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Classroom Experience

What Sets Pacifica Apart

PACIFICA STUDENTS WILL SPEND 400 HOURS IN DISCUSSION

By making conversation into a conscious habit, students improve in their practice of conversation and discussion with others.

WE TAKE A WISDOM APPROACH TO TECHNOLOGY

Pacifica's 1:1 iPad Program owns and manages each device's operating system. This allows the school to set and control all parameters for use on each device.

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A Pacifica Discussion

A discussion is a mini-quest for truth with reference to a common text, where the truth is something unknown, but discoverable.

We are not building the truth, we are searching for it together. The truth is something “out there” that we have to find as a group. A discussion is thus full of adventure, twists and turns, ups and downs, false paths, and epiphanies. Beliefs (not just feelings) are shared out into the room and made vulnerable to our table-mate’s scrutiny and criticism, so that those beliefs may be changed, further refined, and/or solidified. There is therefore no place for naive dogmatism, skepticism, or relativism in a good discussion, because a good discussion assumes that truth is something we can approach and even obtain; that if we look for it we can find it. And yet, a good discussion recognizes that while truth can be known, it is also difficult to know given our fallenness and finitude, as well as our locatedness in particular cultures and times. Discussion participants therefore must approach discussions with humility, recognizing our need for community and the wisdom of the past in order to know the truth.

Students at Pacifica are encouraged and trained to be who they are, say what they think, and to love one another. They are trained to understand that they are not reducible to their ideas, that their honest thoughts matter, that they are not always right, and that they ought to stick to the question at hand and the text at hand.

In a Pacifica discussion, the text is the teacher, and the teacher is the facilitator of the discussion about the text. A good teacher models humility and discipleship to the text, as well as confidence of belief in objective truth, and a willingness to pursue continued growth and learning. A well-led discussion will accordingly affirm the inherent value of every human individual, respect their need to grow and develop as a person in process, and will be engaged in discourse with charity and without anxiety, trusting that God is the one primarily and ultimately responsible for student growth and development. It is this environment and this pedagogy that grounds all our learning, and it is one of the many things that makes our school unique.