IDE

The Bronxville School District is partnering with IDE Corp. (Innovative Designs for Education) to redesign classrooms and strengthen instructional practice to support students’ ability to take ownership of their work. This partnership builds upon our professional development efforts around Project Based Learning and takes another step forward in helping our students fulfill the Bronxville Promise, developing their ability to lead, innovate, engage the world, and think critically.  

Eight teachers across the middle school and high school in the subjects of science, math, social studies, and world language participated in an intensive 8-day summer training to create their Learner-Active, Technology-Infused Classrooms (LATIC). Throughout the school year, an IDE consultant provides personalized mentoring to these teachers.

The Learner-Active, Technology-Infused Classroom is a framework for increasing student engagement, academic rigor, and student responsibility for learning. In LATIC, students approach learning through standards-based units of study that begin with an authentic, real-world problem to solve. Within the context of this problem, students learn the necessary skills and content of the subject area.

The teacher provides a variety of learning activities, including whole-group and small-group lessons, and activities in which students will engage individually, in pairs, and in groups. These may include learning centers, printed directions, articles, online programs, and/or textbook pages. These varied modalities provide student choice and differentiation, meeting individual students’ needs and allowing students to build the necessary content mastery to solve the problem.  

Teachers in LATIC act as facilitators of learning, setting up and managing structures to build student autonomy, and monitoring student progress to ensure that each student is receiving the necessary instruction and learning activities at the right time. The teacher works closely with students to ensure their success, supporting them in acquiring content knowledge, while also helping them build essential executive function skills.