A Thinking Curriculum

At Eastside Prep we prepare our students for the future – college, work, life-long learning. Since we know that the future will bring a different set of circumstances for each individual, we focus on critical and creative thinking. In fact, at Eastside Prep thinking is what we do: we practice thinking; we explore new ways of thinking; we value thinking.

We believe that the best way to teach thinking skills is to start with the established approaches of each academic discipline. Every field has its own set of questions and approaches, such as the scientific method. Students learn to ask, “What questions would an historian raise? How would a scientist approach this new information? What would a poet, philosopher, or mathematician think about this idea?” Our students then become historians, mathematicians, poets, and scientists as they apply these approaches to new information and new situations in the classroom and the community.

An Integrated Curriculum

Another facet of the Eastside Prep curriculum is our purposeful integration between and across the academic disciplines. We know that no field is truly isolated from the others, so we work to integrate content in several ways:

• We create integrated units between courses when collaboration makes sense. For example, when 6th graders read The Odyssey in Literary Thinking, they study Ancient Greece in Historical Thinking.
• We ask an over-arching “Big Question” in each Middle School grade level. In the Upper School all grades focus on a single Big Question which is determined yearly. Faculty members refer to these questions throughout the year in order to help students approach ideas and issues from the different disciplines.
  • Grade 6: What is the world made of?
  • Grade 7: How did we get here?
  • Grade 8: What does it mean to be human?
  • Upper School 2007-08: What is my responsibility to the Global Society?
• Oral and written communication skills are essential in today’s world, so we have students practice them in all classes across the disciplines. Our teachers use consistent writing, editing, and presentation processes to maintain continuity.

A Hands-On Curriculum

Eastside Prep faculty members create curricula that are hands-on, experiential, and project-based. Teachers guide students’ explorations by encouraging them to ask questions, to make comparisons between what they already know and what they have recently learned, and to research carefully and effectively. For some projects, students work in groups to build teamwork and leadership skills. In others, they work independently to develop their own style and potential.

Research-Based Instruction

Teachers have long known that the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else. The experience of “making the idea my own,” is, in fact, the objective of all education. Successful education depends less on receiving information than it does on providing students with opportunities to demonstrate their understanding. Whether in small groups, learning teams, class presentations, simulations, or field trips, students learn by engaging with others in purposeful, directed activity. These and other forms of experiential education – making a human skeleton as opposed to looking at textbook photographs, producing a literary magazine as opposed to reading written pieces, spending a week camping and exploring the Northwest as opposed to reading an account written by someone else – combine to make education at Eastside Prep vibrant and alive!

Building on what you know:

Science tells us that people learn by building on what they already know (see Bibliography). So our teachers create an environment in which it is safe, acceptable, even smart to show what one thinks or knows about a subject. We encourage students to offer their “first thoughts.” An incomplete or even incorrect idea is an important part of learning because students discover that the best way to learn more is to start with what they already know.

Evaluate what you know:

Teachers help students monitor and evaluate their thought processes, encouraging them continually to improve through “further thinking.” Through this type of meta-cognition, students learn to be more strategic and productive in their thinking.

Assessing what we do:

At each grade level, teachers use clearly articulated goals and benchmarks to analyze and assess student work in all subjects. We systematically plan our curriculum at each grade level and across grade levels to ensure rigorous coverage in every academic subject from sixth to 12th grade. Our curriculum and benchmarks are developed using Washington State Essential Academic Learning Requirements (EALRs), curriculum at other independent schools, and standards created by professional associations such as the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), National Council of Science Teachers (NCST), and the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Language (ACTFL).

“Our goal is real learning. Research is clear that people learn better by exploring and organizing information using a few very specific approaches. It makes obvious sense that we should choose the methods that are shown to work best, and one such approach is to create the opportunity for the students to become the teachers. ” -- Head of School, Terry Macaluso, PhD

Click here for a bibliography of research on our pedagogy.