by Glen Herbert

Rosseau Lake College is a preparatory school in the classic sense. All the students are preparing to enter post-secondary programs, and as they approach Grade 11 and Grade 12, instruction focuses a bit more intentionally on that next phase of life. Learning becomes a little more classroom focused, in part because of the demands of the curriculum, but also in part to acclimate the students to the more standard academic settings they’ll move into.

RLC doesn’t offer the International Baccalaureate (IB), though it shares many attributes with those that do: the geographic diversity within the faculty, for one. It also shares the tradition of thinking globally—the IB is heavily influenced by the work of Kurt Hahn—particularly in the sense of global citizenship, which has been a core feature of Rosseau Lake’s DNA since its inception. 

Learning experiences are stretched out over longer arcs of time. The school year is semestered, so courses are offered over a period of months. That’s mirrored in the daily and weekly schedule, with longer blocks of time in the afternoons for students to get involved in projects in a deeper, more committed way. Because of the variation of the daily schedule through the week (Wednesday afternoons, for example, are on a flexible schedule), there isn’t a sense of being pushed from class to class, discipline to discipline, whenever the bell rings. Instead, there is time offered to get into a task and stay with it, largely free from pesky distractions. The dissection of a frog, for example, might take a whole afternoon. As well it should. This is a school that believes in the value of taking time, that learning is an experience to be savoured.

The school follows the Ontario curriculum, and students graduate with the OSSD, though the progress through the grades is highly sequenced and unique to Rosseau Lake. Grades 7 through 8 are the Foundation Years, which, as the name suggests, are designed as a time to develop a good basis in the fundamentals. Instructors work closely together so that when students move up, their strengths, challenges, and talents are known. The school prizes individual, student-paced learning. Says an alumnus, Jenny Spring, “I felt like the teachers paid attention to people’s learning skills, how they learned, and how that was different from student to student.”

The academic year culminates in Discovery Week, during which students complete and present a project of their own design, applying and demonstrating the knowledge and skills they’ve developed throughout the year. It’s a design-process project that begins in January. From then on, Wednesday afternoons are given over to the project. It begins in entirely blue-sky, out-of-the-box thinking, with students considering their passions and the things that animate their imaginations, and then working ahead from there. They are also required to tie their projects back to the courses they’ve been taking throughout the year.

It is the difference between spotting the barred owl on a trail walk - perched still and silent, otherwise invisible within the overhead limbs of the maple - or simply seeing it through the chain link at the local zoo. The bird is impressive in either scenario, but the experience is vastly different. RLC intends for students to see the owl not because it is shown to them, but because they discover it. Learning is embedded in a moment that is at once exciting, deeply personal, remarkable and maybe even unlikely. The learning, like the experience itself, is never quite forgotten.

For more from Graham Vogt on aspects of the RLC academic program, see: 

Alongside the learning journey

The Power of Just Because

Helping students find peace in a busy world 

Thinking beyond

Making the case for learning skills

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