Our Unique Approach

Quintral’s structure and organization creatively meets many interconnected objectives. Our daily and weekly schedule, the personalization of each students’ learning, the delivery and interaction with the curriculum and our approach to evaluation all demonstrate our willingness to do things differently in order to best meet the needs of our students in this constantly evolving world.

In order to allow for fewer transitions and more focused and uninterrupted learning, and yet still offer a wide array of course options, our school utilizes a block schedule, with students attending half their classes on Mondays and Wednesdays, and the other half on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Each day’s morning class is a 2-hour core block, where students dive deep into social studies and English language arts half the week, and science and Spanish language arts the other half. Combining these subject courses with language arts allows for added support for those students who are studying a second language, and also lends itself to interdisciplinary and thematic learning. In addition to their 3 classes per day, students have 2 full hours of free time for outdoor play, exploration and optional enrichment activities. Finally, a morning and afternoon class with their grade-level cohort provides students with a space to build relationships and work through a social-emotional curriculum in the morning and a life skills curriculum in the afternoon.

We believe that each student deserves to work at their own pace and level and to have a say in which interests they’d most like to pursue. Not only do students help design their class schedule each semester, but within each class, students are given significant autonomy to design their own projects and interact with the material using their own preferred learning style. Using homemade lesson books, students document their learning as they go, and present their projects and their work at the end of each semester during a special Family Presentation.

We could not do what we do without our expert Guides who bring passion and respect to every class. While our Guides provide needed materials, introduce new material and help guide students through the development of their projects, they do much more listening than talking, and they are well-trained in student-led learning. Our classes maintain a 12:1 student to Guide ratio and are always mixed-age, allowing for important peer-to-peer learning and even greater differentiation.

Fridays are very special days at Quintral. Fridays are our days to step out of the classroom and apply all our students are learning (socially, emotionally, academically and physically) to the real world. Some examples of our Friday curriculum include excursions in nature (hiking, biking, skiing, kayaking etc.), field trips (community service, public works, cultural events, career shadowing, festivities etc.), on-campus projects (chicken coop, garden days, sustainable structures, clean-up etc.) and guest speakers (visitors, specialists, presentations, workshops etc.).