Imagine arriving at school your first week as a ninth-grader and doing yoga – or tai chi or qigong – as the first activity of the day. Then, imagine getting to go outside to immerse yourself in nature for part of each afternoon, and having to use your imagination, because the school says you’re supposed to. Next, each Friday morning, you participate in a sort of self-government, school-wide council meeting, before going off to make a difference in the world for the rest of the day through a community engagement project.
That’s exactly what 9th grader Michael Smith, of Minnetonka, is looking forward to as he heads off this fall to St. Louis Park’s brand new 5th-12th grade charter school, Quest Academy.
Michael’s mom, Kay, is looking forward to the low student-staff ratio Quest will have. "Each child will get some individual attention every day," she says. She also likes the built-in structure for eliciting students’ input and feedback, the Friday morning meetings. "What a great approach," she says. "It’s kid-based!"
It certainly is. And John Miller, who’s at the helm of Quest Academy, says "it’s long overdue." Elements of transformative education – contemplative practices, students taking charge of their learning, different ways of evaluation that don’t use grades or rank but instead use self-assessment and ongoing feedback, and community engagement – have been around for a while. "But putting them together in this particular way," Miller says, "is unique."
Quest’s thinking, well supported by researchers on the subject, says that academic learning is enhanced by developing the intelligence of the heart and the body. Miller says the school’s goal for students is to "create an environment that is conducive to their unfolding," that allows them to "really access what’s inside them to bring their potential out. To really help students center, know themselves in a deep way, and know how they can connect their particular gifts, in a way that’s productive, to the world around them."
Descriptions of the school’s learning environment and philosophy make you want to go back and repeat middle school. "Faculty members design and implement multi-disciplinary curricula which utilize a variety of modalities to access all the intelligences and optimize student learning," says the school’s website, questacademymn.org.
And science classes are gonna be a gas. Insights from quantum theory – you know, all that astonishing stuff that long ago turned the Newtonian worldview on its ear but hasn’t trickled down to what kids learn in school yet – will be applied throughout the curriculum. Those insights, Quest says, "point to an underlying unity and intelligence at the level of the smallest components of matter and energy" and have "profound implications for…our daily lives."
Grading won’t be traditional, but the school may offer letter grades as a default for high schoolers concerned about getting into good colleges. Quest’s form of evaluation – called formative assessment – helps students get better at what they’re doing and learn about learning. "If you take music or dance or train in a sport," Miller explains, "your coach or teacher will be offering constant feedback, and you will also be figuring out what’s easy for you and what you need to work on. The goal is to improve."
The use of grades and rankings – called summative assessment – "TELLS you something, but it doesn’t actually help you improve. Our goal is mainly to help students improve," Miller says. And he promises a "DYNAMITE, diverse faculty, rich in the arts."
Quest students are ethnically and socio-economically diverse, Miller says, with many coming from right near the school’s St. Louis Park location. You can still apply to attend Quest. It’s first come, first served, right now for about 60 open spots. Fill out application forms on the website, questacademymn.org, and attend one of two upcoming Saturday morning information sessions, August 9 or August 23 from 9-11:00 a.m. at the school, 3946 Wooddale Ave. S., in St. Louis Park, Minn.
Along with yoga, getting to go outside every day and community work on Fridays, kids like Michael Smith may get to learn from the work of the brilliant astrophysicist-cosmologer Brian Swimme. "We’ll be looking," Miller says, "at that whole way of telling the story of the universe." Something I’d go straight back to class for.
