, helping them to be well supported in their areas of struggle and to find authentic joy in their areas of success.

Anchored by these principles, we intentionally decide to organize the core elementary school years into multiage classrooms (1/2; 3/4). In doing so, we recognize that children grow and change at different rates, with different strengths and abilities. We embrace these differences as teachers plan instruction and assessments that expect and celebrate diversity within our classrooms.

Collaboration and Learning

Collaboration is key. Learning at Giddens is not a teacher standing up in the front of a classroom and imparting knowledge to students. Nor is it students deciding on their own what or how they should learn. It is a collaboration of a particular kind.

Guided by expert, dedicated teachers, students learn to explore and investigate the world around them through reading and writing, mathematics, social studies, science, and the arts. Teachers with expertise about content and student development orchestrate learning tasks for students. Through this intentional process, teachers learn a great deal about their students –who they are, what they want to learn, how they learn—and organize curriculum in ways that engage students fully–in ways that help students feel seen inside of the everyday learning of classrooms.

It is also the collaboration between students and students. All learning takes place in a social context and student-to-student interaction, problem solving together and talking about what they are learning is fundamental to providing the highest quality contexts for learning.

Collaborative relationships between teachers and students and students and students are at the heart of productive, thriving learning environments at Giddens.

Homework

At Giddens School, we believe that learning is an ongoing process that takes place throughout a child’s day and is not limited to specific environments or tasks.

Homework at Giddens is designed to support a family culture of learning and engagement. Nightly activities should include being read to, reading aloud to others, playing games, and engaging in conversations about the world around us.

This belief, grounded in educational research and child development best practices, informs our decision to focus homework on the developmentally appropriate goals below.

  • Be an opportunity to build connections between school and home
  • Support the real world application of developing skills
  • Support the building of literacy and math as everyday tools
  • Provide differentiated practice of basic skills, as needed
  • Be an opportunity for students to prepare for or extend upon learning experiences that take place in the classroom
  • Provide opportunities for students to take responsibility for their individual learning, including time and resource management (deepen their executive functioning skills)

Occasionally, at home learning opportunities to support classroom experiences will be offered by the teachers. Resources for families to support engaging learning experiences at home are also available.

Technology

Technology is incorporated into the curriculum from grades Kindergarten through Grade 5 as it is ubiquitous as a learning tool in education. Digital citizenship units help students develop an awareness of their presence online and guide positive decision making for themselves and others. This belief serves to guide behavior when using technology and to interact with others online. Students build an understanding of the Internet as a public place, being mindful of their privacy and use and that of others.

Students gain experience with technology in incremental stages and are exposed similarly. Learning how to use iPads and laptop computers efficiently is developmental, and those incremental steps are understood to be the basis of our technology program. Students learn how to facilitate their best use of writing, editing, and presenting software to organize and complete projects associated with various academic subjects. Students learn to code (write instructions for computers to understand), which develops critical and computational thinking skills. Students are asked to problem solve using a wide range of applications across multiple technology platforms (laptops, tablets, etc.…).

Our ultimate goal is for students to understand both the possibilities and restrictions of technology and to leave Giddens prepared for the changes that technology brings to society at large.