iShine Student Center is a bright, engaging, stimulus-rich environment. We have bright, dedicated teachers who believe it is their responsibility to discover the gifts in each child. Our students are wonderful humans with diverse gifts, talents, and needs – we are all here for them!
Mission Statement
The Mission of iShine Student Center is to nurture and celebrate our diverse community of lifelong learners. We offer an engaging curriculum focused on personalized learning and emotional intelligence. We hold high expectations while creating a safe-to-risk space where each person is loved.
Vision Statement
iShine Student Center strives to:
- Realize and nurture the innate goodness and potential in each child
- Design a safe, joyful, and kind culture where learning happens naturally
- Respond to changing needs and ensure equitable learning opportunities
- Ensure each child has a voice and a choice
- Inspire independent thinkers who set their own goals through intrinsic motivation
- Foster collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, and effective communication
- Promote self-control, teach responsibility, and help children make thoughtful choices for themselves and the world
- Partner with parents and connect with the greater community
- Explore teaching practices and theories to promote innovative learning
Personalized Learning
Each Child is Unique
Personalized learning involves the understanding that each learner is fundamentally unique. This model holds that children come to the learning experience with different minds, abilities, developmental levels, intelligences, human dynamics, personalities, thinking strategies, learning styles, interests, brain-dominance, life-experiences, body-clocks, life-goals, motivation and more. This uniqueness demands alternative approaches for every element of the learning experience.
Need to Know Each Child
As we personalize learning, we are called upon to truly know each learner and to collaborate with them in creating learning experiences that meet their personal needs and desires. This knowledge can come from inquiry, interviews, surveys, observations, narratives, review of work, conversations with family members, and more. When we discover unique preferences and needs, we must vary the presentations, pacing, sequencing, modalities, environment, timing of assignments, assessments, environment, and resources.
Student Choice
Students set goals that will enable them to meet rigorous Common Core and State Standards as well as personal goals. They, then, assist in choosing learning strategies that will allow them to meet these goals. We are working to create self-directed learners in a learning-rich environment with mentors, resources, and a structure of enabling success.
New Roles for Teachers
Personalized learning calls for a new role for teachers. In this model, they must be designers of learning environments where differing needs for quiet, collaboration, research, technology, and presentations are all available. They must design a curriculum and provide opportunities for students to design a curriculum that meets many developmental levels, and various learning styles, intelligences, and interests. This includes learning centers and project-based assignments that are relevant, authentic, and student-driven. It calls for a willingness to become a co-learner. Teachers are guides and collaborators in a learning environment where students set goals and are truly engaged because there is choice and a matching of interests, abilities, learning styles, and challenges.
Students Assess
Personalization is performance-based; students continually assess their own competency toward mastery. Responsibility for a learning map of goals in content, process, and product moves from teacher to student.
Technology Assists in Creating a School of One
Technology is important as each student can access resources, research, assessments, creative design and connections to many teachers. This is motivational. Students are not idle receivers of information but are active producers, and this creates deep learning, where important inquiry allows students to make meaning.
Beyond differentiation, true personalization is more than altering content, process, and product. As we vary every element in education to truly respect the uniqueness of each learner, we create a “School of One.” Students sense that they matter. They learn to initiate, to set goals, to check progress, and to understand.
At iShine Student Center, we are creating a student-centered environment that celebrates diversity in a learning culture. Leadership emerges organically.
Personal Assessment Without Grades
We do not grade students; students are continually doing personal assessments without the judgment inherent in the traditional educational grading system. Students can concentrate on learning without sacrificing self-efficacy. This encourages exploration, discovery of self and world, adventure, intrinsic motivation and a genuine passion for learning.
Learning Centers and Mentors
Classrooms give way to learning centers where open areas invite alternative learning, and teachers serve as mentors and co-learners instead of information disseminators.
The Community is the Classroom
Field Trips
The staff of iShine Student Center believes that the community is an extended classroom. We operationalize this by taking field trips to experience learning in places and with people that can teach us experientially and with authentic demonstration.
Community Expertise
We also ask community “experts” to share their expertise by presenting theories and practices to us, as personal coaches, mentors, speakers, planners and more.
Donations of Time, Talent and Resources
We also ask the community to partner with us by offering us in-kind support to enable us to do what we normally could not do with our limited resources. This includes donating time, talent and resources to us.
Volunteering
In addition, we encourage volunteers to assist us. If you are an artist, musician, writer, photographer, architect, poet, traveler and love to share your skills, we welcome your gifts. If you understand construction, have building skills, love to paint, can fix things, and have office skills, we can utilize your gifts. If you love children’s literature, are skilled at technology, love to read and be read to, let us know. You can mentor a child, lead a project, help with a field trip, and join a growing number of dedicated parents who partner with iShine to bring dynamic opportunities to children. Contact us with your ideas and your schedule.
Program Elements
Leading Edge
The Mosaic Program at iShine Student Center is based on leading-edge research on learning. Our personalized learning program emphasizes innovation, project-based learning, integration of the arts, inquiry and the importance of social-emotional well-being for students, staff, parents, and the greater community. We are continuously demonstrating the power of respect and kindness.
Innovative Brain-Friendly Primary Program
Students in the primary grades learn in a dynamic and balanced literacy program. They participate in multi-modal learning centers, emphasizing the importance of choice and unique learning preferences. Students read with their teachers daily. They write in journals, sing about key concepts, and move to activate their minds and bodies. They use math manipulatives, participate in hands-on-science, play cooperative games and draw and paint to activate the artist within. Students work beyond the State Standards and Common Core as they demonstrate the power of personalized, self-directed learning.
Student Leadership Opportunities
We offer students leadership opportunities including student government, community service and entrepreneurial projects.
Passion to Learn is Evident
While we are rigorous with our expectations to meet and exceed Common Core goals, we do so in ways that allow each child to discover a passion to learn.
