Academic Design principles
Exalt Academies enable students to realize their greatest potential, prepare for competitive colleges and advanced careers, and emerge as tomorrow’s leaders. To accomplish these goals, we employ an academic design that is based on eight core principles. These principles ensure that students gain a broad foundation of knowledge and skills in a variety of instructional mediums where they are challenged to learn and empowered to take ownership over their future.
We have not chosen these design principles because they are new; we’ve chosen them because they provide our schools with a proven formula for serving students in high-need communities across the country. The continuous integration and application of our design principles is what makes the Exalt Education network so unique and what enables our academies to achieve and sustain excellence.
Our eight core design principles include:
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Academic Design Principles
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1. Start early
Children from low-income homes enter kindergarten at a significant deficit, which can only be reversed if we start early.
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2. More learning time
We cannot close the economic achievement gap without providing students more time to learn in a structured, educationally rich environment.
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3. Multi-modal learning
Experiencing multiple modalities stimulates students to retain more, demonstrate greater mastery, and become more agile, persistent learners.
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4. Embed standards & assessment
High performance starts with integrating public standards and frequent assessment into every aspect of instruction.
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5. Greater ownership & opportunity
We provide rewarding careers to mission-driven educators so that they can fulfill their life aspirations and have maximum impact on under-resourced communities.
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6. Technology enabled
The lifeblood of any excellent school is the technology that engages, mediates and enhances the learning of every participant – student, teacher, parent and community member.
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7. Postsecondary focus
America’s workforce cannot meet employers’ demands unless all students project themselves into competitive colleges and advanced careers from an early age.
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8. Leadership development
Students are explicitly taught positive behaviors and routinely put in situations where they model desired leadership attributes.