Avery Coonley School

Avery Coonley School is an independent, coeducational day school serving academically gifted students in preschool through eighth grade. The school was founded in 1906 to promote the progressive educational theories developed by John Dewey and other turn-of-the-20th-century philosophers. ACS is notable for its record of success in academic competitions at the state and national levels in mathematics, science, geography, and other subjects.

About Avery Coonley School in brief

Summary Avery Coonley SchoolAvery Coonley School is an independent, coeducational day school serving academically gifted students in preschool through eighth grade. The school was founded in 1906 to promote the progressive educational theories developed by John Dewey and other turn-of-the-20th-century philosophers. Admission is competitive and an IQ score of at least 124 is required. ACS is notable for its record of success in academic competitions at the state and national levels in mathematics, science, geography, and other subjects. ACS was recognized as a Blue Ribbon School by the United States Department of Education in 1988. It attracted national media attention in 1994 when the school was banned from competition in the Illinois State Science Fair after winning for the fourth year in a row. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2007, citing the \”long-lasting influence on schools throughout the country\” of the educational program and the design of the building and grounds. The progressive legacy is still evident in the modern curriculum, which retains many traditions and educational activities dating back to the beginning of the school. Students work a minimum of one year above their current grade level, and explore broad themes allowing them to learn across subjects and engage in creative and collaborative projects, using instructional technology extensively. It moved to Downers Grove in 1916 and became the Avery Coonleys School in 1929, with a new 10. 45-acre campus designed in the Prairie and Arts and Crafts styles, landscaped by Jens Jensen, who was known as \”dean of the world’s landscape architects\”.

The campus has been expanded several times since the 1980s to create more space for arts, technology, and classrooms. In the 1960s, ACS became a regional research center and a leadership hub for independent schools, and began to focus on the education of the gifted. It is one of the first teacher colleges in the country to offer a four-year program culminating in the bachelor of education degree. There are no plans to open a kindergarten program at the school in the near future, but there are plans to expand the kindergarten program in the future. It has been named after a wealthy Riverside, Illinois, industrialist and publisher, and his wife, Queene Ferry Co onley, who decided to start the school to allow children younger than five years old to attend. She was impressed by the theories of Friedrich Fröbel, who believed children’s early education should be an extension of their lives at home. FröBel’s theories captured the three main principles of what John Dewy would later call the \”kindergarten attitude\”, which applied not just to kindergartners but to children of all ages. According to Dewey, the root of all learning is the activity of the child and not external material, and directing children’s spontaneous impulses towards maintaining the collective life of theSchool is how they become prepared for adult life. The primary role of the School is to train children in cooperative living, the school is to provide the starting point for all learning.