Philosophy
At Benchmark School we believe that each child is brimming with potential that has yet to be fully realized. Helping students develop their potential requires thoughtful instruction that reflects each child’s unique learning profile while helping them move toward the goal of becoming motivated and independent learners. Toward that end, we focus our attention on helping our students:
- build confidence that enables them to actively engage and
find enjoyment in academic and social activities- develop ownership of a wide range of cognitive strategies and conceptual frameworks that will assist them across
academic and social settings- develop an awareness of their own strengths and challenges
- develop essential learning characteristics such as flexibility, persistence, attention, active involvement, reflectivity, and organization
- develop social and emotional knowledge that enables them to interact with respect and caring and collaborate effectively
- develop the ability to self-regulate their own learning so that they can flexibly and creatively apply their conceptual and strategic knowledge in any situation
Putting it all together, Benchmark’s ultimate goal is to help our students become confident and caring individuals who not only possess a strong conceptual and strategic knowledge-base but understand how to flexibly and creatively apply that knowledge-base to meet the challenges they will face throughout their experiences in school and life.
Structured and Supportive Instruction
As a result of these considerations, instruction at Benchmark is structured and supportive while being intellectually stimulating. More specifically, our instruction involves the following key components:
1. We create a caring community where active involvement is encouraged and productive social interaction strategies are modeled and supported.
2. We address the whole child. In addition to developing learning strategies, we work to enhance students’ social and emotional awareness and provide them with strategies that facilitate social interactions as well as their abilities to collaborate. In short, we want to help students develop characteristics and stylistic attributes that help them function effectively in either academic or social settings.
3. We apply a gradual release of responsibility model that begins with teacher modeling and progresses through guided practice on the way to independent practice. This model enables us to be supportive while developing independence.
4. We emphasize explicit instruction. Research is clear that struggling learners benefit from straightforward guidance on what strategies are being taught, how to apply them, why they are important, and when they can be used. The conditional knowledge (“why” and “when”) are particularly important for helping students learn to transfer learning to new settings, which is what learning is all about.
Instructional Program
Benchmark School admits bright, struggling learners who arrive at Benchmark having had difficulties in school for a variety of reasons. In the process of these struggles, students sometimes have been identified as having a language-based learning difference, an auditory processing deficit, or a perceptual difficulty. At other times, students have been identified as dyslexic, reading disabled, learning disabled, ADD/ADHD, or learning different.
While these labels can provide a starting point in understanding a child as a learner, we have found that these labels are not particularly helpful to us in planning an optimal instructional program for a child because there a variety of cognitive, social, and emotional characteristics that interact in unique ways for each child under different learning conditions. Consequently, even within a particular label, each student presents a distinct combination of strengths and weaknesses that affects that child's learning.
Therefore, at Benchmark we do not focus on labels. Instead, we focus on who each child is as a learner and, based on that information, we determine the instructional plan that is best suited for that particular student.
Interestingly, our understanding of each child's unique learning profile has an additional benefit beyond planning instruction. An integral part of helping students move toward our overarching goal of developing the tools and strategies to be efficient and effective learners, thinkers, and problem solvers is helping them understand themselves as learners. This understanding helps our students develop into strong self-advocates who can take control of their own learning.
Since many children enter Benchmark as beginning readers, struggling to identify unknown words, we work hard to teach students a variety of decoding strategies. In addition, we help students understand how our language works, including connections between decoding, spelling, and vocabulary. This focus complements our consistent emphasis on developing comprehension and communication abilities, as well as helps students become confident, self-regulated learners.
The School provides a full-day program staffed by head teachers who are certified and highly trained in effective, research-based instructional techniques. In addition each classroom is staffed by one to two support teachers.
In the Lower School, language arts and social studies are taught in the primary classroom. The head teacher coordinates the team of staff members who teach science, math, art, music, physical education, health, and handwriting. The Middle School is departmentalized with a teacher and support teacher for each subject area.
In all content areas, students are taught to integrate and apply thinking and studying strategies most appropriate to the text, the task, the situation, and their individual cognitive styles and learner characteristics.
Child and Family Support Services
Benchmark provides professional guidance in helping children address the social and emotional issues that often accompany difficulties in school. Counseling professionals work with teachers to help them addresss students' needs, and they also meet with students and parents both individually and in small groups.
In the Middle School, the Mentor Program teams up students and faculty in one-to-one relationships to provide additional academic, social, and emotional support for students.
Success After Benchmark
Benchmark's placement / transition counselors assist parents in identifying the most appropriate school placements when students are ready to leave Benchmark, usually after eighth grade. In addition, Benchmark counselors follow up on the progress of graduates through communication with the receiving schools.
We are extremely proud of the tremendous progress our students make while they are attending Benchmark. However, the most convincing data about the strength of our program comes from how well our students do after they leave Benchmark. Our students attend outstanding schools immediately after graduation and virually 100% go on to attend college. Many students then continue on to graduate and professional programs. Even more importantly than their academic success, our students experience success in their chosen careers and become active members of their communities.
View schools that students attend after leaving Benchmark.
View a sampling of institutions of higher learning attended by Benchmark alumni (undergraduate and graduate programs).
Benchmark Alumni: Where are they and what are they doing?
