Northeast Range High School Program Analysis

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For six years now, the Northeast Range High School has been running a flex Wednesday program. This program consists of all the students beginning their day with class advisory. Here they meet with their respective classmates and class advisors to complete essential planning requirements, organize fundraisers, and coordinate events. For the rest of the day the seventh and eighth graders complete two, two hour blocks of a core classes such as writing or history, while the ninth through twelfth graders participate in an all day class of their choosing. These classes can range from forestry and chemistry, to journalism and shop. This schedule does have some “bugs,” but for many, it has been working out great. Nevertheless, it has been decided that …show more content…
For starters, the seventh and eighth grade classes will be working in two hours blocks of writing and phy-ed (which is pretty much the same as they did before.) The ninth through twelfth grade classes will be working on a new program called experiential learning. The Experiential Learning Center of the University of Colorado Denver has defined experiential learning as, “...a process through which students develop knowledge, skills, and values from direct experiences outside a traditional academic setting.” They also state that, “Well-planned, supervised and assessed experiential learning programs can stimulate academic inquiry by promoting interdisciplinary learning, civic engagement, career development, cultural awareness, leadership, and other professional and intellectual skills.” In the Northeast Range’s experiential learning program, the students will work together and collaborate on an entire high school project. The students will be placed in groups based on their interests to work on different aspects of the project. They will also rotate through the different skills and fields to establish a basis and possibly even an interest in the different …show more content…
This solution would allow students more time to focus on their other weekday classes. The addition of a seventh hour would be a “career hour” in which the students would learn about specific topics relating to what they may choose to pursue in the future. As beneficial as this plan may seem, the loss of the Wednesday experiential learning program for the ninth and tenth graders is too great of a detriment to make this proposal worth it. In addition, the students enjoy having flex Wednesdays, as they offer the students a sort of break in their