Educational Standards of Excellence
Enriched Setting and Environment
- Provides a warm, nurturing environment where students feel comfortable being with other creative and/or bright students like themselves.
- Offers small groups where children can collaborate and work together.
- Assumes that teachers can learn to facilitate active learning while maintaining structure and organization.
- Introduces an interdisciplinary and differentiated program that naturally integrates history, visual arts, science, and technology.
- Supplies students with state-of-the-art materials and manipulatives from computers, hands-on science equipment, art supplies, primary source documents, to a wide selection of diverse literature.
Challenging and Creative Curriculum
- Acknowledges that students learn in different ways.
- Encourages the teacher to apply open-ended questioning techniques with more than one answer to a given problem.
- Generates a participatory exchange where concept, process, and product are balanced, based on a highly structured scope and sequence.
- Guides students through a series of thematic instruction exercises, through direct hands-on experiences.
- Recognizes that students’ active participation in discovering content creates enthusiasm. This, in turn, can motivate students to master content.
- Respects the active learning method because it helps teachers identify each student’s specific strengths. Once recognized, the teacher can help the student build upon them.
Students as Leaders: Enhancing Communication and Speaking Skills
- Promotes an environment where students feel comfortable voicing their opinion and embarking on conversations with their peers and teacher.
- Invites risk-taking behavior through an accepting atmosphere where the powers of thought are respected and critiqued.
- Uses many forms of communication to generate creative thinking, problem posing, and problem solving so that students’ cognitive strengths of higher-level thinking are tapped.
- Presupposes that mastery of content enhances the self and develops self-esteem.
- Maintains that student strengths are a classroom resource, where success breeds success.
