Our Programs
Make History
Our proven and powerful approach to History education, outlined in the book Make History by Art Worrell and Paul Bambrick-Santoyo, seamlessly merges inquiry-based learning with deliberate knowledge retrieval methods, prioritizing the cultivation of student thinking and voice. Guided by this student-centered approach, learners actively engage in their own historical exploration, fostering agency and civic responsibility. This holistic framework not only promotes comprehension of the past but also nurtures a civic mindset, equipping students to critically engage with the present and future and contribute meaningfully to society.
Make History features these key components:
Teaching Cycles that begin with a narrative of the past to help students establish foundational knowledge, followed by historical investigations, reasoning and argumentation.
Knowledge Retrieval Practices that strategically incorporate knowledge organizers and retrieval activities that help students lock in the learning on a day to day basis.
Rigorous primary and secondary source texts that allow students to hone critical reading and thinking skills while also building historical empathy and a deeper insight into the past.
Seminar structures that promote collegiate discourse and collective sense-making.
Ongoing writing workshops to sharpen students’ insights and prose.
Intellectual environment that encourages students to make the academic personal.
Strategic infusion of generative AI tools to help students learn how AI can support learning, rather than replace it.
Project-Based Learning in which students drive the learning through engaging research based projects that build to real world applications.
Literature For Life
Our unique English framework, embodied in our flagship African-American and Latin American Literature curriculum, helps students see literature as a lens they can use to better understand their lives. We believe an English curriculum should produce students who can read, analyze, discuss and write about texts at a collegiate level. Just as importantly, we believe English class should produce students who are intellectuals, ready to read the world around them and revise our shared reality. Our approach accomplishes these twin goals by weaving together fiction, non-fiction, music, film, visual art, and students’ personal lives.
Our approach to English features these elements:
Fiction and non-fiction texts that combine college rigor with contemporary and cultural relevance.
Seminar structures that promote collegiate discourse and communal engagement.
Ongoing writing workshops to sharpen students’ insights and prose.
Multimedia engagement with course themes via films, paintings, and music.
Intellectual environment that encourages students to make the academic personal.
Strategic infusion of generative AI tools to help students learn how AI can support learning, rather than replace it.
End-of-year presentations in which students apply their learnings to explore a societal issue they’re passionate about and suggest ways to address that issue.
The Summit Program
Our cutting-edge Summit program offers students a year-long career exploration experience. Informed by deeper learning research and multiple theories of human flourishing, we’ve honed the Summit program by teaching over 1,000 career exploration lessons to hundreds of students. Combining purpose development with career-connected learning, our framework leads to increases of up to 15% in career readiness in a single year, according to a widely used, research-based survey. Students’ work in the program has been published in The New York Times, Chalkbeat and Oculus, a prominent architecture magazine.
The program includes these components:
Purpose Development: Students reflect on their sense of purpose and use those reflections as a lens through which to evaluate various career paths.
Career Research: Students explore careers using online resources and AI tools.
Network Building: Students create LinkedIn profiles and start connecting with professionals, contact relevant career organizations, and go on field trips.
Purpose Projects: Students engage in year-long projects during which they create original work that’s authentic to fields that interest them. All students incorporate AI tools into their work, often creating those AI tools themselves.
Regular Reflection: Students maintain ongoing digital or analog journals to reflect on all the experiences above.
Capstone Presentations: Students end the year by giving individual presentations in which they reflect on their growth, share their career aspirations, and explain what steps they will be taking next to make their dreams come true.