Bank Street College of Education

Bank Street College of Education is one of the premiere Progressive schools in the country with a School for Children and a Graduate School for educators and leaders in education.  The educational philosophy of Bank Street is based on the most current and ongoing research.  The Bank Street constructivist approach emphasizes hands-on, inquiry based learning where children are actively engaged in cooperative, communicative and creative learning experiences.

The goal is to nurture the whole child-intellectually, socially, and emotionally, while building a lifelong love of learning.  Age-appropriate and dynamic learning opportunities help children construct knowledge and then explore their new understandings through art, drama, language experiences, writing, music, and creative movement.

Lucy Sprague Mitchell, founder of Bank Street College of Education, asserted that the best way for children to learn about the world was to explore the familiar deeply. The credo she wrote nearly a century ago continues to guide the work of Bank Street College today. It communicates her desire to foster children’s flexibility, courage, gentleness, and sensitivity as well as to instill in them a “zest for living,” “lively intellectual curiosities,” and a “striving to live democratically.” (Bank Street College of Education, 2014a) The fundamental principles of working with children have not changed: regardless of the generation, children learn best when they are interested in a topic, remain engaged, and are appropriately challenged.

Our director, Bonnie Brief Pauska, serves as a consultant/professional development facilitator for Bank Street College and New York City’s Department of Education. As part of her work, she is continually learning the newest research from Bank Street College and implementing best practices at creative learning center.

Progressive Education

Creative Learning Center offers preschoolers and early primary (kindergarten/1 students) a progressive learning environment based on the Bank Street Philosophy. Many parents purposely choose a progressive education because they strongly believe that learning corroboratively through experience fosters resilience and better prepares children to navigate a rapidly changing world with increasingly challenging problems.

The benefits to a progressive education include the capacity to understand ideas and apply them to new kinds of problems while fostering a passionate love of learning!

the progressive education model emphasizes:

Attending to the whole child: Progressive educators are concerned with helping children become not only good learners but also well-balanced, caring people.

Community:  Children learn with and from one another in a caring community, and that’s true of moral as well as academic learning. Competition undermines a feeling of community and is deliberately avoided.

Collaboration: There is a strong emphasis on collaborative problem-solving.

Social justice: A sense of community and responsibility extends beyond the classroom, beyond friends, beyond their own ethnic group, and beyond their own country. A commitment to diversity and to improving the lives of others is an integral part of learning.

Intrinsic motivation: Children are naturally motivated to learn when a learning environment challenges and engages them.

Deep understanding: Progressive education is organized around problems, projects, and questions—rather than around lists of facts, skills, and separate disciplines. The teaching is typically interdisciplinary, the assessment rarely focuses on rote memorization, and excellence isn’t confused with “rigor.” Students are invited to think deeply about issues that matter and understand ideas from the inside out.

Active learning: Students play a vital role in helping to design the curriculum, formulate the questions, seek out (and create) answers, think through possibilities, and evaluate how successful they have been.

Taking kids seriously: Progressive educators take their cue from the children—and are particularly attentive to differences among them. The curriculum is based on the children’s interests.

Block Building

Block building is an integral part of our progressive curriculum at Creative Learning Center. We have a large selection of hardwood unit blocks, foam blocks, magnetic blocks, Lego blocks, and more in every classroom. There is plenty of space and time for the children to build and work together.

From the Learning and The Brain conferences at Harvard University, there is strong evidence that block building leads to brain development in all areas. Children who are given ample opportunities to build with blocks through seven years of age have been shown to have statistically stronger math and science skills in their high school years!

Block building contributes to every aspect of a child’s development:

• building self-esteem

• strong cognitive skills

• creative expression

At Creative Learning Center, children are encouraged to build with unit blocks every day. Constructive play permeates what children build since children often add dramatic and fantasy play ideas to their built structures.  The buildings are further stimulated by the addition of books and dramatic play props (e.g. vehicles, animals, play people). Our students can be seen building bridges after reading The Three Billy Goats Gruff or making the Old North Church after learning about Paul Revere’s famous ride through Lexington. Regardless of what our children are building, the teachers facilitate their thinking by asking them questions such as, ‘How high do the walls need to be to protect the castle?” or “What can you do to keep your building from falling?”  Critical thinking and problem solving skills are encouraged by these “What if?” questions.

blocks & math: As they explore building materials, children become meaningfully involved with mathematics.  The blocks themselves are of many geometric shapes and are based on the unit.  Working with the double unit, the children discover that two units are equal to the double. They discover that the unit can be divided into right triangles, squares or smaller rectangles. They will experience the symmetry often needed to make towers balance and discover patterns which make their buildings stable.  Measurement is another naturally occurring extension of the block building activities. As they engage in the clean-up process, the children work in teams to sort and then stack the blocks by size and shape, thereby developing important classification skills.

blocks & science: Children learn about balance, gravity, and stability as they hypothesize and test their theories to find appropriate solutions to building challenges. They are encouraged to question, inquire, observe, clarify, investigate and reflect-all the steps of the scientific method.

blocks & language development: Language flourishes as children discuss their buildings and share their ideas with the class.

blocks, art & architecture: Children are also encouraged to make representational drawings of their buildings or to create labels for their buildings using “inventive” spelling. Builders and architects are invited into our classes to provide inspiration for our budding junior architects.