Curriculum
BE AN ARCHITECT OF YOUR OWN EDUCATIONBeacon Academy students participate in and have agency over their own learning and school experience. Students have the opportunity to explore their own interests and passions within the context of a robust, vibrant curriculum delivered by committed, passionate, and knowledgeable faculty members. Our curriculum is designed to provide a broad base of knowledge and skills, while providing guidance to students as they take the initiative to design and build their own education. Beacon Academy students are fully prepared for future academics, and, more importantly, learn to navigate the world with a sense of purpose, supported by relationships with engaged faculty, flexible schedules, and opportunities to safely and bravely forge their own path in a future that has yet to be defined.
Our pedagogy is based on the development of students' sense of themselves as individuals who are also integral parts of their communities. Students are given the opportunity through both their required and elective coursework to build grade-level bonds and work with mixed-aged groups. Just as in the mixed-age classrooms of Montessori Early Childhood programs, this combination offers students space to navigate the new social, physical, and intellectual realities of adolescence with their cohort as well as by learning from older peers. New students develop foundational academic skills and revise their middle-school learning practice as they bond with their classmates in required 9th Grade American History and Critical Literacy classes; having mastered these skills and established themselves academically at Beacon Academy, they work together as 10th, 11th and 12th Grade students to pursue increasingly complex explorations and tasks in Literature and History over the next three years. Meanwhile, the opportunity to work with and learn from more experienced peers in the 9th and 10th Grade Integrated Science course prepares them stepwise for the more advanced 11th and 12th Grade Science curricula. Other classes, including World Language, the Arts, and Mathematics allow students to create community with classmates of all ages as they collectively develop their proficiency in the field, while the International Baccalaureate Programme offers two-year classes in which a grade level group matures and learns together over time. Overall, this curriculum design allows all students to grow collectively and each student to create an increasingly challenging and personalized learning pathway as they transition to an increasingly solid sense of their adult identities and capacities.