Deliberate Community-Building
Safety & Support
At SEEQS, a strong school community forms the soil in which everything else can grow. Deliberate community-building and maintenance create an intellectually safe learning environment and set the stage for collaborative co-learning.
All students are part of a multi-aged Advisory group that serves as a “home” community-within-a-community and meets three times per week, including for an extended period each Wednesday.
The SEEQS School Counselor supports students’ social and emotional well-being and promotes healthy, productive, and resilient interactions among students, between students and adults, and within the SEEQS community as a whole.
Social-Emotional Learning
Based on the premise that All Emotions Matter, RULER teaches emotional intelligence with the goal of creating a healthier, more equitable, and more compassionate society. RULER is an acronym for the skills of emotional intelligence:
Recognizing emotions in oneself and others
Understanding the causes and consequences of emotions
Labeling emotions with nuanced vocabulary
Expressing emotions in accordance with cultural norms and social context
Regulating emotions with helpful strategies
The RULER program was developed by Dr. Marc Brackett, founder of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, and his team.
Visit RULER Approach to learn more.
Inquiry & Intellectual Safety
The philosophy for children (p4c) approach recognizes that a key objective of education is to help students develop the ability to think for themselves and learn to use this ability responsibly. p4c is both a theory of education and a set of classroom practices designed to:
Set the foundation for intellectual safety in a school
Provide a structure for democratic conversation that honors student ideas and student voice
Build empathy
Encourage authentic listening
Hold space for reflection on both relationships and thinking
SEEQS uses p4c in advisories, in classes, and in whole school settings. We also implement it as a faculty.
Visit the Uehiro Academy for Philosophy and Ethics in Education to learn more.
Restorative Practices
At SEEQS we believe that restorative practices are more impactful than punitive practices. We strive to foster a school community where every individual understands their role in the health of the community and is invested in doing their part to contribute.
Restorative practices include informal and formal process that precede wrongdoing, as well as those for responding to wrongdoing after it occurs (often referred to as restorative justice).
Visit the International Institute for Restorative Practices to learn more.
“The thing I love about middle schoolers is that they are at a crossroads and a sweet spot for learning. They have lived long enough to want to grapple with life’s big questions, but not long enough to be jaded or lose that freshness. If they feel safe, supported, cared for, and respected, their minds are open for higher level questions and a willingness to find the answers. They want to change the world, so let’s let them.”