At Lumiar, Mosaic is ultimately a complex Learning Management System for the school environment.

As a Learning Management System, the Mosaic has three key basic components – or subsystems:

• The Competency Matrix
• The Project Database
• The Learning Portfolio

The Competency Matrix is the subsystem that establishes and describes the curriculum of Lumiar School. Therefore, it determines what students should (or could) learn at Lumiar.
The Project Database is the subsystem that describes the integral parts of Lumiar School’s methodology. Students learn by working with projects – i.e. they develop competencies – at Lumiar. While the Competency Matrix establishes and describes “what” students should (or could) learn, the Project Database establishes “how” they will learn what they should (or could) learn.
Lastly, the Learning Portfolio is a subsystem that describes the learning roadmap of students at Lumiar. First it makes an initial assessment of the student that joins that school, trying to detail which competencies (among which, those established and described in the Competency Matrix) are already mastered by the student before joining the school and at what mastering level the student is. This initial assessment will serve as the basis for the student counseling work about the types of learning projects (among those in the Project Database) the student should be engaged in along the four quarters of his first year in school. Next, the Learning Portfolio will have something that is equivalent to a student’s academic record: a full detailed list of all learning projects that the student will be engaged in (even those he engages in initially and disengages later on). Thirdly, the Learning Portfolio contains an assessment of the performance of students in projects he engaged in. Those assessments are made by the teachers who are responsible for the projects. These assessments indicate which competencies students have developed in each project they got involved in. Next, the Learning Portfolio has a comprehensive two-month assessment of the performance of students made by the educators who worked as their advisors. These assessments include not only aspects related to the cognitive performance of students, but also those aspects related to what is conventionally called his “social and emotional intelligence”, that is, related to his interpersonal relationships (with data taken from observations made by all his educators and from the “Circles” [a democratic mechanism to solve internal issues at school]), from his overall behavior (especially when the student is not working with projects), from his attitudes (towards life, other people, objects) from his values, etc. Finally, the Learning Portfolio includes annual assessments of the student’s performance, with a summary of his development throughout the year. Those assessments contain the same components of the comprehensive two-month assessments. The annual assessment is made at the end of Cycles (child education years, 1st to 5th grade, 6th to 9th grade and high school) and include a detailed analysis of the student’s development that justifies his ability to move on to the next educational level.