Our Model
Social Emotional Learning:
To best develop social and emotional skills and abilities, students should be explicitly taught. Our social and emotional curriculum teaches students how to identify their own emotions, manage their own emotions, engage in and understand various social situations, and empathize and build relationships with others. These skills and abilities are taught through activities, role-plays, and lessons. These lessons are taught during a daily structure known as Circle, and teachers are coached and supported with Circle the same way they are any other class.
Restorative Justice:
Restorative justice is based on the ideal that “because crime hurts, justice should heal” (Braithwaite). The harm should be matched not by further harm but by restorative effort. Restorative justice is a theory of justice that involves repairing harm by inviting all impacted by harm to work collaboratively while taking into consideration the needs of the community and the afflicted while also considering the accountability and the growth of the offender. At Caliber, harm is restored through Circles, conversations, and group mediations depending on the incident.
Inquiry and Research-Backed Practices:
Many classrooms use what is known as the transmission model of learning. The teacher possesses information that is transferred to the student. While this works for remembering facts or dates, it does not result in meaning making. For students to learn something deeply, they must construct their understanding through connecting new experiences to prior knowledge. This style of learning, exemplified by inquiry, gives students opportunities to explore ideas and topics, discuss them, and draw their own conclusions. At Caliber, units and lessons are designed on research-backed theories rooted
in inquiry.
Coaching:
Implementing these model elements requires supporting our teachers to do so — and coaching is the number one way of supporting teachers to develop their craft. We are committed, not just to continuing to support weekly or biweekly coaching for our teachers, but also to training our coaches around our model and their coaching effectiveness.
Equity:
Caliber believes we live in a society that is unjust and built on power structures that are inequitable, that those inequities are discriminatory and directly stand in the way of many of our students and staff, and that we must be actively anti-discriminatory (anti racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic, etc.) to build an equitable community. That belief must be held, validated, and acted upon.
Computer Science:
All students participate in computer programming, with daily computer science, engineering, and robotics classes designed to teach fluency in computing. These highly engaging blocks teach students a variety of important skills including logic, narrative, attention to detail, perseverance and collaboration.