Brookwood School It Starts Here.

Curriculum is a bigger word than you might think. Many people assume that curriculum refers to specific subject matter – the entries on a course syllabus in college, for instance. We consider Brookwood’s curriculum to be more than that. While it is partly comprised of all the subject matter, or content, in the academic program, it also includes all the skills that students are taught in those subjects and all the problem-solving processes they learn to use at different grade levels.

Curriculum also includes all aspects of an extracurricular program – from the philosophy of the athletic coaches, through the drills they use, right down to the actual rules of the specific sports they coach. And because you can’t really separate any of these aspects of curriculum from the way in which they are taught, we also consider teaching styles and methodologies to be part of the curriculum itself. So the content of the program is important, to be sure, but without those skills and strategies and teacher tactics, a curriculum would be incomplete.

Frequently, when you ask about a school’s curriculum, you are handed a large piece of paper covered with boxes; the boxes are generally filled with words or phrases that name specific units of study or skills in the curriculum. The reality is that the boxes represent only one variable in a curriculum, and without knowing something about the other variables, you can’t really make a judgment about the quality of a school’s program. Of course, we also have charts and a myriad internal curriculum documents, as well, and below you can scroll through our departmental and grade-level curricular goals and focal points. But it is also important to know about Brookwood’s curriculum that…

• It is child-centered, process-oriented, and skills driven.
• There are strands or areas of focus in our curriculum – subjects or disciplines that have become organizing principles for us in the curriculum development process. They include but are not limited to: communication skills, information management skills, critical thinking and problem solving skills, organizational skills, and actual study skills.
• We make every effort to mount a multicultural curriculum, one that includes in its content, to varying degrees and in various ways, the perspectives and practices of a wide array of cultures. At Brookwood, our commitment to diversity presupposes that our curriculum, in general, will be multicultural.
• Brookwood is in its seventh year of web-based curriculum mapping; faculty go to a website to plan and chronicle their curricula. We spend considerable time on curriculum development and evaluation (in a rotating departmental review cycle) with the hope of providing our students with a stable, well sequenced, and consistent program. At the same time, our curriculum is thought to be a living entity; that is, we continually tweak, hone, and amend it in an effort to keep it fresh and relevant for both students and teachers.

Finally, it is essential to understand the irrefutable logic and current pedagogy that underlie the WAY we approach our program at Brookwood. To really understand what Brookwood is about from an educational point-of-view, please read the position statement that follows. And then come visit us, for a “three-dimensional” sense of Brookwood’s curriculum can only be had through conversation with our teachers, our Department Coordinators, and our students!

Brookwood's Bottom Line: How Kids Learn Best
Educational rigor has a different face these days; at Brookwood, we know that new face well. Here, we know that preparing a student for the world in which we live today is a task entirely unlike that which faced educators twenty-five years ago.

We know it is no longer enough to require the memorization of important facts and figures, for there no longer exists a discrete and finite body of knowledge (dates, definitions, formulas) that students can learn in order to master a subject. We know also that it is not enough to learn to compete against peers in a host of challenges; instead, the student of today must learn to build and sustain the collaborative relationships demanded by the interconnectedness of our world. He or she must learn to manage the avalanche of information that proliferates daily; to access, organize, evaluate and apply that knowledge to circumstances that can change overnight. Our students need analytical skills in order to deconstruct the complexity of their lives and the problems they will face; instead of simply finding answers, they need to learn to make good decisions. And to make these decisions, they need to know themselves well and to understand the principles they seek to advance. We know that command of their language will give them command of their lives and, above all else, we know that Brookwood students must come to love learning, for it is a process in which they will necessarily be engaged for the rest of their lives.

Just as our undertaking with students today has evolved away from a focus on memorization and competition, changed also is what we know about learning. Over the past 50 years, psychologists and neurologists have taught us that the traditional face of rigor in an academic environment is not necessarily the best one to wear: Unlike our predecessors, we know now that emotions actually influence thought and that students learn best when they feel physically healthy, personally recognized, and emotionally safe. We know that personal change and growth occur through the experience of relationships, and that students construct the meaning of their worlds as a function of their stages of development in life, rather than by simply accepting an objective definition of that reality. Very simply put, we know that how kids feel determines in large measure whether kids learn, and that is a powerful bottom line.

At Brookwood, we develop academic excellence, and we do so using the means and methodologies we know to be best suited to that end: We are "warm" and "child-centered" because it is educationally sound to be both; we are mindful of the relationships we offer and those we nurture and supervise because we know that vigilance to be an educational imperative. We know that the mind cannot develop if the self lies unattended, and that neither will develop if both challenge and support are not equally tendered to the learner. We know that our students will someday be required to solve problems of currently unimaginable complexity, and that their own safety and the survival of our world depend ultimately on their having not just the intellectual acuity to understand those problems, but also the skills to work with others of diverse backgrounds as they tackle them, and the "conscience, character, and compassion" required to persevere.

Our educational environment is one designed for our age, and we are proud of the superlative scholarship that it engenders.