The children we teach at Darlington will live, think and learn almost exclusively in the 21^st Century, which as we know now will be characterized by a different type of thinking — a higher level of thinking that forces adaptation to today’s rapidly changing world. Darlington students can no longer be passive recipients of facts and figures that they dutifully memorize and just as dutifully forget after a quiz or test is turned in. In a world where knowledge is always expanding, our challenge as educators is to stay ahead of that expansion by teaching our students to become better thinkers. Darlington is committed to an academic program centered on developing just these sorts of critical and creative thinking skills. We are designing learning experiences from pre-K to twelfth grade that will grow our students into adults prepared for a lifetime of thoughtful living and learning.

 

Our first task in this endeavor is to promote an understanding of those thinking skills that will encourage our children to stretch themselves to a higher level of thinking. Too often typical classroom instruction is focused on lower level activities. Knowledge, comprehension and application are essential first steps on the thinking “ladder” that must also proceed to the higher levels of inference, analysis, interpretation, prediction, and evaluation. Our students are naturally inquisitive, and it is our hope that a curriculum focused on critical thinking will provide them with those tools vital to promoting and even provoking that inquiry.

In addition to promoting critical thinking, Darlington classrooms will also foster creative thinking by celebrating the uniqueness of each child and by providing challenging, open-ended assignments that just might have more than one right answer. A classroom filled with creative thinking produces fluency, flexibility and originality while offering new ideas in a variety of diverse contexts and through an array of unique perspectives. Ultimately, a classroom that encourages creative thinking is a classroom of endless possibilities, and every room, court, field and office at Darlington is committed to this belief.

As educators, it is incumbent upon us to provide each of our students with as many opportunities to develop critical and creative thinking skills as possible with the aid of technology, experience, expertise, and desire. As future leaders and problem solvers, our students will regularly grapple with challenges that we can only imagine today. How exciting and invigorating are their future possibilities — it is our privilege to take part in their journey.

At Darlington we invite our children to lead, to solve problems, and to imagine every single day.