The recent Spring Chorus concert, in which students in all thee diviisons engaged a rapt audience of listeners and our many culminating projects and assessments got me thinking about an important part of the LREI educational experience.

At LREI and at most progressive schools, there is a significant focus on the "process," which serves as a foundation to our commitment to experiential learning. Embedded in this idea of "process" is an expectation that students reflect on their work and the thinking behind it. We want them to use this reflective stance to help them see their work from a variety of perspectives. This helps them to see the work as an on-going endeavor to be revisited, rethought, and reworked. At the same time, there is something important about the product of this work. It crystallizes and brings into focus the effort and energy that defines the process and, in its own way, the product stands as an achievement that has meaning and value.

The key is not to linger too long on the product so that it stands in the way of a new process. When the product becomes its own end, we lose an important opportunity for new learning. The artist Robert Rauschenberg speaks to this idea is a recent issue of The New Yorker when he comments that "It's always the moment of doing that counts. When a painting is finished it's already something I've done, no longer something I'm doing." It is in that same spirit that we seek to challenge our students to always be "in process" and to see a particular product as an opening to a new process, to always be doing and never content to be simply done.

I am continually struck by the richness of our integrated curriculum. The value of an integrated curriculum, which connects traditionally-separate subject areas is something that has been a core value at LREI from the very beginning. As Agnes De Lima notes in The Little Red School House: