Gateway America Prep

Independence

At Gateway America, we believe that developing independence helps students become stronger learners and successful adults. We use student-driven learning and testing to help our students achieve independence, which comes with self-management, organization and self-motivation.

STUDENT-DRIVEN LEARNING
Students work with a learning coach to design their own lessons and set their own education goals. At the beginning of the week, students plan their upcoming lessons, and set goals to ensure they stay on track. At the beginning of each day, students write out and revisit these goals. As students complete lessons and move through the course, they continue to update and revise their goals. Monitoring academic achievement helps build a student’s confidence, while also teaching him or her valuable self-management and self-motivation skills.

Students at Gateway America create their own tests. This helps them evaluate what is most important in their courses and develop critical thinking skills. As students complete their lessons, they submit it to a mentor for feedback. The mentor critiques the lessons and then the student can make corrections. Once all the lessons and corrections are completed, the student selects questions for the test. After mentor approval of the questions, the student studies for and takes the test.

BENEFITS
Student responsibility is one of our goals. We want our students to think responsibly, and grow into independent learners who are not dependent on a school or a teacher to advance their education. Students are expected to read, understand, and articulate the learning material independently. This approach builds self-confidence among our students on many different levels. They gain confidence in their academic ability, as well as their ability to set and achieve goals. Student-driven learning and student-driven testing also help students learn other important soft skills, such as time management, self-motivation, and organization.