Where encouragement meets ownership

At Bricolage, our school culture is student-owned. We develop intrinsic motivation through natural consequences. We do not have a merit/demerit system, color charts or punitive punishments for non-compliance. We do not give extrinsic rewards or punishments.

Bricolage is the education of the future, not an educational experiment. We encourage students to tinker, create and explore—to become thinkers who create using a variety of available materials. The methods and practices we incorporate are carefully selected for their outstanding results.

Our core values

Integrity, empathy and innovation ground our school culture. Everyone at Bricolage—and everything they do—is rooted in these core values.

Integrity. Do your best.

Our measure of educational equity is that all students have the opportunity to achieve whatever they want to, regardless of their backgrounds or circumstances. We believe that when people commit to consistently doing their best work, special things can happen. This resulting greatness is defined not only by the quality of the final product, but also by the learning that occurs in the process of creating it.

Empathy. Care for others.

We consider four qualities of empathy: perspective taking, staying out of judgment, recognizing emotion and communicating emotion. Because we believe empathy is something people can develop, we aspire to help our students becoming empathic. A relationship-builder, empathy promotes a sense of belonging for all and allows us to relate to others with different backgrounds.

Innovation. Be a problem solver.

We were founded with a daring and lively spirit of innovation or creative problem solving. Innovation can be a student designing a project to explore the similarities of children from different cultures or two students working out an issue by stepping aside to discuss their dispute. Every day, we explicitly teach our students to be self-motivated, take initiative and learn from failure—and we aspire to do so as well. Like our commitment to equity and the bricoleur attitude, innovation is essential to our school culture. Everyone contributes to this dynamic, positive environment with questions, curiosity and the willingness to listen, share and learn.