Curriculum

Sheridan's curriculum is designed to be engaging, intellectually stimulating, and developmentally appropriate. Skills, content, and concepts progress in a coherent fashion from kindergarten to eighth grade, and essential questions and understandings frame each discipline. Through authentic, hands-on learning experiences, students are challenged to wrestle with big ideas and to think critically, creatively, and conceptually. Sheridan's curriculum is based on three philosophical underpinnings: concept-based curriculum and instruction, the constructivist approach to learning, and the Responsive Classroom social and emotional curriculum.

Concept-Based Curriculum & Instruction
Sheridan's curriculum is academically challenging and conceptually based. In each discipline, the curriculum is designed to provide students with a core set of concepts and broad conceptual understandings that build from grade to grade. These concepts and understandings contextualize the content students learn and provide authentic purposes for skill acquisition and practice. Students examine case studies that illuminate these concepts and understandings, and, in the process, they are explicitly taught to forge connections, to see patterns, and to make generalizations. The emphasis is on process as much as content. Students develop academic skills and gain an integral understanding of each particular topic. Through this approach, students develop a deeper understanding of the world in which they live.

A concept based curriculum:

• preserves the integrity of each subject area while allowing for cross-discipline connections;
• is vertically aligned so that students' knowledge, skills, and understandings grow each year; and
• explicitly teaches students how to think.

In a concept-based curriculum, students:

• understand ideas rather than memorize facts;
• use critical content and facts as tools for understanding key concepts and principles;
• transfer understandings from one setting to another; and
• develop specific skills and processes according to national curriculum standards for each discipline.

Constructivist Learning
Sheridan's curriculum and instruction is built on the philosophy that students must be actively engaged in the construction of knowledge. They are not empty vessels to be filled but rather active agents in making meaning of the world around them.

Through constructivism:

• learners are viewed as unique individuals with individual backgrounds and experiences;
• learning is an active, social task;
• responsibility for learning resides in the learners, and they should be actively involved in the learning process;
• students should be challenged within close proximity, yet slightly above, their current level of development;
• feelings of competency and mastery of material are the greatest motivators for future learning; and
• teachers are facilitators in the learning process.

Social & Emotional Learning
Sheridan believes that students learn best when they are equipped with both academic and social-emotional skills, and thus we seek to develop the whole child. Sheridan uses the Responsive Classroom model which is based on seven principles:

• The social curriculum is as important as the academic curriculum.
• How children learn is as important as what they learn: Process and content go hand-in-hand.
• The greatest cognitive growth occurs through social interaction.
• To be successful academically and socially, children need a set of social skills: cooperation, assertion, responsibility, empathy, and self-control.
• Knowing the children we teach—individually, culturally, and developmentally—is as important as knowing the content we teach.
• Knowing the families of the children we teach and working with them as partners is essential to children's education.
• How the adults at school work together is important: lasting change begins with the adult community.

Teachers at Sheridan work hard to create a classroom culture based on respect, understanding, kindness, and joy. At the beginning of the year, each grade creates a covenant that spells out the principles by which they will abide. Through morning meetings, problem-solving meetings, and cooperative learning experiences, the teachers nurture this culture, teaching the students both the benefits and responsibilities of being a member in a community.