Students experience ongoing powerful learning moments, organized within a greater journey or acr of learning, toward a compelling purpose - a purpose that matters in the present. This longevity is what enables mastery and understanding, thus enabling student pride in and ownership of learning.

To provide opportunities for students to demonstrate understanding and create work that matters, teachers backwards plan student learning trajectories toward a purposeful end goal. Throughout the course of study, cumulative learning enables increasing depth of understanding and the ability to apply learning. Teachers focus both on the arc of learning (driving/essential question, challenge, sustained inquiry, benchmarks, final product, etc.) and on the daily practices that enable powerful learning moments to occur throughout the journey.

Students work both collaboratively and independently toward a collective challenge, drawing on the expertise and thinking of their peers and bringing their own expertise and thinking to the group.

Site leaders backwards plan adult learning trajectories that build toward a purposeful end goal in which educators have the opportunity to both demonstrate understanding and create work that matters. Site leaders create the conditions, structures, and supports to enable lengthy arcs of learning for students within the school (within classrooms, vertically, interdisciplinary/horizontally, and whole school).