What are your students looking at?

That’s what a passer-by asks me as my seventh grade students worked at a site on State Street.

Yes, it looks to that passer-by as if the students are looking at and taking notes about nothing:  an empty space, a hole in the ground for construction.  Yet these students are engaged in learning that is so distinctive of City Academy.  They were doing field work for their investigation into whether Liberty Sky, a proposed 300’ tower of luxury apartments, is the best housing to build on that site.  These students were:

• Out learning in our city: we are City Academy for a reason.
• Doing investigative learning into a complex and current issue.
• Doing field WORK, not merely being on a field trip.
• Tackling a question that demands a range of perspectives to be considered before reaching an answer.
• Gathering their own evidence to arrive at their own supported and thoughtful conclusions.

That’s unusually good learning.  That’s what we do well at City Academy.