The middle school curriculum is designed around a focus on Expeditionary Learning, a proven model for comprehensive school reform. Expeditionary learning emphasizes learning by doing, with a particular focus on character growth, teamwork, and literacy. It connects academic learning to adventure, service, and character development. It helps teachers learn to teach reading, writing, science, math, and other subjects through a challenging set of inter-connected real-world projects called learning expeditions. Literacy instruction, embedded in learning expeditions, is a special focus of this design.
Maplewood Richmond Heights Middle School is also an official eMints school, which enables every student to use cutting-edge technology as a tool to aid in their learning. The overarching goal of this program at MRH is to enhance five specific 21st Century skills: creative thinking, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and inquiry.
Below is the entire 2-year curriculum cycle for communication arts. Click on any link to download the unit plan.
All curriculum is written in the Understanding by Design format. This philosophy of curriculum represents a way of thinking about the design of curriculum, instruction, and assessment and pulls together many ideas and processes that have been tested both through research and classroom use. These ideas and processes can result in a way of thinking about curriculum that can give rise to powerful learning experiences that result in deeper understandings of facts, concepts, generalizations, principles, and other ideas and will result in learning experiences that will engage learners and result in learners gaining more sophisticated insights and abilities that will be reflected in a variety of performances both in school and in the real world.
Expectations.”
