Dynamically Balanced Education
What Blue School has done that’s so exciting is to recognize that An integrated vision of child development must be built into a school’s dna. –Lawrence J. Cohen, advisory board member ii
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What is “dynamically balanced education” and why does it matter? From both research and experience, we know that academic learning alone doesn’t determine a child’s future success. Never has this been truer than in this time of rapid and dramatic change in the way people live, work, and relate around the world. So what will your child need to thrive? A well-stocked academic toolkit, certainly. But you also want him to develop adaptable and creative problemsolving skills, a compassionate, collaborative spirit, the optimism and courage to take on his biggest questions and ideas, and the self-knowledge to form and pursue his own ambitious vision for the future. At Blue School, we leave none of the essentials to chance. Through a singular marriage of methods that combine cuttingedge innovation with tried-and-true practices, academic seriousness with the necessity of joy, creativity, and exuberant play, we ensure the traditional goals of school, and all the essential aspects of a complete and balanced education— academic mastery, creative thinking, and self and social intelligence. By the time he graduates, your child is ready and eager to approach the blank canvas of the unknowable future. Here’s how we do it… 3
SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW This place feels like so much more than “school.” My son is learning the usual subjects, yes, but he’s also learning to assess and think on his feet, to negotiate complex emotions and build relationships with other people, to trust his ideas and put them out there—All the qualities he’ll need in life. –parent Innovative education isn’t merely about employing the newest techniques. It’s about recognizing the best of old and new, valuing all the essentials of a complete education and seamlessly integrating them into each moment in the classroom.
Academic content, meet a responsive curriculum. What defines a curriculum: the genuine interests of your student? Or the learning goals her teacher sets? Both! In dynamic balance. PRE-PRIMARY Exploring materials—water, dirt, clay, and paint—mixing dough, practicing numbers and letters, making music, performing a play, growing plants—your child’s pre-primary years, full of exuberant play and imaginative exploration, form the foundation for a lifetime of joyful learning. PRIMARY Reading rich texts, telling imaginative stories, making models, hypotheses, short films, scientific experiments, embarking on deep mathematical explorations: in every moment, your child’s curiosity and ideas lead the way, as she develops deeply integrated skills in literacy, research, the scientific method, mathematical reasoning, creative thinking, and self and social understanding. MIDDLE SCHOOL Critically discussing novels and non-fiction, building rich understanding of perspectives, points of view, and biases in historical and current sources, taking on interestdriven independent intensives, visualizing numerical relationships by modeling data, joining agediverse groups to create and enact service projects: in Middle School, collaboration, self-reflection, expansive creativity, and growing critical thinking skills help your student to hone her distinct voice and vision, and take on her biggest questions yet.
After a summer of research, two third grade co-teachers make a plan to ground the year’s learning in our school’s richly historical neighborhood, South Street Seaport. They know they’ll be teaching math, literacy, science, creative thinking, artistic expression, empathy, and collaboration, but to find out just what that learning will look like, they listen to their students. On a neighborhood walk, they ask the children to look, listen, photograph, observe. The Fulton Market sign intrigues the children: How old was it? Who used it? What were those people like? The walk becomes a treasure hunt, as clues to the long-ago past—the style and material of the buildings, the signs and cobblestones along the street, the boats in the water and the beautiful bridge—turn up everywhere. Over the semester, co-teachers and students devise a constellation of projects that bring the past to life: writing imaginative responses and poetry, creating a hallway installation of a timeline of events, inventing historical characters and writing researched monologues from those vanished perspectives, and finally, creating a living museum, with help from the drama specialist to record period sound effects, and the music specialist to learn period songs. These findings are proudly presented to the school community and, later, the South Street Seaport Community Board. But the very best part? Each student sees how her authentic interests can shape the course of her studies, finds fascination and relevance in each immersive project, and takes ownership of her own learning.
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Disciplined planning, meet masterful improvisation.
Snapshot measures, meet multi-dimensional assessment.
What makes a good teacher: the ability to design a richly layered and engaging lesson? Or the agility to follow students’ interests and adapt intelligently in the moment? Both! In dynamic balance.
Who can offer the best perspective on a student’s learning progress—teachers, parents, or the student herself? All of the above! In dynamic balance.
In fifth grade, the day’s reading of The Odyssey contains an offhand reference to a meal eaten on this mythical ship. A student’s interest is piqued: What kinds of foods were they eating? Another inspired question follows: Where would they get food on a long journey? Without a fridge, how would they keep their food from spoiling? The teacher directs the conversation to various ways of preserving food: pickling, brining, drying, salt. Seeing the scientific application at the heart of these questions, she proposes: Why not give these methods a try, and see which one works best?
TEACHER DEVELOPMENT Our teaching method demands the highest levels of mastery and engagement. That means that it also requires a lot of support, which is why we have twice-aweek planning meetings with our faculty, a deep commitment to professional development, and intensely collaborative teaching teams working in every classroom—embodying the kind of learning we seek to inspire in our students.
DOCUMENTATION Photos, video, transcripts of pivotal classroom moments, and students’ work itself: we use all kinds of documentation as tools for assessment, and we share them with you. With this insight, a conversation that starts in the classroom can make its way to the dinner table, homework time, or a bedtime story, and students, teachers, and parents can reflect and participate in moments of powerful learning.
PROVOCATIONS Each school year starts with a carefully crafted question, or provocation, created after months of research and collaboration between co-teachers and “co-curricular specialists.” When presented to the students, these open-ended provocations direct the course of the learning for the entire year.
PORTFOLIOS Each year, students of all ages select their most important work—highlighting their questions, triumphs, and growth in all areas—to create a comprehensive portfolio. Then, they present their portfolio to parents, teachers, and peers, reflecting on the year’s learning and the new goals they’ve set for themselves.
The class devises a science experiment with apple slices, only to realize that the weak winter sun won’t do much to dry preserve the fruit. Something more powerful is needed—an oven, which can magnify the sun’s rays! A couple weeks later, the science and sustainability specialist and parents join the class to help build students’ meticulously designed solar dehydrators. Later, students return to their creative written responses to The Odyssey, now focused on ancient meals at sea, and incorporate their new knowledge. Deep engagement, an immersive, integrated, and fun project, a search for the answers to genuine questions: when our teachers plan and improvise, putting child-centric interests at the center of each day, learning fulfills and often exceeds our advancing academic goals.
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CO-CURRICULARS Specialists in STEAM (science, tech, engineering, arts, mathematics), music, science and sustainability, studio art, movement, Spanish, math, physical education, and the dramatic arts—work with grade-level teachers to devise ambitious, large scale projects, like the creation of a school-wide composting system, or a wellresearched living museum.
MID- & END-OF-YEAR REPORTS We view assessment as a conversation that begins the moment your child arrives. In addition to a daily conversation that happens in person and over email, we create two narrative reports of your child’s progress— addressing benchmarks and curricular standards—and host family conferences to discuss our observations and ask and answer questions.
A written test gives a snapshot of what a seventh grader has learned about algebraic variables. But rather than a culminating evaluation, this is just one useful moment in an ongoing conversation that happens day-to-day, momentto-moment: What’s been mastered, and what needs more work? What’s another path you could try to get to the right answer? How do you feel when you’re stuck on a problem, and what helps you feel ready to try again, see a new possibility, make a breakthrough? At a teacher-family conference, she becomes an active participant in this ongoing conversation. She listens, and she speaks up: I’ve noticed that I like learning about history through reading novels, I learn math best when I can picture the numbers, I’m getting better at putting my thoughts down on paper. Teachers, students, and parents alike reflect on every learning experience, not only to evaluate past progress but also to inform the next challenge. Every day and in every subject area, we invite your student into a process of wondering, observation, problem-solving, and joyful accomplishment, shifting her focus from external markers of success to a selfsustained and irrepressible desire to learn. And this is how she learns to take on the future at Blue School: confidently setting ambitious goals for herself and reveling in every success and failure, because each one teaches her something new and moves her closer to bringing her vision to life.
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Individual voices, meet vibrant community. Where do young people learn best: in an environment where academic goals are always at the forefront, or where each student feels safe and supported? Both! In dynamic balance. A disagreement develops, as disagreements sometimes do, between two friends in kindergarten. While making up a story together, each wants his idea for the ending to prevail. Their teacher might have taken the children aside to help them work out their feelings, but today, after checking that both feel like sharing with the class, she sees a valuable opportunity to extend the learning beyond these two students. She opens the discussion to include the whole class. Friends, these two are having a disagreement. Can you put yourself in both of their shoes and imagine how they’re feeling right now? Can we all think together about how to move forward? The students reflect on their own experiences, offer words of support, and eagerly raise their hands. What if you make a choose-your-own-adventure and have both endings? How about two different stories? After some thought, the two friends reach a happy compromise: they each tell the story with the other’s ending. Kindness, empathy, conflict resolution, respect: when we explicitly include social and emotional intelligence in our teaching, we empower your child to create meaningful relationships with his community and speak up in his own unique voice. This kind of learning serves him well beyond the classroom, as a work partner, life partner, and global citizen.
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COLLABORATION When we ask our students to work together, they learn to share knowledge and ideas, build off of each other’s strengths as they create projects, expand mastery, and gain confidence. They learn how to listen, how to articulate ideas, how to compromise, how to be supportive, and how to be a good friend. EXPANSIVE COMMUNITY Our community supports and celebrates each student and each family. We know each other, look out for each other, spend time together, and collaborate on big projects together, because serious, exuberant learning happens— for students and adults alike—in the context of relationships grounded in respect and trust. PARENT PARTICIPATION An abiding belief in the parentschool partnership is at the core of our philosophy. We welcome parents to join us in the daily life of our school through weekly community meetings, family conferences, open classrooms several times a year, teacher and head of school blogs, panels, and roundtables—not to mention each morning’s joyful drop-off— that support the parenting and educational process.
SOMETHING BORROWED Life is all about different solutions and different ways to go about things. Children need to be able to think outside the box, to be able to understand the world from different perspectives and see the possibilities. –parent Creative, progressive, inquiry-based—these oft-applied labels don’t quite capture who we are. But we do borrow the best ideas and practices from many areas of thought, and intentionally integrate them into our approach.
Educational theory: our take on time-tested traditions The Blue School approach, while serving as a vibrant response to new demands and discoveries in education, has deep roots. INTEGRATIVE When we explore math, history, literacy, creativity, self-reflection, and empathy in a single lesson, we know, and research confirms, that the integration of each of these subjects actually influences and deepens learning as a whole and mirrors the way people encounter, explore, and solve problems throughout life. EXPERIENTIAL Seeds and soil, buoyant Plasticine, handmade paper, snails, robots, electric circuitry—we make sure to engage our students’ eyes, hands, and minds by connecting abstract concepts to the tangible world. As children grow older, their projects take on increasing complexity and commitment, unfolding over many weeks, just as inspired projects do in the world beyond school.
Our methods are grounded in the longstanding ideals of educators and theorists like John Dewey, Lev Vygotsky, and Maria Montessori, all of which have been in development for over a century. Like these respected traditions, Blue School champions student engagement and academic interaction, integration between subject areas, curiosity-based curriculum driven by student inquiry, and a holistic approach to each child’s academic, social, and emotional growth. Most importantly, our approach carries on a rich educational heritage of valuing the experience of each child, not only as future college students and professionals, but as self-aware young citizens of the world.
EMPATHETIC We ask our students to consider varied perspectives, viewpoints, lived experiences—to imagine themselves inside the skin of people throughout history and all walks of life: a world explorer, an undocumented immigrant, a protester, a politician. These emotional connections have real educational value; they also enrich the kindness of our school community and each student.
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Making space for learning: the way we do it
Neuroscience and child development research: how (and why) we think about it
Walk through the expansive, light-filled classrooms and hallways of the Blue School building, and right away you can tell: this is a place made for learning.
Year after year, breakthrough after breakthrough, researchers in neuroscience and child development have broadened our understanding of how young minds work and how they learn best.
Drawing inspiration from Reggio Emilia’s philosophy that the school environment should serve as a “third teacher,” we have intentionally designed every aspect of Blue School’s physical home to invite deeper investigation, reflection, and community engagement.
NEUROSCIENCE What are the best conditions and environments for learning? What creates insight, motivation, retention, and true knowledge within each student? Instead of relying only on intuition and experience, we’re drawing upon research that seeks to quantitatively answer these questions, including how, for example, emotional and physical well-being can impact the brain’s ability to learn.
Students find quiet, serene corners for reading or thinking, nooks filled with tactile tools for experimentation and creation, and spaces for energetic movement and play. Our walls, an evolving, inspiring, and useful display of colorful and carefully curated work, document our students’ learning: from inquiry webs of questions, to drawings, diagrams, essays, and photographs of the subjects of their immersive learning. Blue School is a place to think, imagine, explore, analyze, express—and dream.
THE WONDER ROOM With light-up floors, black lights, and movable props, the Wonder Room offers space to our younger learners for daring and imaginative play. It’s also a place for them to learn about light and shadow, cause and effect, independence and collaboration, and have the experience of interacting with and transforming their environment. THE STEAM WORKSHOP A maker space equipped with a 3D printer, sewing station, fabrication tools, and woodworking implements, our STEAM workshop was made to realize even the most ambitious projects our students dream up. THE OUT OF DOORS With a deck populated by growing plants, the Blue School bees and butterflies, flowers and bird feeders, a terrace that houses the studentinitiated composting program, an insect habitat, a rooftop garden in the making, and the nearby Imagination Playground— students’ explorations often take them out of the classroom and into rich interactions with both the natural and urban world around them.
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BLUE SCHOOL LENSES Hero, artist, scientist, trickster, group member, innocent: when a student gets stuck on a problem, her teacher might encourage her to try on a new perspective or try out a different medium. Neuroscience shows how “perspective-taking” in this way creates new pathways between diverse areas of the brain, making way for truly creative problem solving that cuts across disciplines. LAB SCHOOL Blue School regularly brings new research and thinking into daily practice— and we hope to lead by example, serving as a model for schools around the world. While we carefully consider every technique that makes it into the classroom, our openness to new ideas means we’re in constant conversation about how to make the school experience and learning ever better.
Our founders noticed, however, that much of this knowledge— some decades old—wasn’t making it into classrooms. They created Blue School in part to answer this profound need, to create a school that not only implemented all that we now know about how young people learn, but also could remain flexible enough to implement new knowledge and breakthroughs. Consider the many studies that reveal and validate a wide variety of learning styles. How, we ask, can we develop an educational model that doesn’t privilege just one or two types of learners while pushing others to the margins? And how can we encourage students to practice all these differing perspectives in their explorations and understanding of their work in the world? Our practice of the “Blue School Lenses,” our perspective-taking model, is an evolving answer to these questions. Beyond the classroom, we host regular panels and workshops for faculty, staff, and parents with leading thinkers in relevant fields. In fact, some of those great thinkers, including Sir Ken Robinson, Dr. Dan Siegel, Lawrence J. Cohen, and John Maeda, have joined our Advisory Board and now guide top-level discussions in the school. We create professional development opportunities for our teachers, supporting them as they learn about ground-breaking ideas (and maybe develop some of their own) through conferences and higher education. Most importantly, we make space for teachers to implement these new ideas appropriately in the classroom, modeling the same curiosity and intellectual exploration we seek to foster in our students.
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The creative process: how we apply it No great work of art was ever made without creativity. We believe this holds true for any great work of any kind in any field. Consider the artist’s process: The first spark of an idea, trying a new approach, seeing a fresh angle, insisting on an unconventional interpretation, articulating, developing, and bringing that idea fully to life, meeting the problems she faced along the way, pushing the work, or even the medium, forward. The same can be said of any great feat of engineering, powerful social movement, breakthrough in science, or invention in business or technology. Every accomplishment in every discipline calls for creative thinking. And the new challenges presented by our changing world demand it. So when we ask your student to translate a math problem into a new medium, consider how systemic dynamics repeat themselves throughout history, ask him to try out an idea, try again, and tinker, we’re helping him develop the kind of agile mind that will enliven his thinking in every subject area and serve him well in his next school and the wide world beyond.
IMAGINATION What if I could invent a new language, travel to other galaxies, talk to a girl my age from the eighteenth century, create a robot to help the blind? When no idea is too big or outlandish to consider, and students have the space to dream, their imaginings can become the starting point for long-lasting, real, and memorable learning. DIVERGENT THINKING Our teachers take every opportunity to say “yes” to their students’ questions and curiosities, encouraging each child to test out different hypotheses, try out others’ ideas and perspectives, and consider all sorts of possibilities to arrive at a conclusion. Not only does this approach promote deeper engagement in the subject matter, it fosters critical skills like flexibility of thought, persistence, and resilience. INNOVATION Our students have come up with some spectacular projects: everything from solar powered dehydrators, a complex Rube Goldberg machine, a scale model of the Brooklyn Bridge, a book written by the entire class on handmade pages, a neighborhood designed around the needs of people and animals, graphic novels, a system of city-wide ziplines. Just imagine— with all that practice—what they’ll be creating in ten years.
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SOMETHING BLUE The DNA of the Blue Man show is at the heart of this place in the day-to-day experience of the kids. It’s that thinking outside the box, that self-belief that you can do anything in the world. –parent
Messy, immersive, playful—when you think of the Blue Man Group, academic learning probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. Yet, like the groundbreaking production, Blue School was born from our founders’ abiding optimism, curiosity, and deep respect for learning.
Our Blue beginnings Serious learning can come from surprising sources. BLUE SCHOOL GLOBAL From the very beginning, we’ve believed that Blue School’s lifechanging approach to education can also be world-changing. Now we’re hard at work on realizing this ambitious global vision. We continue to make progress on expanding the reach of Blue School’s dynamically balanced approach by sharing our methodologies and practices with parents and teachers, beyond our little corner of Manhattan. BLUE NOTES Our school community includes many experts and thought leaders in the fields of education and child development, and each year we host workshops open to the public to spread their insights from child psychology and neuroscience, as well as new ideas and techniques for the parenting process, STEAM, and teaching and learning. CONFERENCES Yearly, we convene educators from all over the city and around the world to discuss the most pressing problems we face in education today and to share knowledge among professionals who are innovating responses in classrooms, schools, and supporting organizations around the world.
Blue School was founded by six accomplished artists, including the three original members of the Blue Man Group. They had always been interested in the challenges and innovations in the world of education; in fact, the Blue Man Group founders have often said that if their creative impulses hadn’t found expression first in performance art, they could have emerged in the creation of a school. And so these six inspired individuals and passionate parents developed their vision for a school that incorporates all the essentials of a complete and balanced education. They saw Blue School as an essential antidote to the nation’s prevailing—and lopsided—educational models that aims to prepare young people for purposeful and joyful lives in a rapidly changing world. They consulted and collaborated with the best thinkers in the fields of education, neuroscience, child development, and creativity to help bring this vision to life. While the playgroup they started in 2006 has since matured into a thriving pre-primary, primary, and middle school, the imaginative spark of the Blue Man DNA continues to animate our daily work, from our littlest learners’ structured play, to our eldest students’ acts of inspired invention.
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Some things never change. A strong academic foundation will always remain essential to every child’s success in school. Today, we know that creative thinking and self and social intelligence play an equally crucial role in school, and the world far beyond it. With our driving values and particular mix of methods, Blue School doesn’t leave any of these essentials to chance, ensuring that your child is ready and eager to take on the role of protagonist in her own learning and life.
Ready for the next step? Contact our admissions office: Dawn Williams Director of Admissions 212 228 6341 x110 dawn@blueschool.org Chloe Scott-Giry Assistant Director of Admissions 212 228 6341 x165 chloesg@blueschool.org
Or visit us: 241 Water Street NYC 10038 blueschool.org
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dynamically balanced education for seriously curious young people age 2 through grade 8 blueschool.org