Year over year, scholars in the LCS junior class deliver Colorado’s apical SAT scores, outperforming nearly all Coloradans on both the math and English sections of the exam. This erudite achievement is only possible due to students’ mastering foundational knowledge in grades K–8, and to their continued hard work at the high-school level with consistently delivered, expert-level instruction by professional classroom instructors.
And yet, nearly all LCS instructors are considered unqualified by the Colorado Department of Education because they do not hold a formal Teaching License. Rather than recruiting licensed teachers with degrees from teacher colleges and endorsements from CDE, LCS eschews this common hiring practice, opting instead to recruit professionals with subject-matter expertise.
Many LCS teachers have prior K–12 teaching experience, while others have backgrounds in industry, military, or university-level instruction.
To be considered for employment, LCS teachers must demonstrate subject-matter expertise and an aptitude for pedagogy and classroom management which can be honed by working with mentors and instructional coaches. Teacher applicants are interviewed before a panel comprised of Liberty Founders, administrators, parent experts, department heads, and board members. Approximately 10–15 questions are asked about pedagogy and classroom management—the bulk of interview questions are dedicated to measuring the candidate’s level of expertise in his or her subject area. Interviewers ask increasingly difficult questions until a candidate is stumped and the ceiling of the candidate’s knowledge is revealed.
The school would not enjoy the recurring academic success for which it is known if forced to only hire licensed teachers.
PEDAGOGY AND PROFESSIOAL EDUCATORS
Becoming a teacher at Liberty
The professional classroom instructors at LCS teach a content-rich body of knowledge sequenced to align with the content their colleagues are teaching in their respective classrooms. Students learn about the rise and fall of Rome in Western Civilization, and when the bell rings, they migrate to art class where they study Giovanni Battista Fontana’s famous painting The Story of Romulus and Remus.
LCS mandatory staff meetings occur each Wednesday from 3:30–5:00PM. At a minimum frequency of once per quarter, teachers use this time to gather with grade-level colleagues around the mission of sequencing the curriculum, and ensuring maximum efficiency of instructional time is achieved across all grade levels.
CLICK HERE to read Hiring the Best Instructors, by Liberty Founder and Headmaster Bob Schaffer
The Thinking Framework: A Classical Framework for Teaching Thinking
Memorizing facts absent mastering the skills of learning is insufficient education. Therefore, in addition to a content-rich knowledge-based education, LCS students are also instructed in skills such as mature literacy and critical thinking.
The Thinking Framework is LCS’s pedagogical strategy for teaching students background knowledge, and then how to recognize and analyze patterns, solve problems, and mentally model and map assignments like lab experiments, written essays, and complex math problems.
Knowledge—In Liberty’s beginning grades (K–3), the acquisition of common knowledge—about a wide variety of subjects—is the primary focus of our school’s Thinking Framework.
Patterns—While students naturally make inferences on their own about the relations of the facts and ideas, Liberty instructors skillfully help students make connections and see the patterns—dissimilitude in similitude, and similitude in dissimilitude. This emphasis occurs at the next level, generally grades 4-6. During these grades, Liberty teachers, in addition to teaching more knowledge, specifically look for ways to train students’ perceptions of organizing principles, and the relations between things they have learned or observed.
Modeling—During the junior-high years (grades 7–12) Liberty’s students continue to learn many new facts and their relationships, but more and more of this is independent. Because of how knowledge builds upon knowledge, schemes are quicker to form and be modeled. In junior high, mental modeling – the making and testing of arguments and hypotheses (including logic)—is explicitly and implicitly taught, and students are given ample opportunity to practice. In writing, this means essays that marshal several concepts with underlying evidence. In history, it means an effort to link the patterns of individual human nature with social influence to project explanations of future or past causation. In math, this means symbolic representation of complex problems, algebra, and geometry.
CLICK HERE for a comprehensive article describing the school’s Thinking Framework strategy.