High School Becomes My School

K¹² offers a high school experience that is like no other. With more than 150 online courses from which to choose, including three to four versions of core subjects, students can enjoy an individualized high school program tailored to their goals and abilities. Whether targeting a top-tier, 4-year university, a local community college, or an immediate career, K¹² helps maximize each student's personal post-high school success.

We Start with the Best Aspects of our K-8 Curriculum...

The K¹² high school curriculum is tailor-made for high school students. At the same time, many of the characteristics that underpin our high quality K-8 courses are built into our high school courses, including:

• Careful work built on educational research to identify the "Big Ideas" of a subject area as well as the concepts that are stumbling blocks for many students
• Clear layout of the objectives to be mastered in each lesson, unit, and semester, crafted from educational research, the best state and national standards, and deep content expertise
• Easy-to-navigate online content, including summaries and reviews, with more time and effort spent on the hardest, most important topics and skills
• Engaging interactive content to illustrate and explain the toughest concepts in ways no static page (print or Web) could ever match
• Beautiful printed materials matched with the online courses (in most cases actually built for the online course) so that the images, phrases, and organization of these references clearly reinforce the key concepts, explanations, and work done throughout the course
• Terrific offline experiences with labs, books, and writing designed to give sufficient practice in key skills that students must master, as well as challenging problems and assignments to develop each student's ability to apply what they've learned in new circumstances
• Clear assessment tools to measure mastery of lesson objectives, using both online and off-line tasks to carefully probe mastery
• Many important features tailored for high school.

However, the actual operation of high school courses differs from K-8 courses, to make the high school experience successful, given the far more complex world of content, skills, and time management required. Our approach to our high school courses differs in these areas:

• Each course has a regular weekly schedule of assignments and activities.
• Our courses support threaded, teacher-monitored, student discussions about key topics and ideas being covered.
• A full-time high school teacher qualified to teach his or her subject area is deeply engaged with the students' work every week.
• Parents/learning coaches are not expected to be engaged in the academic work directly–the usual parental moral and practical support for high school kids is enough (and plenty!).

Regular Weekly Schedule

Unlike the "go-at-your-own-pace" scheduling used for the K¹² K-8 curriculum, our high school courses make use of a weekly schedule of activities and assignments. The student has the flexibility over several days of deciding what work gets done when, so students who work best on some subjects early in the morning can tackle them then, while students who are night owls can burn the candle to get their work done at the time of day that works best for them.

Each week, however, there are due dates and assignments designed into the program to:

• Allow a group of kids to move through material at the same time (or in close proximity); their virtual discussions are a powerful learning engine at this level
• Enable teachers to run online group activities as needed for each section of students, helping many students to overcome the same (complex) obstacles at the same time
• Free parents/learning coaches from detailed academic support burdens that may be beyond many at the high school level
• Encourage students (with help from family and teachers) to acquire the experience of planning their work and lives week by week, which is a key skill for later in life

While providing students with the needed flexibility for work, extra-curricular activities, and hobbies, the K¹² course's weekly schedule permits the teacher to ensure that each student is moving along at a reasonable pace, and enables state-of-the-art distance learning techniques to be used (such as conducting a full-class meeting online).

Next Section: Online Discussions & Working With Teachers