The children we teach at Darlington will live, think and learn almost exclusively in the 21^st Century, which 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.

 

First we encourage our children to stretch themselves to a higher level of thinking. 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 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 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 seen through an array of unique perspectives. Ultimately, a classroom that encourages creative thinking is a classroom of endless possibilities, and every room, performance hall, court, field and office at Darlington is committed to this belief.

As educators, we provide 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 challenge each other to learn with passion.