Educational Focus:

Longleaf School of the Arts proposes to construct a secondary school model based on theories of educating the whole child, including cognitive, affective, and social dimensions. The educational theory behind this program is based on over a century of research into how students learn most effectively. Just as this school seeks to educate three distinct aspects of an adolescent, so does the model draw from different sources to inform these three organizational schemes.

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The cognitive instructional dimension includes theories of how students become masters of a discipline (content pedagogy), what is important to know (curriculum), and how we can best teach students to make connections among disciplines to solve real-world problems (general cognitive development). To this end, LSA will follow Renzulli’s Schoolwide Enrichment Model (SEM) the Creative Problem Solving (CPS) model, and Mortimer Adler’s Paideia model. The efficacy and reliability of these models are supported by extensive research.

While all three of these methods are common in schools across the United States, there is currently no extant school in North Carolina that combines these theories of student learning into a full program for secondary students. The combination of intense, student-generated content (via Paideia seminars) and consistent practice in mastery of a discipline (via the SEM), will provide students with extensive practice in the manner of learning and doing that is most common in major universities, research facilities, and corporations around the country.