Test-takers find the answer.
Problem-solvers find
more than one.
At TVS, learning follows the learner. Emergent learning is a through-line of the TVS curriculum, turning what children wonder about into the work they do.
Children are born able to imagine many answers, and school too often teaches them to hunt for one.
The Village School · Emergent Learning
The emergent learning approach honors that natural capacity through challenges and experiences where learners generate their own questions, follow unexpected turns, and discover that a good problem holds more than a single solution.
We pay attention to how a learner arrived somewhere, not only to what they produced. The thinking is the work.
An approach that does not work is information, not a failure. Learners are encouraged to celebrate mistakes, learn from then, and try again.
These grow when children have room to wonder out loud, chase an idea further than expected, and build on what someone beside them just figured out.
Wonder Lab is where emergent learning comes to life. Learners spend part of every day on challenges with no set path. They define the problem themselves, choose their materials, build and rebuild when an approach fails, and compare their solution with the very different ones their peers arrived at.
Emergent learning is one part of how TVS is designed. See how it connects to the rest of our approach.