Curriculum Design
At McAuliffe Regional CPS, we achieve breadth through depth to both cover and make sense of the Massachusetts Frameworks educational content. Our curriculum is coordinated both horizontally across teams to ensure consistency and vertically through the grades to ensure adequate coverage and a coherent learning experience.
Our curriculum is based on achieving essential and fundamental goals focused on academic success. When teachers create learning expeditions, they use a planning template that begins with learning goals. They determine the most important ideas they want students to remember ten years later, and identify what essential content will be learned and what skills will be mastered. Then they plan assessments that will show how well students are doing, and finally, they plan the sequence of activities that will give form to the work. Our educational goals include:
- Students will become clear and effective writers of the English language and proficient in reading.
- Students will demonstrate proficiency in mathematical computation, problem solving, and application of key concepts.
- Students will develop yearly Individual Achievement Plans to establish clear goals for themselves and track their achievement toward meeting those goals at least once per semester.
- Students will demonstrate a clear commitment to their education, develop the courage and insight necessary to set high standards for academic and personal success, and have the appropriate attitudes to achieve the standards they have set for themselves.
- Students will perform at least 60 hours of community service or participation over their three years attending MRCPS. Twenty of those hours can be embedded in the learning expeditions.
- All students will participate in Exhibition Nights at least once per year.
Our Innovative "Flexible Grouping" Math Program
For most of their core subjects, students are in classes with diverse populations, including gifted and talented, special needs, and English Language Learners, on teams of up to 34 students with two teachers, one for Humanities and the other for Math/Science. However, in order to meet the student's urgent and unique needs for math instruction, students travel off-team for an intensive, focused period dedicated to developing math skills in a performance-based group.
There are at least four levels of math instruction at each grade level, and in some cases as many as six different levels of math instruction in one grade level. McAuliffe Regional CPS will move a child into a new math class most any time to ensure that child gets the support and challenge he/she needs for a given strand of math.
For more details, see our "Flexible Grouping: How It Works" document.
Integrating Activities:
While McAuliffe Regional CPS emphasizes learning expeditions and active pedagogy, teachers cover some content outside of the learning expedition. For example, although data analysis and measurement can be easily integrated into most expeditions, some strands, such as algebra and geometry, may or may not have plausible connections to a given expedition. For this reason, we introduced a dedicated time for off-team math, which focused on those skills. In this class, as well as in a skills-based English/Language Arts class, active pedagogy promoted student engagement and mastery of content and skills. Active pedagogy allows students to ground new knowledge and skills through discovery and probing. It is guided inquiry that balances teacher-led protocols with self-discovery.
Peace Studies
In addition to its core curriculum, McAuliffe Regional CPS has developed a unique peace studies curriculum that teaches applied strategies for creating sustainable solutions to conflicts through an experiential learning model. The course teaches students to analyze conflict for the explicit purpose of prescribing one of three strategies for resolution, as well as the skills and knowledge to apply those strategies.