Princeton-Blairstown Center

Princeton-Blairstown Center's programs are designed to promote social and emotional learning through the principles of experiential education.  All kinds of students will benefit from Princeton-Blairstown Center's programs, whether in school, at our Blairstown site, on Princeton University's Campus or in your community.

Experiential education is a learning process that places participants in a unique setting with purposeful problem-solving activities that require full engagement.  Through synthesis and reflection, participants examine pre-existing behaviors in a new light and explore new found skills and strengths.

Our facilitators utilize challenge course and adventure-based programming in small groups to create opportunities for mistakes, success, cooperation, contemplation -- all to promote learning experiences that can be transferred back to the personal and academic lives of participants.

Each activity offers opportunities for participants to learn about themselves and their peers through a process of reflection called debriefing.   During this process, participants learn:

• communication skills that help them share individual and group strengths and challenges,
• techniques to help them build on their strengths and improve upon their challenges,  
• strategies for applying these new skills to the next activity and to their ‘real lives’ in school and at home.

Princeton-Blairstown Center bases its programs on the following principles:

• Consistency, continuity, repetition, fun and challenge in a safe environment help a young person to learn.
• The skills necessary to be successful, however a young person defines success, must be incorporated into the full life of a young person, in school and within the fabric of the family and community.
• Reflection is an important step toward self-awareness.  We want participants to ask:  "What did I just learn, and how can it be incorporated into other facets of my life?"

Princeton-Blairstown Center has a highly structured, professionally-tested curriculum that helps develop the skills required for success in the 21st century. Those skills are:

• Critical thinking
• Collaboration
• Cooperation
• Creativity
• Problem solving

"I liked how we all talked about things we needed to work out.” - Trenton 8^th Grader

"I learned that my group was very trustworthy and helpful." - Trenton 9th grader

"I learned that patience is important." - Trenton 11th grader

“The more games we played, the more it helped us understand the objectives better.” – Trenton 8^th Grader

"You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation." Plato

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