Vision: A community of families and professionals strengthened through sustainable family relationships and the experience of education providing the highest potential for self–actualization in all children.
Family and Professional Development Center
The Family and Professional Development Center, opening with the Lab School in the fall of 2010, will allow parents to learn along with their children. This is where the uniqueness of the Institute comes forward; no other school in Portland provides adults with the mandatory opportunity for self–development.
The aim of Family and Professional Development Center is to provide families with an understanding of Natural Learning Rhythms, the philosophy upon which Lab School is founded. In order to encourage full capacity and potential in children, it is necessary for parents, caregivers, and teachers to value and understand the developmental stages of childhood. Natural Learning Rhythms offers great detail into the breadth and scope of each developmental stage. Simultaneously, our program offers direct, applicable responses to the following challenges in education today:
- Creating relationships that are meaningful to parents, teachers and the child and which express and support development.
- Involving the families of children of all ages and backgrounds to optimize academic achievement.
- Showing teachers and parents how to recognize and support relationships that lead to mutual respect between adult and child and among the children.
- How to support academic excellence in the home.
When an adult meets the developmental needs of the child, optimal well–being is available to each of them. Many of the blocks to the adult’s well–being dissolve and the family system flourishes. Over the years we have developed experiential learning programs specifically designed to concretize the learning of this approach to the whole child. Parents are required to participate in these specially designed programs if their children are enrolled in the Lab School.
Learn More about the Natural Learning Rhythm approach...