About
- International by Design
  Our School's curriculum and disposition have been globally focused since WIS's founding in 1966.
- Three Divisions, Two Campuses, One School
  Our students in Preschool through Grade 12 occupy two campuses: one in Georgetown and one in Cleveland Park.
Admissions
- Why Choose WIS?
  The members of our Admissions team are available to answer your questions.
Academics
- Early Years Language Immersion
  In Preschool, Pre-Kindergarten, and Kindergarten our students are immersed in Spanish or French.
- International Baccalaureate PYP and DP
  Preschool to Grade 5 students learn under the framework of the IB Primary Years Program; all Grades 11 and 12 students take IB Diploma Program courses.
Arts & STEM
- Creativity Encouraged!
  The fine and performing arts are an essential aspect of a WIS education.
Athletics
- Scholar-Athletes
  Each year, approximately 60% of our Middle and Upper School students participate on at least one athletics team.
Student Life
- Where Aren't We From?
  Faculty, parents, and students collectively hail from nearly 100 countries!
- After School Enrichment
  Co-Curricular Programs offers a wide array of after school classes for Primary School students.
Support
- Your Philanthropy Matters
  Gifts to WIS support faculty development, innovative learning experiences, financial aid, athletics, and other strategic priorities.

In This Section

Core Beliefs About Learning

Click on any of the blue bars below to learn more about each of our Core Beliefs.

ONE: We believe that all humans want to learn, and that learning is an essential, innate, ongoing, and lifelong process.

Teaching

Therefore educators:

Expect that all people can learn.
Maintain appropriate expectations that challenge all learners.
Share their passion for learning.
Regard all interactions as teaching/learning opportunities.
Model curiosity and persistence.

Assessing

Therefore:

The primary purpose for assessment is to improve learning.
Assessment provides all learners with the capacity to demonstrate what they know, value, and are able to do.

TWO: We believe that learning is a process of making meaning of the world.

Teaching

Therefore educators:

Are concerned with the development of understanding.
Recognize that ideas are constructed and open to question or refinement.
View curriculum as being based on key ideas or questions.
Are patient with the time it takes to build meaning.
Expose students to multiple perspectives and cultures.

Assessing

Therefore:

Assessment focuses on demonstrations of understanding that move beyond gathering and recalling information.
Assessment is moderated through collaboration to enhance fairness, reliability, and validity.

THREE: We believe that learners are unique and they are responsible for their own learning.

Teaching

Therefore educators:

Recognize and respond to individual differences and learning styles.
Demonstrate care for and understanding of each learner.
Include and maximize the participation of learners of different abilities and backgrounds.
Differentiate instruction through a relevant range of teaching approaches and strategies.
Collaborate/communicate with learners about learning goals, activities, issues, and contexts.

Assessing

Therefore:

Learners self-assess and develop their capacity to monitor their own learning.
Learners reflect upon and evaluate assessment tasks.

FOUR: We believe that learning depends on being able to connect prior knowledge, perceptions, or patterns of experience to new experiences, new information, and contexts.

Teaching

Therefore educators:

Seek to discover what learners already know, value, and are able to do.
Build on the diverse personal, social, and cultural experience, knowledge, and skills that learners bring to new learning.
Make explicit the connections between different aspects of learning.
Structure activities to challenge learners’ suppositions and preconceptions.
Assist all learners in extending their levels of thinking and understanding.

Assessing

Therefore:

A range of assessments and monitoring processes are used to gather information about what learners know, value, and are able to do.
Assessment about what learners know, value, and are able to do is used to plan teaching sequences and to diagnose areas for challenge and intervention.
Assessment respects and includes different ways of knowing.

FIVE: We believe that learning is profoundly influenced by social relationships.

Teaching

Therefore educators:

Develop positive relationships with and between all involved in the learners’ learning.
Build a sense of community, group identity, and appropriate learning partnerships.
Plan for purposeful, collaborative teacher/teacher, teacher/learner, and learner/learner interaction.
Maintain a sense of humor.
Promote a sense of participation and responsibility from the local to the global.

Assessing

Therefore:

Assessment is fair, free from bias, and inclusive for all learners.
Assessment incorporates judgments from learners, peers, and educators.
Assessment includes the work of groups as well as individuals.

SIX: We believe that learning is significantly affected by emotions.

Teaching

Therefore educators:

Provide a consistently safe, positive, and secure environment.
Acknowledge emotions and emotional contexts.
When appropriate, make use of these contexts as opportunities for learning.

Assessing

Therefore:

Assessment includes the monitoring of learners’ emotional wellbeing.
Learners monitor the extent to which emotions affect and influence their learning.

SEVEN: We believe that self-perception directly affects motivation and learning.

EIGHT: We believe that learning is more effective when information is embedded in purposeful and meaningful experiences and interactions.

Teaching

Therefore educators:

Act intentionally, planning for interactions with learners.
Make their intentions or expected outcomes clear and explicit to learners.
Involve learners in goal setting.
Connect what is being taught to hypothetical and real-life experiences.
Relate what is being taught to learners’ experiences and interests.
Engage learners in multi-sensory experiences.

Assessing

Therefore:

Learners are clear about what is being assessed.
Assessment encourages learners to exhibit their actual understandings.
Assessment is in itself a central learning experience.
Assessment tasks are based where possible on real-world contexts and embedded in recurrent learning.

NINE: We believe that learning is contextual.

TEN: We believe that learning is enhanced when learners are aware of how thinking and learning occur (meta-cognition), which gives learners increased control over their learning.

ELEVEN: We believe that learning is demonstrated when learners can apply their understandings in new situations in flexible and thought-provoking ways.

Teaching

Therefore educators:

Design learning sequences that explicitly support the application and transfer of learning to new problems and settings.
Draw attention to similarities, connections, and analogies between the known and the new.

Assessing

Therefore:

Assessment opportunities are designed to explicitly test learners’ ability to apply their learning in new and unfamiliar situations.

TWELVE: We believe that learning is complex and non-linear.

Teaching

Therefore educators:

Are intentional about learners’ extending, elaborating, reorganizing, reformulating, and reflecting upon their own frameworks of knowledge.
Provide the time for this to happen.
Recognize the educational potential in risk-taking, mistakes or errors.
Encourage perseverance.

Assessing

Therefore:

Assessment encourages learners to reflect and question and to continuously plan for future learning.
Learners note and use errors as a means of improving their own learning.
Assessment products may vary widely to reflect different ways of demonstrating understanding.

* Based upon Principles of Learning, Teaching, and Assessment, Tasmanian Department of Education, Australia