While content was still important it was deemed imperative to give the students ideas and activities that would help them best educate themselves in any subject area. Each unit is organized in parallel structures with a decentralized plan appropriate to the age group involved, and all units have faculty teaching teams. The overall program can be illustrated by the Cross Age program, which parallels the structure of the other two, but the choices are wider and include work in several laboratory settings staffed by different faculty teams. Children between 6 and 16 are free to choose any offering they wish to pursue. This wide age range allows the teachers to group students flexibly depending on learning needs and allows students to move at their own pace.
Students enjoy the mixing of ages and there seem to be many benefits to such a cross age structure.
The group then separates into Families, i.e., like age groups. The students end their day in their family grouping, talk about the events of the day, and join together for a closing activity. Students are presented with a wide range of activities which will be available only one time, such as a mini-workshop with a visiting novelist, an open science lab with a visiting heart surgeon, a craft class in soap carving, a music composition class with a professional composer, a class in creating computer games, etc. All students who wish may attend field trips designed to involve the community in the learning experience. The botany class may go on a trip to a nature reserve, or the drama class might attend a dress rehearsal of the Music Center Repertory Company, or perhaps the math class will visit a session of the Stock Exchange in the financial district.