Sequoyah School Celebrates Treehouse Hot Lunch

How do students learn in the Treehouse?

“If you come up with an idea you get to say it. We always talk about something before we do it.”

In the Treehouse we spend time each day in discussion, for example deciding what we should plan for our camping trips, what lunch we should serve the rest of the school when it’s our turn, or how we should deal with a particular conflict. So, we held a meeting to talk about how we should describe our class on the school’s website; as usual, the students had many ideas.

One student said, “The Treehouse is unique because it’s up in the sky on a platform. It’s different from all the classes.” Situated on the upper deck of the main classroom building, it overlooks the rest of the campus…if you peek through the trees. The placement of the classroom itself is an appropriate metaphor for the position of the class in the school community. The Treehouse is the middle class at Sequoyah. Sandwiched between the three lower and three upper classes, it serves as the transition between them.

There are many “firsts” that structure this experience of transition. The Treehouse students listed: first single-class camping trips, first consistent homework, first Literature Circles, first lunch-time access to a microwave, etc. Consistently through these “firsts”, we emphasize the students’ responsibility for their own work and behavior. Sequoyah’s Habit of Mind “Ownership” helps us to focus on this idea. Students in the Treehouse are expected to “own” the project of their intellectual growth. With help and support from teachers and parents, Treehouse students develop habits and strategies that make it possible for them do their best work and be accountable for it. This includes using a homework journal to keep track of what work needs to be done at home, a system for reporting what books they are reading, and student involvement in parent/teacher/student conferences. The language arts curriculum in the Treehouse is a mix of self-directed and assigned work. Students have time during the day to write and read text of their own choosing. They also practice writing in many different modes and styles in teacher-directed projects. They practice mining different kinds of writing for information, as well as synthesizing it and responding to it.

In the Treehouse student learning is often collaborative. Students work in groups in theater projects, literature circles and science experiments. They collaborate to solve mathematical problems and then discuss their solutions and processes with the group. The group determines which solutions work, which solutions don’t work, and weighs the pros and cons of different methods for solving problems.

Back in the meeting, one student reported, “we have questions like what we study.” Working from an essential question, students research and construct collaborative and independent projects culminating in an exhibition that includes both creative and more objective work. For example, a culminating project might pair a research essay with a picture book, both created using information gathered through research, or it might pair a research essay with a theater performance. We might study the history of California through the lens of the history of water, or the history of farming. Each unit is organized around answering an essential question, such as, how/where/by whom is our food produced and how does that affect us/our community/our world?

Our meeting is a good reflection of the culture of the classroom and the aspects of the curriculum and pedagogy that the students and teachers value.

-Emily Singer