Insight honors teens’ autonomy and provides the scaffolding they need to achieve their goals.
The Insight Experience at a Glance
Daily life at Insight looks a little different than traditional school. While we hold classes throughout the day, we do not require students to arrive by 8:30 and stay until 3:30, Monday through Friday, changing classes every 50 minutes. Instead, we require students to be at Insight or at a field site when they have classes, workshops, and advising. At other times, students have choices. They can work on campus in our Social Study Hall or Quiet Study Hall, work from home, head to the library, or go to a job or volunteer site. Students are supported in learning how to use their time wisely, developing a daily and weekly rhythm that allows them to achieve their goals.
Each feature of Insight’s developmentally-grounded, evidence-based program contributes to building students’ competence, confidence, and connection to school and community.
Insight’s lively and intimate academic courses and rich community are augmented by experiential, social-emotional, and service learning that build skills and community.
Small Classes
At Insight, each class has ten or fewer students. This gives teachers and students the opportunity to truly get to know each other and develop strong working relationships. Together, they cultivate the respect and rapport required to engage in deep dialogue, growth, and genuine engagement with material.
A Place to Belong
Insight welcomes and supports students from diverse backgrounds, who have diverse profiles and interests. Our students and staff members come to Insight with intersectional identities with respect to race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, learning differences, and neuro-development. We strive to build a thriving community, modeling the diverse, just, equitable, inclusive, anti-racist society our students and faculty hope to build and inhabit and see in the world.
Experiential Learning
Insight Outside: Outdoor Adventure Education
Outdoor learning teaches key skills that correlate with high achievement. Research shows that outdoor skills such as backpacking, paddling, way-finding, and shelter-building contribute to healthy development at the individual and group levels, including increased self-confidence and problem-solving and communication skills.
Insight integrates outdoor learning into our school program throughout the year. We partner with Frog Hollow Outdoors to plan local and regional expeditions and provide appropriate equipment to students regardless of their prior outdoor experience or financial resources.
Teamship: Collaborating for the Modern World
Work is changing. Artificial intelligence and computers can now do much of the work once done by people. So what is a uniquely human job description of the future? The stuff that computers can’t do is where our power lies. One example of this is in leveraging the power of teams to solve complex problems.
Insight’s semester long Teamship class provides hands-on training to grow these skills. In collaboration with the nonprofit District C, Insight provides Teamship courses in which students team up with peers and a District C-Certified Coach to solve real problems for real businesses. Training for the jobs of the future is fundamental to students’ development as competent, confident, and connected young adults.
Research tells us that social, emotional, and metacognitive skills are essential components of a comprehensive education. When schools combine developmentally appropriate experiential learning with social-emotional skills training, they see increased student success.
Service Learning
Insight students engage in service-learning in the school and in the community, within specific classes, as a whole group, and independently. Students in our Focus phase complete a minimum of forty hours of service to their community.
School-Based Service Learning
Using skills they have learned in and outside of school, Insight students take initiative and responsibility for contributing program ideas, recruiting like-minded peers, building student support systems, collaborating across interest areas, and continuously improving the institution.
Students sit on all Insight committees, suggest new courses, plan group outings and service days, write for newsletters and social media, help on-board new teachers and students, and offer student-led workshops during our intersession.
Community-Based Service Learning
Insight students are committed to equity, justice, health, education, and opportunity for all. They act on their commitments in a variety of ways, including
Serving on the City of Durham’s Youth Commission
Serving on the Youth Board of The Nasher Museum
Volunteering at Durham Community Food Bank and with Feed Durham, NC
Participating in the National Youth Climate Strike
Working with Keep Durham Beautiful and other partners to clean up our neighborhoods and waterways
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Social, Emotional, and Metacognitive Learning Skills
Research tells us that social, emotional, and metacognitive skills are essential components of a comprehensive education. When schools combine developmentally appropriate experiential learning with social-emotional skills training, they see increased student success. Core offerings in this domain include:
Social Study Hall
A daily offering during non-class times where the wall between schoolwork and fun starts to come down, lines start to blur; students and faculty talk and work together and often find themselves discussing and building on exciting ideas learned in class. Social study hall provides a natural setting to build friendships and tie classroom ideas into real life.
Living in Beta
All Insight students participate in our wayfinding program called Living in Beta. When students “live in beta,” they work through guided exercises to uncover their questions and curiosities and develop projects to explore them further. Over time, with the support of their mentors, students are able to distinguish true passions from fleeting interests, while working in their communities. Through Living in Beta, students cultivate self-awareness and a growth mindset.
How People Learn: Developing Metacognition
A semester-long workshop offered annually to incoming students. The workshop introduces students to current research on how people learn and how to optimize learning experiences. We have found that learning more about this subject helps students become better agents of and advocates for their own education and academic needs.