The Experience
What does it mean to learn at a school of experience? Wrapping your senses around new ideas. Diving into direct contact with concepts and questions. Making, doing, and experimenting you way into knowing, understanding, and mastering.
At The Whitfield School, teachers design learning experiences that are inquiry-driven, empowering students to make choices, take ownership, and take risks in their educational journey. Teachers craft units where students are invited to explore, experiment, and collaborate, encouraging productive learning struggles that lead to growth. Students' voices take center stage as they present findings, create meaningful artifacts, and engage in peer-led learning. Throughout the unit, teachers act as coaches, providing appropriate levels of support and feedback through formative and summative checkpoints. By fostering an environment where students' unique voices drive the learning process, Whitfield's teachers ensure that each experience is purposeful, dynamic, and enduring.
Experiential Learning
Critical thinking, creative problem solving, clear communication, intellectual dexterity, and personal resilience—we build these skills through hands-on engagement and real-world experiences. Our students learn alongside thinkers of all kinds and collaborate with people who hold different perspectives, all while doing, making, sensing, and feeling.
Students apply their knowledge through projects, fieldwork, and real-world challenges.
Community
At Whitfield we see the academic, social, and emotional environment in which students live, learn, and grow in an entirely different light: Our culture is a catalyst for their accomplishments.
When students feel cheered on as well as challenged, they also feel saft to dive more deeply into complexity and rise to higher academic expectations.
Traditions
Our school traditions not only facilitate active, experiential learning in the moment, but they also foster a lively, connected community and forge friendships that last a lifetime. We know students develop faster intellectually, advance further academically, and engage more deeply emotionally when they love where they learn.