We believe that a school’s education program should provide equal access to all and enable every student to master challenging content, skills, and learning strategies.  At Von Wedel, Clear Focus and High Expectations are – for faculty and students alike – two of the program’s defining tenets.  These beliefs are shared among the entire school community to encourage the whole to strive to ensure the success of every member.  Clear focus and high expectations are the foundation upon which our program’s ethos was born.

School faculty are intimately familiarized with each student’s learning style, social and family conditions, strengths, aspirations, and needs.  Each of our students enjoys strong relationships with other students and a close, continuous relationship with one or more adults in the school community.  Through personalization, we focus on each individual student’s respective achievement and success above simply collective gains.  No child is ever kept from soaring, and none are ever left behind.

Our school’s Leadership is focused on student achievement; improving and enhancing school culture, teaching, and learning; and effective collaboration across and among school leaders, teachers, parents, students, and local partners.  We demonstrate and inspire an unwavering commitment to fulfilling the school’s mission among all members of the school community and make informed decisions, implement innovative solutions, and take smart risks along the way.

Assessment and the measurement of learning outcomes occurs continuously with a variety of opportunities for students to demonstrate that they meet content and performance standards and can apply their learning.  This helps to identify not only the school’s collective progress, but, even more importantly, each individual’s achievement and gains toward specific, tailored goals.  The School communicates this progress to families and analyzes the results to help inform and extend each child’s goal setting.

All the while, Von Wedel Montessori School simultaneously engages in a dynamic process of self-assessment, reflection, and innovation that meets changing student needs and guides future development.

Von Wedel Montessori School integrates families, and the community itself, into school life. Our campuses exist as partnerships driven by parent demand, and cultivated by the School community, in which parents and caregivers not only communicate and share information and strategies pertaining to an individual child’s gains, but also have voice and power to shape the school’s future development.

This partnership extends to collaboration with outside organizations that strengthen the School’s ability to serve the academic and developmental needs of its many students. This interaction enables Von Wedel to keep in touch with wider community and professional networks and helps us to capitalize on opportunities and resources that support student success.

Classrooms and schools should be places that offer students a sense of belonging and purpose, and where they feel connected to the whole.  Von Wedel embraces this idea by fostering an educational environment defined by interaction between students:  a style of interaction very reminiscent of, and grounded in, concepts of the family.

In our standard mixed-age environments, there are certain members of the classroom who fill the role of the bigger brothers and sisters, some who take on the role of traditional middle siblings, and others yet who enter as the classroom’s younger brothers and sisters.  Each of our students is tied to every other student; each has definite and different responsibilities to the whole; and each plays an important role in the ensuing atmosphere of cooperation and support which has come to define Montessori at Von Wedel.

We tap into children’s natural understanding of relationships and, through the wide span of abilities and aptitudes the children share, create a school culture where differences are celebrated and where students need not feel self-conscious for their performance.  Everyone works at his or her own level, and none are ‘behind’ or ‘ahead’ of the rest.

At Von Wedel, our students, teachers, families, and even administrators come together to form a web of personal relationships that make school a true extension of the home, and a place that is comfortable, safe, and overwhelmingly conducive to exploration, experimentation, learning, and growth.

Teachers at Von Wedel go beyond simply concerning themselves with ‘conveying’ information to a child, and instead position themselves as guides who help facilitate and share in learning and growth experiences – be they academic, ethical, moral, or social.  Our Teachers’ concerns extend beyond marks or scores on a piece of paper to encompass the whole child, and they skillfully create and shape environments whose purpose is to support that child’s growth and development into adolescence.

Our teachers focus on and acknowledge multiple areas, forms, and modes of student success; they embrace a range of measurement tools; and they encourage the use of innovative learning methods to increase learning opportunities for all students.

Responsibility, Accountability, and Empowerment are not simply ‘adult’ concepts and should begin being stressed in youth. Even at the preschool level, Von Wedel students learn that they have certain and very definite responsibilities to themselves, their friends, their classroom, their school, all the way to their world, and are held accountable for fulfilling those responsibilities.  Our students understand that they will make decisions – and mistakes – as part of their learning.

Our students also understand that their educational program is not a fixed, static thing, but rather something they can help to shape – albeit within limits.  They are empowered to make decisions that affect their daily experience and are guided to making better and better choices until such time that they can be relied on – by parents, teachers, and friends – to exercise a degree of academic independence.

Von Wedel students are provided an environment rich with practical and real-world experiences through which they develop and apply personal and life skills. Whether organizing a school talent show, running the classroom’s after-school lemonade stand, or collecting canned goods or old toys for donation during the Holiday season, students are continuously given the ability to apply concepts from their classroom learning and integrate them across life’s experiences.

(A lemonade stand, for example, involves everything from mathematical operations, to use of money, to planning and organizational skills, to social concepts such as charity if the revenues are to be used as part of a class service project.)

School and classroom life should embrace ideals of cooperation and collaboration toward the attainment of both personal and collective goals, with students involving themselves in not only their own, individual program, but with their friends’ and classmates’ programs as well.

As students move from their Primary to Elementary years, they will be encouraged by teachers to learn to establish realistic goals for themselves, again both individually and for the group, and to take the steps necessary to meeting those goals.   More and more, teachers will seek to step back, fading almost even out of sight, as independent thinkers and doers emerge to engage themselves and each other.

At Von Wedel, success is when the classroom appears to run itself, without any central compelling force beyond the air of energy and enthusiasm that ties the group together.