The New Queens Paideia School is providing a much needed, high quality educational environment that is helping children reach new potential in their lives. With an innovative and highly personalized learning plan, this brand new school has some very serious goals set for itself and its students. In a past interview, cofounder Francis Mechner said “We will create a situation in which kids take responsibility for their own learning, in which learning is something they do for themselves instead of something that is done to them.”
The individualized learning plan for students is created in a team effort.
Each student and his or her parents regularly meet with our staff to plan the child’s next learning objectives — things the student wants to learn, can learn, and should learn at any given time. Learning objectives are continuously formulated and reformulated to be achievable and consonant with goals that the teacher and parents consider important in that child’s development: academic skills, social skills, and personal growth. They are discussed, negotiated, agreed upon, and revisited on a regular basis. This personalized approach replaces the one-size-fits-all conventional school curriculum.
The primary goal of the QPS approach is for each child to become a confident, effective, and contributing member of society, a motivated, self-directed learner, and an independent thinker
Just the Facts on Queens Paideia
Queens Paideia offers a personalized educational approach so that students can reach their full potential. This approach, which is not achievable in mainstream schooling, is based on a student-teacher ratio of 5:1 and customized learning programs for each child. The content, schedule, and pace of a student’s learning program is driven by his or her unique skills, interests, temperament, potentials, and needs.
Student ages range from 7 to 14, with older students encouraged to help younger students in an environment of teamwork and mixed-age projects. Older students can experience the satisfaction of assisting or teaching younger ones while simultaneously providing them with role models. Students often teach and learn from each other.
The Admissions Process for Queens Paideia
1. An application form that requests your current contact data; it also includes a parent questionnaire so that we can learn more about you and your interest in Queens Paideia;
2. A current instructor evaluation, which can be filled out by any teacher who has known your child for at least a year and has regular interaction with him/her in a group setting;
3. An official school transcript from your child’s current school, which should be forwarded by mail directly from the school.
4. Optional: anything created by your child that you think is relevant, e.g., writing samples, drawings, musical or artistic compositions, and so forth.Upon receipt of the completed application, we will contact you to set up a parent-only informational meeting with two representatives of Queens Paideia. After that step, interested families (including children) will begin a process of meeting other Queens Paideia families and its teachers so that everyone can learn more about each other. Because we are a relatively small group at this time, a mutual goodness-of-fit is very important to the success of the school.
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We are considering Queens Paideia for next year for our daughter. The space and the teachers look very cool, but it was my daughter who really loved it. I spoke with one of the parents there for a long time and got the impression that the teachers do talk to the parents about their kids a lot (what a concept!), so the parents are not as worried as they would be somewhere else. That’s my problem now–my kid comes home with tons of work and no explanation. And I can’t stand the social garbage that keeps coming up. Seems to be less of a headache at Qu. Paideia because the teachers are on it.