Personal Growth - Cascadia Montessori School

Personal Growth

Personal Growth is a key to success in our world. The educational program at Cascadia addresses this important area, developing thinking skills (decision-making, problem-solving and creative thinking), self confidence and social skills and confidence.

Thinking skills: Specific lessons are provided that focus on thinking skills. Starting in first grade, we include lessons in creative writing, inferential comprehension work, arithmetic applications in solving problems, the analysis of science experiments, and the analysis of social studies lessons. Students in our upper classroom work on unique lessons, creative in their own right, such as “Peak Math,” and open-ended research projects. Please ask to have example lessons described during a visit to Cascadia.

The specific lessons are important but teaching students to think involves more than such lessons. Learning to think, practice in thinking, and expression of thinking needs an entire “classroom climate” that allows, encourages, values, and brings out creative thinking.

Cascadia provides the environment for teaching and learning creative thinking:

• First, learning with understanding is an important foundation for creative thinking.
Understanding subjects, rather than just memorizing facts in a subject area, allows
broader use and interconnection of the subjects by the students. The understandings
allow new applications.

• Second, creative thinking is fostered at Cascadia because of the open and secure social
environment that is provided. Students learn to make contributions, listen to the
contributions of other students, and discuss the topics in a constructive, non-threatening
way.

• Third, at a more concrete level, students are intentionally provided with choices, when
appropriate, within specific lessons. Cascadia presents and nurtures the idea of choice and
the thinking involved in choice.

Self-confidence, personal awareness, and social skills: At Cascadia, our students’ self-confidence builds from: their ability and awareness that they are able to make good decisions; their accumulating academic knowledge; their introductions to cultural subjects; and their developing social skills. Students learn how to become leaders as well as team members who are respected by their fellow students.

• Our students develop awareness that they have choices about the way they interact with
their peers. Appropriate guidance is provided to help them make and understand
decisions that foster their social and academic growth.

• It is an intentional and key part of our program that each of our rooms contains two
grades. Each year, the older students in each room provide positive role models regarding
learning and appropriate behavior for the younger students in the rooms. The younger
   students benefit greatly from this arrangement. The older students in each room become
   aware of their responsibility toward younger students and more aware of the
achievements they have made. As the students move through the grades, the incremental
growth obtained in each room helps our students develop an understanding of
   responsibility and leadership. These are qualities that can be carried by our graduates into
their next educational levels and into their adult lives.

• Students come to understand that learning is a positive activity. They realize that they are
at school to learn and that learning is important and has value to them. They find that they
feel good about themselves when they learn. They become aware of the academic and
social growth that results from their efforts.

• Our program allows students to discover their strengths and interests; our students start
to develop a sense or their potential in the world! Several letters from parents of current
sand former students, included in our printed brochure, contain descriptions of this aspect
of Cascadia’s education; they describe the “blossoming” or “coming out” of their children.