NPES teachers integrate our local community and intentional places beyond Chicago into our curriculum. Our place-based approach includes civic engagement with local service-learning partners; frequent field studies across the city; local business partnerships; Chicago neighborhood explorations; design-thinking projects aimed at addressing community challenges; and purposeful educational travel, including day and overnight trips like our civil rights tour of Georgia and Alabama and trips to Washington, D.C., Springfield, Illinois, outdoor education in Wisconsin, and an optional excursion to a Spanish-speaking nation in the Americas, recently to the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica.

Research shows that travel and other place-based experiences “foster a sense of belonging, increase student learning, improve student academic persistence, and narrow equity gaps (Johnson et al. 2020).” Furthermore, according to the University of Nebraska, students report positive feelings regarding outdoor field experiences while also perceiving the experience as increasing their understanding of the course content (Boyle et al. 2007). Instructors report higher student engagement with place-based learning than with traditional classroom lectures (Goodlad and Leonard 2018). All place-based learning programs at NPES except the optional international trip are included in our tuition because it is an integral, unique, and powerful aspect of our curriculum. To learn more, visit our Placed-Based Learning page HERE.

NPES students are known in their families, local communities, high schools, and colleges for their exceptional communication skills. All preschool through fifth grade students engage joyfully in a year-long drama class that includes frequent improv games, with rich after-school opportunities for students to perform in middle school. Design thinking courses and club programming in the Innovation Lab, service learning, student council, model united nations, classroom greeters, student tour guides, the important role our students play in hiring new faculty, safety patrol, summer camp junior counselors, Shark Week, and a collaborative classroom pedagogy in which students communicate daily with peers as they construct learning together (and often share their learning with others beyond their classroom via NPES’ i-Visits, presentations, original videos, podcasts, and more) reflect our school’s unique investment in building written, spoken, non-verbal, and other creative communication skills. NPES students think and feel deeply, and often have something to say. And we love that.

Play in early childhood is the authentic and beautiful means through which children develop social-emotional and academic skills, so play with purpose is the foundation of our engaging and joyful Early Childhood program. Our expert early childhood teachers provide gross motor play on the playlot and in the small gym, developing the large muscle groups including a child's core, back, legs, and arms. Outdoor time on the playlot results in greater concentration, more independent self-regulation, resilience, and stamina, as well increased curiosity, imagination, frontal-lobe executive functioning, active participation in learning, and the development of key social-emotional skills. Inside NPES’ purpose-built early childhood suite, students meet daily for a nurturing and communal morning meeting where they practice essential school readiness skills like sitting, active listening, speaking with relevance, practicing body awareness in a smaller shared space, and being supportive members of a group. 

We curate a variety of free-choice activities at classroom centers where curiosity generates exploration, experimentation, creative tinkering and making, transitioning, patience, sharing, conflict resolution, and time-management. Embedded throughout the day are appealing opportunities to grow literacy, math, and science skills, with the healthy naming and processing of feelings integrated into all we do. Purposeful play is how enduring, useful, and fun learning takes place. With NPES’ Reggio-inspired approach to building skills-rich “studies” (units) rooted in how the children have been playing (where their interests lie), all learning becomes more tangible, relevant, and meaningful to early childhood students. And they understand from the beginning that learning is supposed to be fun. To learn more, visit our Early Childhood page HERE.

The advantages students enjoy in small independent schools like NPES are well-documented in research. Among the compelling findings is the higher levels of academic achievement, engagement, belonging, and happiness students experience. Graduates of small schools develop the academic readiness, confidence, initiative, and social skills not only to thrive in even the largest secondary and postsecondary institutions, but to lead those communities (this is what NPES alumni are known for in some of the best public and private high schools across the city). Our challenging and engaging inquiry-based approach, our decidedly human scale, and the personal attention students receive from our community of educators, peers, and families who truly know and appreciate them, sets our small school with a big impact apart.

We strive daily to live the research that shows “Belonging is experienced when students are present, invited, welcomed, known, accepted, involved, supported, heard, befriended, and needed (Biggs & Carter, 2017, and Brock et al, 2020). NPES takes several specific and intentional steps to nurture and sustain a genuine culture of inclusion, belonging, and well-being that ensure students experience these essential aspects of belonging, many of which are outlined on our Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging page HERE. 

An important inspiration behind NPES’ founding in 1980 was the fervent belief that children cannot be educated meaningfully for life and future learning without an engaging and diverse program in the arts. Honoring the creative impulse that led a group of north side parents and educators to launch their own school nearly fifty years ago (during a period when visual art, music, and drama were being reduced or eliminated from the curriculum of many schools), today NPES continues to provide all students with an arts education that fuels creative self-discovery and expression, a respect for truth, authenticity, beauty, and originality, and deeper and more creative intellectual engagement in their academic studies.  

All students at our school, preschool through eighth grade, take classes in visual art and music, with an emphasis on appreciation, skill-building, self-expression, creation, affirmation, and growth. Students preschool through fifth grade also study drama every year in a dedicated class, while middle school students pursue the dramatic arts in after-school programs like our fall one-act plays and our spring school-wide musical production. Our grades 3-8 choral program and 5-8 band program provide any interested student with the opportunity to build their skills while performing in a multi-grade ensemble throughout the school year. And our Faith Nielsen Fine Arts each May (the Nielsen family has long supported the arts at NPES) provides all artists, singers, and musicians with a chance to showcase their talents during an all-school evening open house.

In terms of facilities, we have an early childhood art studio, a K-8 art studio with a kiln and laser cutter, a music and band room, a choral and drama room, and a high and low-tech innovation lab (where we teach design thinking) that is ideal for experimenting, tinkering, and making. And our fine arts program provides all students with additional identity mirrors and windows so they can explore diverse ways of thinking and being, seeing that they belong in our community while also broadening their perspective and inspiring curiosity about other cultures and the world.

While early adolescence may always be an awkward stage of human development (the initial throes of puberty have a way of unsettling everything, albeit temporarily, leading to some challenging moments for all), NPES redefines middle school, operating at a more personalized scale so that all students are known personally and appreciated for who they are. This culture of belonging and respect for individuality and diversity, where social competition is minimized, mentoring and leadership opportunities are prioritized, and all students are supported and challenged academically–without senseless competition, as if learning and growth are somehow finite resources–empowers our middle schoolers to develop their confidence, make the interpersonal connections they crave with their peers and teachers, and learn how to communicate and self-advocate effectively. And our personalized approach to high school placement, as a result of our positive, supportive, and intellectually-rigorous program (with challenging coursework combined with a unique emphasis on social-emotional skills for well-being and sustainability), speaks for itself. NPES students gain acceptance year-after-year to the best public, parochial, and independent schools across the city, and such a diverse array of schools, reflecting how well they’ve been served in our middle school program.

Among the unique and impactful features of our middle school program is our approach to staffing, which ensures that nearly all of a student’s teachers follow them through their three-year middle school program, ensuring that each student is known well as a person and learner from the first day of school in both seventh and eighth grades. These trusting, affirming, and close relationships, and the understanding, communication, and coaching that develops between students and teachers in our middle school, is priceless. Our Advisory program, additional courses unique to middle school including Design Thinking in the Innovation Lab; SEED (Sparking Empathy, Embracing Diversity); Student Resource Time (studying, homework, 1:1 support from a teacher); Service Learning; and a seventh and eighth grade advanced algebra curriculum with two math teachers for a 12:1 student-teacher ratio); an intentional student travel program integrated into the curriculum; before and after-school academic extensions like Model United Nations, Science Olympiad, Creative Drama, Band, Chorus, and personalized graduation projects that reflect each individual student’s learning, growth, and unique interests as they matriculate to high school.

Our middle school program is anything but ordinary. 

Students school-wide engage in design-thinking in our state-of-the-art Innovation Lab through select units in their classroom studies, designated supervised recess periods, and after-school club programming. Middle School students also engage in a semester-long course in design thinking each year. Design thinking is a skills-rich process for real-world  problem-solving that integrates key skills and concepts from STEM, Literacy, Social Studies, and the Arts. The enduring multi-step process for problem solving students learn in design thinking challenges them to understand problems on a deeper level and develop possible solutions to be tested and then re-designed as needed. Design thinking challenges all students to think expansively about a better world while practicing and developing a wide range of useful skills for future studies and for their lives, including:

-Critical thinking: Analyzing problems from multiple angles and questioning assumptions

-Empathy: Understanding the needs and perspectives of those adversely affected by the problem

-Creativity: Generating multiple solutions through brainstorming and prototyping

-Collaboration: Working effectively with others to solve problems

-Communication: Expressing ideas clearly, receiving constructive feedback with an open mind (and a willingness to adapt plans based on the feedback)

-Problem solving: Defining problems, exploring solutions, and learning from failure

-Resilience: Viewing setbacks as learning opportunities and a necessary and valuable part of the problem-solving process

-Active listening, questioning, and Interviewing

-Conducting research and integrating findings into plans

-Assessing the validity of claims and discriminating between truth and falsehoods

-Analyzing data

-Negotiating, compromising, advocating

-Leading and organizing teams

-Using the resources in the Inno Lab (using low and high-tech tools to iterate and create with purpose)

-Giving presentations and pitching ideas

Design thinking at NPES also helps students experience new ways they can strive to make their communities better for all.