Core Ideas Guiding Learning at King Open
Social Justice and Equity: Social Justice leads us to examine our approach to each child’s learning—ensuring we value every student, provide full access to educational opportunities, and affirm all cultures and learning styles. We strive to build students' agency for making a difference in the world. To achieve this, we do this in part by prioritizing rigorous Tier 1 academic and SEL instruction.
Continuous Learning is the Work: Professional growth is constant at King Open. We recognize that improving student outcomes requires an iterative cycle of reflection and action. Teachers engage in ongoing analysis of their instructional effectiveness, seeking out research-based practices to refine their craft. We hold a shared commitment to keeping our pedagogy dynamic, responsive to current student data, and aligned with the highest standards of academic excellence.
Restorative Justice and Circle Work: Restorative Justice is woven into the fabric of our school culture. Through regular circle work, we build empathy, maintain social-emotional health, and address harm in a way that repairs relationships. This practice promotes accountability and understanding, ensuring that our classrooms remain inclusive, safe, and focused on the collective well-being of every student so that every student has high-quality access to grade-level content as a fundamental act of equity.
Engaging Families in Meaningful Partnerships: We build strong partnerships between families and staff, recognizing that every family brings valuable strengths to our school. Family involvement supports the learning and social development of all children. We engage in substantive conferences and provide detailed reports on student progress. Together, staff and families examine data to inform how to better serve our students.
Inclusivity: All Students Matter: King Open strives to be a fully inclusive school where all students, regardless of learning styles or needs, have access to the same rigorous curriculum. We view every child as bringing unique gifts to our community. We operationalize this inclusion through robust Response to Intervention (RTI) systems, utilizing data-driven decision-making to provide the targeted support necessary for every student to succeed within the general education setting.
Fostering Student’s Independence: We empower students to become agents of their own learning. By explicitly teaching executive functioning skills and the strategies needed to monitor their own progress, we move students toward autonomy. We encourage students to recognize the role of effort in learning, providing them with the tools to work independently, do the cognitive heavy lifting, advocate for their needs, and take ownership of their academic and social growth.
Nurturing Community and Building Relationships: Every classroom is a community built on respect and sensitivity. We develop each student’s capacity for self-expression and self-control. We view conflicts as opportunities for learning and explicitly teach conflict resolution strategies. This relational work is the bedrock of our classroom management, allowing us to maintain the safe, orderly environment required for deep academic focus.
Assessment for Learning: Students receive immediate, ongoing feedback, developing essential skills of self-assessment and reflection. Teachers use curricular assessments, alongside district assessments/ benchmarks, to refine instructional practice and ensure our teaching is responsive to student needs.
Professional Collaboration: King Open is a professional learning community where teachers work in teams and as a whole staff to improve instruction. We collaborate across lateral and multi-grade teams to observe practice, lesson plan, assess learning, and set goals. By opening our classrooms for collegial observation and sharing effective pedagogical moves, we ensure consistency of practice, deep content knowledge, and a unified approach to raising achievement school-wide.
Responsive Classroom: King Open uses Responsive Classroom throughout the school. Responsive Classroom is a teaching approach that seeks to develop emotional/social skills alongside academic skills. It incorporates such techniques as daily meeting, rule creation, behavior modeling and positive teacher language to create an atmosphere in which students learn how to internalize expected behavior and correct mistakes with dignity. While some form of Responsive Classroom has been used widely by many KO teachers.