[Richard]

Originally Posted by Pete

My comments are based on the interaction with the teachers and other staff and how that impacted the other students. One wacked out principle and a couple of looney teachers can raise all kinds of heck with a class.

Leadership and personal responsibility. This is one of the major problems within education today--just as it is with business, the government, etc. I offer no excuses or remedies, but realize that it is an issue as individually and as collectively complex as building an ODA. Here is how my faculty and I view such an onerous task--as a Team.

Richard's $.02

The Upper School Philosophy

I have witnessed a whole succession of technological revolutions,
but none of them has done away with the need for character or the ability to think

.

Bernard Baruch

The Upper School has a distinctive mission—to expand the hearts and minds of students and to nurture excellence through academic, creative and physical achievement. This mission carries within it two important ideas. The first is that students should engage in the expected facets of a college preparatory program, namely a rich academic, artistic, and athletic environment. The second is that the program to deliver this mission needs to be developmental in its approach. That is, the school believes that the students are not completed people and learners yet; that they are still growing into these roles. Therefore, our program takes this fact into account. The faculty has high expectations of the students but also the understanding that students enter with varying levels of ability to handle these expectations.

The development of the program is shaped by the following core values:

• Committing to improvement and a desire for excellence,
• Cultivating a sense of personal responsibility,
• Developing a sense of service and pride within the school community and the greater community surrounding it,
• Fostering creativity as a fundamental life skill,
• Practicing mutual respect, support, honesty, and trust.

These core values led to the development of the key features of the program-- our advisory/mentoring system and our approach to classes.

Advisory/Mentoring

The mission statement of the school and its core values all imply a global, instead of piece-meal, approach to education. Therefore, built within the school is a system to track the global view of each student—the advisory system which is at the heart of our developmental approach to education. Through personalized attention, students are better able to develop their academic and social skills to successfully navigate the challenges of high school. It is within this system that they can discuss their capabilities, learn who they are and how they learn, and create a desire to push themselves academically. Also within this system, students can learn to problem-solve and work through difficult academic or social issues in a safe and trusting environment.

The primary goal of the advisor/mentor relationship is to aid each student in assuming responsibility for his or her own learning and life. Advisor relationships make time for assessment, inquiry and reflection, help students learn to make use of what they know, and allows advisors to help develop personalized learning strategies, support and reinforce a student's individual identity, and respond to each student as a whole person.

The advisor system is the network within which teachers share information about individual students and within which most student situations are resolved. The advisory relationship also assists in scheduling, problem-solving, counseling, and school - home communication. As a general rule, parents begin with the advisor to seek advice, have questions answered, and raise issues concerning their student.

Approach to Classes

The Upper School offers a full college preparatory educational program that adheres to the recommended guidelines of the Texas Education Agency. Additionally, students are encouraged to further challenge themselves while finishing their high school graduation requirements by availing themselves of the wide range of dual-credit college-level classes offered by local colleges.

What makes the Upper School's college prep program distinct is the manner in which the instruction is delivered. The classes explicitly build student academic skills, deliver factual content, and push students to grapple with the meaning of the subjects. The faculty has a solid understanding of this approach and develops its classes in response. To reflect this common understanding, the faculty follows a set of commonly applied curricular goals that reflects the approach to classes of the Upper School.

• Goal 1: Every class builds students' academic skills. This means that every class explicitly deals with academic skills such as note taking, collecting, organizing, analyzing, and presenting information, and participating in class. This goal is based on the core values of personal responsibility, as students must take care of most of these things on their own, and a personal commitment to seeking excellence, as these skills lay the foundation for strong academic work.
  
• Goal 2: Every class builds students' life skills. Each class deals with personal traits that lead to success in class, such as perseverance, dependability, and the ability to work with others. This goal is based on the core values of mutual trust, support, and respect, since developing these traits form the basis on which a person can be trusted, and personal responsibility, since each person has to develop these skills.
  
• Goal 3: Every class is clear about the fundamental knowledge that students must learn, and then pushes each student to reach an explanatory level in the class. Every class makes clear to the students what the base-line assumptions are for the factual knowledge that must be learned. This information is used as a base to build explanations of the knowledge and understanding of how it integrates with other elements from the subjects and, further, how it relates to other subjects. This goal is based on the core value of a commitment to seeking excellence. Excellence in academic subjects is reached when a student is able to effectively handle the factual, process-oriented elements of a subject while also being able to explain its meaning and purpose. Additionally, this goal reflects both the core values of diversity and creativity. Diversity is reflected in the idea that many paths to true explanation exist; sometimes the explanations are verbal, sometimes written, sometimes logical, and sometimes more philosophical or emotive. Creativity is reflected in the many modes of explanation that exist and the ways in which students can combine them to reach an original or deeper understanding of subject material.
  
• Goal 4: Every class holds students accountable for their learning and pushes them to become active participants in their education. Naturally, students are graded in every class as a means of accountability. Beyond this, however, students are often asked by their teachers and mentors to evaluate their own progress and to account for themselves for their learning. This goal is based on the core value of personal responsibility and students are pushed to continually work towards taking an ever larger role in their own education.
  
• Goal 5: Every class personalizes the education and differentiates for the skills of students. This goal is met through means such as individualizing assignments and assessments, peer tutoring, ability grouping, and one-on-one instruction when necessary or requested. It is based on the core value of diversity, by recognizing that students come to us with a range of abilities and skill sets, and our need to attempt to meet student’s differing cognitive levels.
  
• Goal 6: Every class uses a range of different instructional approaches to accommodate a variety of learning styles. The instructional approaches range from one-on-one instruction to lectures, group work, peer tutoring, independent projects, and guided discovery. This goal is based, in some measure, on all of the school's core values. In particular, it represents creativity by exemplifying the on-going search for new and better instructional methods. It also represents service when the instruction turns to peer tutoring and working groups and students aid one another through the learning process.
  
• Goal 7: The information in each class is presented through multiple perspectives. Teachers push students to understand various subjects in multiple ways. For instance, in English classes, this involves reading texts that include a range of different authors and expressing understanding of the texts verbally and in written analysis. In mathematics classes, students deal with mathematical ideas in symbolic, graphical, structural, and written forms. This goal is designed to foster both a sense of diversity and creativity of thought: diversity by the very nature of the different ways of approaching subjects and creativity by being able to apply more than one approach to their problem solving.

Reading the set of curricular goals as a whole reveals a belief in our developmental approach to education. Goals 1, 2, 5, 6, and 7 all stem from an understanding that the students do not come to us as whole, complete learners at the start of ninth grade. While focus on content mastery is clearly stated in goals 3 and 4, we recognize that students will grow in their academic ability over the course of high school and that one of our primary missions is to actively help them realize and achieve this growth in an increasingly technologically challenging world.