Our Program:
The International Approach
Teaching and Learning
Internationals promote heterogeneous and collaborative structures that build on the strengths of every individual member of the school community
Our beliefs:
- Individuals learn best from each other in heterogeneous, collaborative groupings
- The most successful educational programs are those which emphasize high expectations coupled with effective support systems.
- Students arrive with both linguistic and conceptual knowledge.
Our practices:
- Students are mixed by age, grade, academic ability, linguistic proficiency, native language, and prior schooling.
- Classes are not leveled by linguistic ability.
- Students, teachers and leaders work collaboratively on projects to produce common and individual products.
- Our schools give prestige to what is normally stigmatized (i.e., being an immigrant).
Internationals believe that language skills are most effectively learned in context and emerge most naturally in purposeful, language-rich, experiential, interdisciplinary study.
Our beliefs:
- Our students require the ability to understand, speak, read and write English with near-native fluency to realize their full potential within the United States and in the global economy.
- In an increasingly interdependent world, proficiency in a language other than English is a resource for the student, the school and the society.
Our practices:
- Students learn language through content through activity-based learning and a variety of assessment/end products
- We do not organize separate ESL or bilingual classes.
- Every teacher is a language teacher.
- Students make oral presentations often, starting early in their career and culminating in portfolio presentations at key junctures in their academic paths.
- Since English is the lingua franca, English language is fostered through collaborative student work on projects.
- Native language is fostered through project-based work among students sharing a language and through inclusion of native language products in varying forms.
- The locus of control for language use is the student, mediated by the context.