Essential Ingredients of an exceptional school for exceptional learners:

Accelerated and imaginative curriculum

In a dynamic, experiential, and nurturing education environment, students learn to construct knowledge, formulate insight, connect reality with theory, and transfer information into new settings. Project-based activities are anchored to research and finding solutions for a better world.

Developing focus and awareness in morning yoga

Differentiated for diverse learning styles and levels

Learning activities are designed to address multiple learning styles and achievement or developmental levels. Both informal and formal diagnostic procedures provide data about the students’ preferences. This data is used to create units, lessons, and evaluation procedures tailored to the individual’s needs.

Knowledge, skills, and attitudes transferable to future careers

Students connect classroom activities to actual professions. For example, they learn science through projects that engage them as chemists, lawyers, environmentalists, authors, and engineers. Through experiential activities they learn about government, civilizations, algorithms, literary genres, and more — as these are applied in real-world contexts. More importantly, students discover how their unique talents, when developed, become pipelines for their possible future careers.

Inquiry-based projects drive content mastery

The focus of learning is in understanding and not in memorizing information. Comprehension of theoretical precepts is based upon the application of scientific and social research methodologies.  Students learn by formulating questions and issues and by designing scholarly and experiment-oriented activities through which their questions are answered.

Real-life and imaginative applications of knowledge

Every module begins and ends with conversations of how the topic is connected to the students’ lives, and how new knowledge and skills can be applied to make a better world. For example, in the study of the science and art of color, students understand the allure of color between bees and flowers. Just like bees, people have color preferences, a vital consideration in designing a consumer product.

Opportunities found in adversity

Children learn how perfectionism can be both a positive and negative trait. The school culture teaches students to value learning not as an end product but as a process. Mistakes trigger new questions and provide new guideposts. Children begin to recognize that what is stored in long-term memory must be continually enhanced with new knowledge.

Compassion for a better world

Synapse Institute teaches emotional intelligence skills to equip young change makers with the tools and resources so future generations will thrive.

Self-Science and Emotional Intelligence

To support the students’ development in these critical areas, Self-Science is taught weekly as a stand-alone course and, more importantly, as an embedded theme in the everyday learning experiences. The students own experiences, concerns, and questions drive the content. In his best-selling book, Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman praises it as a model program.

These learnable skills — including emotional literacy, optimism, empathy, consequential thinking, and self-motivation — create self-awareness, self-management, and self-direction.