philosophy and pedagogy

The Wheatlands Country School is dedicated to providing a learning environment for your child that celebrates their curiosity and imagination.  We believe that children are natural learners and that by providing a healthy school environment, challenging them, and giving them plenty of autonomy in how they pursue their knowledge, we will give students the agency to grow into creative, compassionate, and capable adults. Our constructivist approach celebrates risk, lostness, and mistakes. We want to ask questions rather than provide answers. We believe that spending daily, prolonged time outside and in unstructured play will allow our students to follow these questions by giving them the opportunity to encounter reality rather than merely experience classroom abstractions of growth, interconnectedness, story, mathematics, beauty, and ecology. Additionally, we believe there is value in designing daily, structured learning to advance the development of specific social, academic, practical, and artistic skills. Using our combined approach of child-led and curriculum-based learning, we hope to provide a rigorous program that will honor and grow the whole child. 

 No single approach encompasses everything that is good about education. We have conscientiously pulled best practices from a range of pedagogies in an effort to help our prospective students grow as whole beings and not merely learners. We incorporate elements of Reggio Emilia, the science of reading, place-based education, forest school, arts integration, drama-based pedagogy, and other constructivist approaches. We simultaneously encourage respect for collective experiences and the development of individual passions and identity. We create space for both teacher-led and child-centered learning opportunities.