Perspectives on balancing freedom and productivity.
One thing that continues to challenge our mesivta program is discovering how to create the proper amount of structure so
that everyone, even the newer students who have never been given much freedom or independence in their school
experience, can be successful. Finding this balance has led to several important choices in the way we use time and space, as
well as in the way our teachers interact with students:
• Physical space—the mesivta is spead out over several “zones” of learning. In one zone, students may attend a large
-group, “seminar” type of class, in another they are able to gather in small groups or work independently while a
teacher circulates to provide help, in still another there is a complete “quiet zone” for individual focused activity.
Additionally, there is an attic for free-space and “tinkering”
• Time—block scheduling is not compatible with our group of students, as it does not allow for them to work within
their own cycles of energy, nor does it support students learning different topics with different pacing; instead, we
use a “real world” model of scheduling in which our students attend meetings and work on independent or group
tasks and projects, much like in the modern work world
• Teacher as Mentor—the relationship a student has with a LL teacher can be likened to a “mentor to apprentice” in
which the teacher is not the main purveyor of knowledge, but the guide to model how a student can access
knowledge and apply it