Culture Our school is not merely an institution that dispenses knowledge from teacher to student. It is a place permeated by a culture focused on 3 categories: the true, the good and the beautiful.We aim to foster in our students the ability to discover truth for themselves and to understand it wherever it is found. We want them to pursue an ever-increasing knowledge and understanding of reality. Additionally, we expect to see and aid in the development of a sense of wonder within our students: wonder about reality and a desire to learn more. We want to inculcate within them a love for the truth.We encourage students desire the good in their own lives and in the world. We want them to become morally and spiritually serious persons. To that end, we want our students to develop the ability to recognize the good. In the end, we hope that they appropriate practices that will produce good in their own lives and in the lives of those around them.We show our students that they can develop, not only the ability to recognize and love beauty, but the potential to attain proficiency in the skills required to producing beautiful things. And not just in art, but in music and drama as well. We intend for our students to move from those abilities to a love of beauty in its various expressions. Learning—the engagement of the mind and imagination with reality—is an essential human activity. We introduce our students to this essential activity through forming them into a community of learners. We do not intend to introduce them to school or schooling, but to a culture where ideas and the expression of the human spirit matter. Jacques Maritain, a French philosopher, described education as a “human awakening.” The educational culture of Trinity Schools makes that human awakening a reality for our students.At Trinity Schools, the student is the main agent of his or her own education. Rather than receiving knowledge passively, each student is actively engaged in apprehending concepts and perceiving relationships.Students learn to think for themselves and not simply absorb the ideas of others. This is one result of our firm commitment to reading and discussing original texts and documents. Students deal directly with the thoughts and words of the author, not with the ideas of some other reader or expert. They do not read commentaries, introductions, reviews, etc.; they meet the text on its own terms. Thoughtful and imaginative participation is required of every student.This notion of the active involvement of each student lies behind many of the distinctive features of the organization and pedagogy of Trinity Schools. Limiting the size of classes to no more than 20 students, separating boys and girls in the classroom, reading original texts and documents rather than textbooks—all are strategies for constructing a culture where students are engaged in thinking on their own and discussing their ideas with others.Our educational culture is active and focused on active engagement. In the arts program, students play the recorder, sing in the choir and compose music. In the visual arts, they paint and draw. In drama, they act. In the seminar, they discuss and write. In mathematics and science, they solve problems, write computer programs in MATLAB and engage in experiments. The pedagogy of Trinity School is based upon the conviction that education—indeed, all of the intellectual life—is a search for truth carried forward by men and women working together in discussion, research and experimentation. Thus, the faculty and the students of Trinity School constitute a community of learners. As the students progress though the program they are expected to contribute more and more to this community.The Trinity curriculum takes seriously the liberal arts tradition of the West. That tradition clearly recognized that the knowledge of reality was comprehended under certain specific habits of mind. We have built our pedagogy around the three liberal arts known as the trivium: grammar, logic and rhetoric. In a generalized form and as applied to our curriculum, this means that we begin the six-year course of instruction with an emphasis upon the elementary aspects of the subject being studied—the grammar. During the middle years at Trinity the emphasis falls on the relationships among the elements, especially the relationship of logical implication. In the final years of this course of study the students are expected to participate more actively in the search for truth and in the integration of these subject matters—rhetoric. This intellectual sojourn could be described as the gathering of data, the formation of hypotheses and the construction of theory.The teacher leads, forms and modelsWe believe that the best way to learn is in the context of an authentic culture of learning—a community of learners. We also believe that the community’s order and vitality are dependent upon effective leadership in the classroom. The teacher provides that crucial element. The teacher’s dynamism, preparedness, knowledge, intellectual curiosity, and love for both the students and the subject, establish the culture to which the students are meant to respond and against which their performance is measured. Any intellectual or aesthetic habit of mind that marks the school’s culture is modeled by the teacher. Any expressed form of pedagogy we use always rests on the primacy of the teacher’s leadership.The teacher asks the questionsWe believe that all knowledge begins in wonder, and at the core of wonder is questioning. As a pedagogical means, questioning happens at every level of the curriculum. The teacher’s question is a key lead—sometimes, the key lead—into the text, phenomenon, topic or problem under exploration. It is also the model for how the student is to ask questions and develop a sense of wonder and depth of inquiry. Finally, it is the chief means by which the student is challenged to press beyond the self-evident, the parochial and the unexamined. The rigor of a teacher’s questioning increases as the student matures; thus, the most developed questioning happens in our advanced curricula. In our seminars on literature the teachers use questioning more extensively than anywhere else in the program. We often refer to our seminars as “Socratic,” precisely because of the extensive role questioning plays. There, we rely on the teacher’s rigorous questioning to spur the students’ analysis, and we refrain from didactic instruction.The teacher coachesWe believe that learning is largely a matter of trial and error, practice and performance. In the face of that reality, positive and negative feedback from the teacher is vital to the student’s development. In the practice of coaching, when a student performs proficiently, the teacher reinforces that performance; when a student makes a mistake or needs improvement, the teacher corrects the flaw or demonstrates the pertinent skill or method and guides the student to better performance. Every aspect of a student’s performance is under the direction of the teacher as coach. This requires great attention and energy on the teacher’s part; it requires an abiding affection as well: a love of learning and a love of the student experiencing the challenging process of learning. Coaching happens at every level of the program. It is the chief means we use to directly shape student performance.The teacher instructs didacticallyWe believe that all our students should acquire basic ordered knowledge. The principal means for meeting that objective is the presentation of information that is largely factual, narrative and formulaic. In order to convey that information, the teacher relies largely on didactic instruction: lectures, demonstrations and explanations. All three modes of communication are filled out with questioning and coaching. At the same time, the teacher’s clear and lively presentation of the three modes of didactic instruction is necessary to a student’s adequate engagement in the subject matter at hand. Didactic instruction happens at all levels of the curriculum, but most extensively in seventh and eighth grades. Didactic instruction is the chief means by which we convey the foundational content of basic ordered knowledge.