St. Scholastica Academy recognizes that along with the core disciplines, additional curricular areas are fundamental and vital to a student’s education, personal development, and quality of life. Eighth and ninth grade students are required to schedule an art elective in studio art, choir, dance, or musical theater so that they are exposed to the visual and performing arts.
The arts curriculum includes art and music appreciation, dance, theater, ceramics, digital image, and studio classes ranging from Studio Art I through AP Studio Art, 2-D, 3-D, and drawing. Students learn professional-grade software such as InDesign, Final Cut Express, and Adobe Creative Suite. SSA students exhibit their artwork in local and regional art shows and competitions. In addition, SSA partners with St. Paul’s School, our brother school, students have co-educational opportunities in theater and band.
Curricular alignment helps girls understand how different courses fit together, which in turn helps them build on contextual experiences to construct knowledge. This leads to a deeper understanding and greater retention of concepts and skills. English and social studies coursework are aligned so as to provide students with the historical context for the literary works they read and analyze in English class. Writing in these disciplines is evidence-based and requires students to cite evidence from primary and secondary sources to support a claim or thesis. Furthermore, SSA’s English department partners with Louisiana State University to implement its writing initiative to expose underclassmen to the various writing experiences they will encounter in their senior-level dual enrollment courses.
Math and science curricula are aligned for an integrated approach to learning the STEM disciplines. When students learn to calculate the slope of a line in math class, they are graphing mass versus volume in science class and determining that the slope of the line is density in grams/ml. When students are learning about scalar quantities in geometry, they add a direction to it to make it a vector quantity in physics. Dimensional analysis in math is applied to converting between grams and moles in chemistry and so on. Girls come to see that science is a true application of math. In addition, SSA collaborates with Louisiana State University (LSU) to incorporate its College Readiness Program in Mathematics, which provides SSA students with a seamless curriculum from Algebra I through Differential and Integral Calculus. Since the implementation of the Physics First sequential model (see Physics First) and the College Readiness Program in Mathematics, SSA’s math and science ACT scores have improved exponentially, while students’ attitudes toward and interests in these subjects has positively changed. Recently, SSA earned the math and reading scores necessary to be awarded the National Blue-Ribbon Award for Excellence.
To bring to life innovative thinking in the classroom and to make it actionable for girls, the teachers at St. Scholastica Academy creatively incorporate the GRITTY GIRL DESIGN CYCLE into their instructional design. The Gritty Girl Design Cycle is cyclical in nature thereby encouraging students to persevere by revisiting the problem and continuing to improve it. Although the Gritty Girl DesignCycle was modeled after the engineering design process, it can easily be applied to all disciplines as a problem-solving tool. Students are first presented with the Gritty Girl Design Cycle in their Introduction to STEM class during their eighth-grade year. After learning about why females should choose STEM, exploring college majors and careers in STEM fields, and participating in team-building activities, students are presented with the Gritty Girl Design Cycle so that each STEM unit can incorporate its problem-solving process when planning the design of a product or prototype. To support the Gritty Girl Design Cycle both inside and outside of the classroom, teachers, moderators, and athletic coaches shift their role from “sage on the stage” to “guide on the side.” Rather than serving as a presentation of information, instruction is artistically designed to support student investigation of phenomena and designing of products or solutions. Students engage in Socratic seminars or other open-ended discussions to surface facts and terms as they develop explanations rich with evidence from a multitude of resources. Processing activities are sprinkled throughout a lesson to help explain phenomena or to provide a context for ideas to be learned. A critical question is at the heart of every unit of study in all disciplines at SSA. These questions drive multiple explanations and have a range of possible outcomes that collectively lead to deeper understanding. Critical questions are developed in collaborative teams to ensure that they address big ideas, are overarching in nature, and incorporate higher order thinking. These questions are used to frame the learning for each lesson within a unit of study whether it be in physical education or theology, and they are used to guide both summative and formative assessment practices throughout each unit’s instructional timeline. Outside of the classroom, critical questions are used to guide the design process in student council events, strategical plays in athletics, liturgical Masses, dances and cheers, theatrical performances, and service-learning projects.
