The Student Experience
As soon as students enter Summit Learning, their teachers and mentor start understanding their interests, goals, and aspirations. Based on those discussions, each student has a personalized learning experience that meets their individual needs.
Summit Learning has three pillars:
- Project-based learning to build cognitive skills
- One-on-one mentoring to understand and pursue personal goals
- Individualized pathways to master content
Each pillar corresponds with blocks in a student's day:
- Project Time - where students apply the content they've learned to real-world situations, developing essential and transferable lifelong skills.
- Mentor Time - where students work with their mentor to set long and short term goals and receive feedback on their progress.
- Personalized Learning Time - where students make their way through a range of resources, choosing how they want to learn content in line with their personal needs and preferences.
Equipped with the tools to customize instruction to meet the needs of all students, and empowered to build strong relationships, teachers are at the heart of every Summit Learning Classroom. The spend a majority of their time teaching students how to apply their content knowledge to real-world situations through rigorous projects that are centered on the development of cognitive skills. They also provide constant support and guidance in helping students achieve their own personal goals, through additional role as mentor.
At Summit, a student's time is organized to represent the three main pillars of Summit Learning. This may vary depending on each student's needs, but a general student schedule includes a blend of:
- Project-based learning to build cognitive skills - through project-based learning time.
- Students spend the majority of their time working on rich, real-world projects with their teachers and classmates that develop cognitive skills. These rigorous projects enable students to apply their content knowledge to real-world situations
- One-on-one mentoring to understand and pursue personal goals - during weekly meetings with mentors and mentor teams.
- Students meet one-on-one with a mentor, a teacher, a school leader, or another adult, at least once a week. The weekly check-in and any other organic mentor support revolve around ensuring that a student's daily actions and current progress are aligned to his or her individual long-term goals and aspirations. They also meet regularly as a group with their teacher and other men-tees.
- Individualized pathways to master content - during personalized learning time.
- During this time, students make their way through content via a range of resources, or playlists, to become college-ready, choosing the subjects they want to learn and how they access that content. They learn content largely via the Summit Learning Platform, all with the support of their teacher. Students are able to move at their own pace, and learn how they best learn, because they have different options to learn the same information. Unlike in traditional lectures, they haven't pushed too far ahead of what they are ready for, nor are they bored because they already know the information.
