Experiential and Meaningful Learning

Tell me and I will forget. Show me and I may remember. Involve me and I will understand. ~Chinese Proverb

Nothing is fully learned without experience. Running River is focused on a meaningful, experiential approach to education. We used project based learning to integrate all academics. In both collaborative thematic units and personal learning children design, with their advisor, a project that attempts to answer an essential question that the student has decided to research. Project goals include every academic area. In this way children become personally responsible for their learning. They work closely with their advisor and also have mentors that are experts in the area of their project. At the end of each project period they give exhibitions and presentations of their completed work, demonstrating what they have learned and how they have learned it. These final presentations must address the goals that were set out in the beginning. The process the children go through to learn everything they can in order to answer their essential question provides an in-depth learning experience that is tangible and can be applied to all learning endeavors.

‘Good teaching is forever being on the cutting edge of a child’s competence’. Jerome Bruner

Our goal is that children leave Running River with the skills to use their hands to work and live, their hearts to reflect and contemplate, and their minds to organize, analyze, solve and communicate. In order for this to be accomplished, they must develop the confidence to meet life’s challenges, and have the competency to know what it takes to learn anything fully and deeply. This happens through being immersed in experiences that are real and meaningful, where they have to apply their knowledge, whatever it may be, at whatever age they are; to learn from and with others; to know how to acquire new information and test it out; to make mistakes; and to be persevering with a process that is in-depth, multi-faceted, uses both imagination and intellect, and in the end, is a reflection of how all discoveries are made and all problems are solved. This is the true joy of learning.

‘No problem can be solved by the same consciousness that created it. We need to see the world anew.’ Albert Einstein