Curriculum Approach

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 as applicable:

• 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

Recognizing the intrinsic differences between high school courses and K-8 courses, the K¹² high school courses operate differently than our K-8 courses.

• Each course has a regular weekly schedule of assignments and activities.
• Students are regularly involved on a course-by-course basis in threaded, teacher-monitored discussions with each other 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 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!).